How We Got Here: A History of Nintendo's Official Emulators | Tech Rules

It's finally done!! This video has been in the works since before the expansion pack was even announced; it just gave me a reason to finally finish it. I put SO much effort into this, learning and double-checking everything I can, trying to ensure I'm giving a good explanation for the variety of things I talk about here. With the sheer scope of it, I'm sure I still got stuff wrong. If you caught anything incorrect, please let me know! With how big this video is, I'll frankly be surprised if there aren't some big things I need to correct. Thankfully, LuigiBlood has already pointed out a lot of these very shortly after the video's release: -N64 WiiVC doesn't seem to have specialized builds for each game. It was merely constantly updated over time, and the progress was shown in new VC releases. It still used game-specific fixes, but they all exist within the emulator by default. -That random shot at I took at DK64 at the beginning of the video didn't actually have any basis, it seems. While it was just used as a small joke, I still don't want to spread that misinformation. However, I still assure you that it definitely didn't use the expansion pack to avoid a bug. In addition to these, LuigiBlood also added a LOT of extra information I had missed and gave a different (although admittedly much more educated) outlook on the future of the Switch's N64 emulation. I highly recommend you take a look at it! If we're being honest, I probably could've dialed it back on taking shots at Nintendo in this video. While a lot of the things they've done recently have given me a bad impression of them, I'll be the first to admit that I made a lot of assumptions here, especially at the end. I still find my criticisms reasonable, but I'd like to remind everyone (myself included) that we don't know what goes on internally and, while speculation is one thing, taking action based on assumptions is another. This might be a needless clarification, but I just wanna make sure I'm not misconstrued here. Please be nice to other human beings! With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy today's video!

Don't worry guys, he's pretty active on twt. Just said he's working through personal stuff and to give him time.

The worst part about Nintendo is not that they CAN'T do incredible things... It's that they CAN, but choose not to.

bro dropped 18 bangers of videos then dipped

random note: I don't have the issue anymore but I can personally confirm there was a letter to Nintendo Power asking of Warioware: Twisted was compatable with the Gamecube GBA player. The response was something along the lines of: "There's technically nothing stopping you but if you do attempt to do this, PLEASE send us a video."

A friend of mine and I were playing Kirby’s Dream Course online and we saw the rollback netcode and we were both just absolutely in awe about the fact that it has rollback at all!

I used to basically share a copy of animal crossing with a friend of mine growing up until I got my own copy. Any time he would come over we would boot it up on my gamecube and I would just leave it on (sometimes for days at a time) until I wanted to play something else.

For those saying he died: he's alive and well. He uses his twitter regularly, he also said back then that he's going through some irl stuff and we should give him time. So please don't despair thinking he left the channel to rot or something happened to him.

9:50 you mention those tilting-cartridge games being "incompatible" with the GameBoy Player because you'd have to tilt your whole console around, but Fun Fact: in speedruns for Kirby Tilt n' Tumble for the Gameboy Color, most runners play the game on the GameBoy Player and tilt the console around in their hands. The run was even showed off at AGDQ 2017

The mini consoles had almost no protection. IIRC the SNES mini even had a welcome message from NERD when you connected a shell :)

The rollback in the SNES Online emulator... is that why sometimes, when playing DKC with my friend online, I would see one of us yeet off a cliff only to end up safe on the platform we were aiming for? That's honestly pretty interesting and so cool

As a speedrunner for Secret of Mana for quite a long time, the SNES Mini is my absolute favorite system for running that game in particular. The SNES Mini controllers are so good, that I bought an adapter to play on my regular SNES, as I think they are strictly better than original controllers especially in regards to START/SELECT-buttons. The SNES Mini also has a (great) built-in flashing reduction, while not noticeably impacting the brightness of the game overall. The only time I notice the game being a bit dimmer, is specifically in the menu-borders not being as bright. But considering the rather severe flashing Secret of Mana has at times, I'll happily play this over the original anytime. The only downside is, that it does not support 3 controllers to my knowledge, which makes certain tricks unavailable compared to original console + multitap (although, no one speedruns these categories anyways) Biggest downside of being a fan of the SNES Mini: Replacement controllers are not being sold. One of my controllers is starting to give up by now, so... That's unfortunate

I was not expecting the Switch's SNES emulator having rollback, that's a big suprise to me.

Can't believe this vid is 2 years old already. One of the best youtube channels out there with interesting video ideas and funny commentary with solid editing. Man's never missed with a video, they all slap.

I would like to say that I disagree with a lot of this research. I have done some reverse engineering of my own on some of these emulators, and I have an idea who developed pretty much each of them. For the sake of research and sharing information, I would like to do bulletpoints correcting, AND adding with what I know: - First things first: No, Donkey Kong 64 didn't use the Expansion Pak just to delay a crash bug. While it is true, they still continued development to make use of the extra RAM, else you would have seen a hack that would make the game work without it in this golden age of N64 hacking. It doe really use the Expansion Pak. - Nintendo in the late 90s hired a japanese developer who worked on iNES, an early NES emulator. This developer, Tomohiro Kawase was involved in Nintendo's NES emulator for N64 and GC, as well as the GB/C emulator for Pokémon Stadium's GB Tower. To this day he is still at Nintendo doing archiving and preservation work for them. - I believe the N64 emulator for GC and Wii isn't necessarily different versions finetuned for specific games, but rather the latest version of the emulator they had which contains all finetuning for every game it supported. In fact the GC N64 emulator supports quite a bunch of games, including unreleased Panel de Pon 64, Dr. Mario 64, and Slicradic (also known as Mini Racers), all those game specific hacks are included in the emulator, and it can easily be found since their emulator executable also includes development information that eases the reverse engineering process. All those games are of course supported on Wii VC's emulator. - Nintendo originally had a single person developing the SNES emulator for Wii, but was transferred to Intelligent Systems who were already in charge of the new NES emulator for Wii, this information comes from the gigaleak. Intelligent Systems then improved those emulators for the Wii U... and were also used in the official localization of Fire Emblem on NES for Switch, dark filter included, and 3D World's Luigi Bros... without the filter. - iQue Studio did indeed develop the new N64 emulator for Wii U, but in reality iQue had developed their own set of emulator called "TRL", which you have mentioned, which included NES, GBC and GBA (unused). It was used for 3DS, but the GBC emulator was ported to Wii as WTRL for Kirby's Dream Collection. The N64 emulator explicitly refers to TRL, meaning it is the 4th emulator of the set. As far as I know, iQue was entirely responsible for Super Mario 64 in 3D All-Stars because it still heavily refers to TRL-NX. - NERD has taken over Intelligent Systems's NES and SNES emulators from Wii U to the Mini consoles and Switch, and used their own set of codenames. However I do suspect they took over the N64 emulator from 3D All-Stars possibly later as they pretty much made sure to remove every reference to TRL and instead has a new codename. The N64 emulator for Switch is definitely based on the Wii U's, as it contains very similar configuration files, and very similar code as well. For exemple, I found that the Wii U emulator had unfinished emulation code for the Japan only 64DD expansion. This code is still on the Switch versions, untouched since the Wii U in the exact same way. - The difference in emulation between 3D All-Stars and Switch Online is staggering, and as far as I know, seems to be a regression which resulted of an attempt to externalize graphical rendering configuration in an attempt to make an emulator that can work for any game if properly set up. However I personally believe the emulator is in every way worse than on Wii U even since 3D All-Stars due to many hints of serious issues that wouldn't really be noticed because they did everything in their power to avoid them for 3D All-Stars. A lot of games on Switch Online rely on serious game hacks just to avoid to emulate specific things that slows down the game. But as far as I know... these things were emulated just fine on Wii U. In fact, adding games to the Switch emulator already require serious reverse engineering work and hacking just to make sure they even boot up. I'm usually fine with game specific hacks, but here, it is done to *an obscene extent* that makes me doubt that the emulator, as it is currently is, to be competent. And it cannot be just a matter of optimization, because emulators like mupen64plus-next, which does not rely on a lot of these hacks, work just fine on the Switch console itself. I personally think the emulator is victim of years of changes that were considered "good enough" from iQue, and no one really had the time to sit down and think that the emulator had only gotten worse through those changes. It's very probable that Nintendo simply didn't allow them to do this, but I personally think if you give a bad emulator to a competent engineering team, that team wouldn't necessarily be able to do anything of value. And clearly NERD is capable of great things like their DS and GameCube emulators. I do not believe in the emulator's future unless they do massive changes to it, or simply rewriting the emulator itself. ...Hopefully this comment is of good enough value :)

I took serious issue when playing Paper Mario on NSO when I was in the Lava Piranha fight. There was very noticeable lag that happened when I’d fight, and if I jumped on him, I had to time the action command much earlier that what was normal, which was really annoying when I was wearing All or Nothing. His animation also had bad stutters in it that I haven’t noticed in any other fight or location(do note I haven’t played past this fight yet). I don’t ever remember having any real issues with this in WiiVC so it’s upsetting on NSO.

Fun fact: Latency issues on Switch tend to be around 3 in-game frames, regardless of the game. That's why OOT is so much worse than other games on the service, as 3 frames of latency is much worse in a 20 FPS game rather than a 30 FPS or 60 FPS one.

It’s been 2 years, I miss your content dude! Hope you’re doing alright wherever you are 🗿

Am I the only one who wonders where tech rules went? Loved his content ❤

"You are safe to engage Ridley... however crudely you want" got me good.