So I'm just gonna come in here and talk about my experience recently.
I updated my Atmosphere to 0.8.6, downloaded the most recent RetroArch Switch nightly, I guess 3-27-19, plopped it on my ExFat 64gb, booted up and ran Retroarch from the Homebrew Launcher after holding R on a title installed to SD (FF9) and booted up RetroArch. I'm assuming this has full RAM access as when I ran N64 games, they "ran". I just want Wetrix to work, it's a notoriously difficult game to emulate, so I tried first using Mupen64Plus, which took around 30-45 seconds to go from blackscreen to in-game images. Performance was terrible, after freezing and choppyness on the main menu, I was able to start a game, but it was completely unplayable, freezing constantly during gameplay, stuttering audio.
Closed the content through the RetroArch menu, then booted the game with the Mupen64Plus-Next core, and 30-40 seconds of blackscreen until the games splash screens started, this time loaded a little quicker to the main menu, and the main menu was slightly more useable. Upon starting a game, the game was slightly more playable, froze less under low stress conditions, but after about 5 mins of gameplay, became unplayable as the stuttering and freezing happened too often.
Closed the content and loaded Super Mario 64 using the Mupen64Plus-Next core, and about 20 seconds of blackscreen until Mario's head pops up, choppily and occasionally frozen, before becoming a little more smooth. Started a new game and watched the intro as it occasionally hiccuped, especially when Mario first appears out of the pipe, and for a short while after. Eventually, for a span of around 5-10 seconds, the game would seem to run fine, although every 5-10 seconds, a hiccup would occur and the screen would freeze for about 2-3 frames before returning to playable. Entering the castle and going to bob-omb battlefield, the hiccups remain constant. In the actual level, the hiccups also occur, like it was on time.
Closed the content, sad, and quit retroarch. Fire up FF9, but uh oh, the save data might be corrupt, need to check that. Oh, I guess the whole game is corrupt, oh, Horizon says the sd card is corrupt and wants me to format it.
Now windows says the SD card is dirty and won't let me write to it.
I'm familiar with the rhetoric surrounding ExFat here in this forum, and have had no problems using any/all homebrews up to this point. I'm not sure if I should entirely blame RetroArch, but I do, wholeheartedly.
I formatted the SD to FAT32 as some time in the future I will come back and take a look at the progress of this project, but right now, N64 just isn't up to snuff to be called "playable".
Now, that's just my experience this time. Previously I was unable to even boot n64 titles because of some RAM access stuff, but I'd like to just say that if I ever used this program wrong, I have no idea what I was supposed to do. There is no up to date guide on getting this running properly as far as I can tell.
It would be really nice to have the opening post updated when/if there are changes to the way you're supposed to be running this thing.
Why does the og Mupen64Plus core even exist? How come these dudes say n64 is running at 60fps, but when I run it, it's a total mess? I may never know.
