Mupen64plus Download
Kanisha Dezarn
I wanted to make this guide because this is an emulator no one talks about, well no one around here it seems. Project 64 as an emulator isn't bad but the devs are shady with previous releases being packaged with ad-ware and now with 2.3 using the PJ64 UI you get a stupid nag screen which according to @SIMPLY AUSTINpeople are reporting it doesn't go away after a while. Now I have been using 2.3 through Launchbox bypassing the UI and I do not see the nag screen unless I need to load it up manually to tweak some stuff. I have also noticed that while Project 64 and the Mupen64 core in Retroarch are decent enough emulators neither of them can play one of my favourite N64 titles, Beetle Adventure Racing very well. Even the Vulkan powered Retroarch Mupen core does not run this game well. The stand alone Mupen64plus does run this game extremely well and it even has some texture pack support. Anyways, enough of my rambling lets get started.
Go to the Mupen64plus homepage or as of the time of this guide go straight to the 2.5 release page -core/releases/tag/2.5. You will want to get the mupen64plus-bundle-win32-2.5.zip or if you are running on lower end hardware get the dynarec version.
Launch a game either through Launchbox using this emulator or drag and drop a rom file on the exe file. This will generate a Mupen64plus folder and files in "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\".
Go to "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Mupen64Plus" and find the mupen64plus.cfg, open this file in your favourite text editor and edit the lines as you see fit but here are some immediate recommendations to look for:
# Enable/Disable Anisotropic Filtering for Mipmapping (0=no filtering, 2-16=quality). This is uneffective if Mipmapping is 0. If the given value is to high to be supported by your graphic card, the value will be the highest value your graphic card can support. Better result with Trilinear filtering
AnisotropicFiltering = 0
If you wish to use texture packs you will need to enable it with the last setting above by setting it to True. You will need to go to your "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Mupen64Plus" folder and create a folder called "hires_texture". In this folder you will place your texture pack folders and files. The folders have to be named correctly like "super mario 64". I was only able to get loose file texture packs to work, .htc and .dat format packs I could not figure out how to get to work. If anyone has information on how to get these to work I would love to hear it. I know .htc is a GlideN64 plugin format and I tried using that plugin and different folder structures but I had no luck. From what I have read the Android version does support these formats but I do not know if the Windows version code is as up to date with that support or not. Like I said if anyone has any information on getting .htc and .dat format packs working please let me know.
Right now for simple out of the box use with now frills, no muss, no fuss Retroatch and the basic Mupen64 core is extremely good and for the most part handles everything very well. It also gives the option to bump up resolution along with the other Retroarch benefits like shaders and such. If you have Retroarch installed and working and just want simple N64 emulation it is the way to go but you do not get texture support, maybe one day.
If full blown texture support is what you want then Project64 is the only way to go. It handles all the different formats, loose, htc and dat packages. Like I said in the boring section above once you get the 2.3 version of PJ64 setup and loading games through Launchbox bypassing the PJ64 UI then the nag screen is no longer an issue. I agree fully with Austin in not promoting PJ64 because of their shady shit but calling it ransomware in his latest video is a little harsh. Ransomware hijacks your entire system and locks you out unless you pay. The ad-ware shit from previous versions while it is scummy can be avoided with careful reading of the installer or looking around for an ad-ware free version.
The future of the Vulkan Mupen64 core in Retroarch may prove to be the best emulator in the end taking advantage of GPUs power to more accurately emulate the N64 but as of right now it still isn't better than PJ64 or the base Mupen64 RA core.
If you want the best possible N64 emulation right now and some limited texture pack support and don't mind getting your hands dirty with some manual config editing then the stand alone version of Mupen64plus is the best way to go. It is the only N64 emulator that can play Beetle Adventure Racing without major bugs and slowdown. That isn't say it is perfect because it isn't there are some small minor graphical bugs I have found in the first track but the game is extremely playable. All the other choices (PJ64 and both RA cores) have major graphical issues and slowdown.
I will still be using PJ64 for both Zelda games because Djipis texture packs are just that amazing and shouldn't be missed out on. For Mario64 I will probably play around some more with the stand alone Mupen64plus to do further testing. For everything else I don't know yet if I will use RA Mupen or stand alone, I need to do more play testing to decide.
I tried to do that because I would rather have it in the same folder as well but for whatever reason Mupen just didn't like that at all. It is possible I missed a setting tucked away in the config file to allow it to be in the folder with the exe.
God, I haven't really delved too deeply into N64 emulation other than to play some Zelda and Mario with texture packs but what a pile of shit N64 emulation is on the whole. Each emulator plays certain games better than others but no one single emulator is best overall. They all have their really shitty flaws.
Honestly at this point in time if I had to pick just one I would say use Project64 but get it setup and use it through a frontend like Launchbox and never touch it's UI.Games I have been testing are Banjo Kazooie, Beetle Adventure, Conker, Mario Golf, San Francisco Rush and Mario64. That is just a short list of games and each one responds differently to each emulator, I don't even want to get into the rest of the library to test.
I'd have to play through all of the opening intro and get into actual gameplay to give an honest and fair opinion since it's not fair to judge based off non gameplay. But having said that judging just off thefirst few minutes of the intro scene I would say PJ64 is the better emu play to play Conker. Retroarch Mupen64 core has bad grphic glitches right off the start, Mupen64plus stand alone has overscan pixels which are just annoying but major graphic glitches like when Conker is wasted looking up at the sign it really bugs out. PJ64 seems to be mostly glitch free with only the spotlight at the very opening looking a bit off and that is it.
I don't know why you don't have anything after [Video General] though. I have installed and setup Mupen a couple of times to make sure I had my tutorial done right and each time when it generated the cfg file it had all the settings there. Here is my cfg attached, you may be able to just drop it into your "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Mupen64Plus" folder and have it just work. I don't believe there is any hard paths in it that need to be adjusted
Using Ubuntu 16.04LTS on an HP Beats 15 Notebook with 8 Gigs of RAM and an A10 AMD processor. I've never had this problem before while using mupen64plus on other computers with less RAM and less powerful processors, so I'm really at a loss as to what's going on here. I installed mupen64plus from the command line as always and when I try to run mupen64plus in the terminal this is what happens:
Finally, after running the command sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove mupen64plus to completely uninstall it and all of its dependencies, I'm still seeing the man pages for mupen64plus and the terminal still autocompletes the command mupen64plus.
This is the first time I've had this problem in 2 years of using mupen64plus--I've even gotten it to work well on a tiny HP Mini with no problems. What am I doing wrong here and how do I get it working right? What is causing this failed to find core library error and how can I fix it?
The problem comes from /usr/local/lib/libmupen64plus.so.2 path.
It seems that you have two installation of the application - in /usr/local and in normal paths (as the the result of the installation of deb-package).
Does anyone else here use Mupen64Plus? Back when it came with a GUI, I used it to play Zelda Ocarina of Time. When the upgrade removed the built-in GUI a couple years ago I saved my .sra file for OOT and assumed I'd be able to use it again some day down the road. Well last night I decided to bite the bullet and just learn how to use the CLI. I installed Mupen64Plus on my new laptop and found that gameplay was not too difficult at all. I loaded my Zelda OOT rom and when I found where the files are saved I dropped a copy of my old .sra file into that directory. When I reloaded Zelda OOT, it seemed that the game had gone back to the beginning... I tried several more times to copy that old save state back in but never managed to get it to load. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? It would be very nice to have my old save state again...
Well I might know what's going on here. Actually when I copy in that .sra file, it does restore my name for Link (AKK) - but nothing else. So I'm thinking the progress through the levels is stored somewhere else - maybe on the ROM itself? Maybe the ROM has flags that get flipped when you pass certain levels? But that doesn't make sense if ROM means "read only memory".... Alternately, maybe the way that Mupen stores the data in save files changed between the last version I used and this one? Any ideas, anyone?
Nothing to do with the ROM. From what I remember, Nintendo 64 had cartridges plugged into the controllers. What you could do is downgrade the mupen64plus package from the ARM. Right now [community] takes for-FRICKEN-ever to load: but when it does, you just use:
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