A work-in-progress N64 emulator
nmulator is a work-in-progress Nintendo 64 emulator for PCs. It currently boots a decent number of commercial games, though many more are not playable and/or contain graphical inaccuracies. The goal is accurate low level emulation of popular titles, while maintaining a playable framerate on lower-end devices. Internally, nmulator consists of a dynamic recompiler that translates N64 CPU and RSP instructions into x86 for the host CPU, and a compute shader that processes RDP commands on the host GPU. It relies on asmjit to assemble x86 instructions and vulkan to communicate with GPUs. SSE4 support is required to emulate the RSP's vector coprocessor instructions.
- Run and pass rasky's RSP vector tests
- Reduce per-block interrupt check cost
- Measure and reduce R4300/RSP context switches
- Cache and reuse tmem versions
- Optimize RSP fallback block lookup
- Detect and accelerate idle loops
- Add watchpoints and RSP support to debugger
The latest binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS can be downloaded via nightly.link. Windows and Linux builds are design work out of the box, assuming your GPU supports Vulkan. macOS builds require MoltenVK to be installed by the user via brew install molten-vk. To run nmulator, specify a big-endian ROM file on the command line, and ensure an appropriate pifdata.bin file is in the current directory. Note that nmulator is not ready for general use, so please do not report usability or compatibility issues.
To build from source, you should first install glslangValidator, then run the following:
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release
- Documentation - Programming Manual, RSP Programmer's Guide, & RDP Command Summary are essential.
- CPU Instructions - Comprehensive documentation of the R4300 instruction set.
- RSP Instructions - RSP COP2 vector instruction set reference, incomplete but more accurate than RSP Programmer's guide.
- Memory Map - List of memory segments, MMIO registers, etc.
- Test ROMS - Invaluable for debugging CPU instructions, texture formats, etc. Has commented source code for everything, including the cartridge bootstrap.
- Resource Compilation - Links to useful homebrew dev tools and other useful resources.