The Nintendo 64 remains one of the trickiest systems to emulate: every game pushed the hardware its own way, and no emulator runs them all perfectly. Recalbox 10.1 therefore offers several — when a game stutters, crashes or renders badly, the first thing to try is another core.
Two families live side by side: mupen64plus in its standalone form (the historical emulator, with its video plugins) and two libretro cores (inside RetroArch, with shaders, rewind, overrides…).
Emulator / core (RUN WITH) |
Nature | Available on |
|---|---|---|
MUPEN64PLUS GLIDE64MK2 |
standalone mupen64plus — the default choice | every board |
MUPEN64PLUS RICE |
standalone mupen64plus, older and lighter plugin | every board |
MUPEN64PLUS GLIDEN64 |
standalone mupen64plus, the most accurate plugin | Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Zero 2 |
MUPEN64PLUS N64_GLES2 / RICE_GLES2 |
lightweight plugins for small boards | Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Zero 2 |
LIBRETRO MUPEN64PLUS_NEXT |
modern libretro core (GLideN64 engine) | every board |
LIBRETRO PARALLEL_N64 |
libretro core, very good on some notoriously hard games | every board |
There is no official game-by-game compatibility table: results vary far too much from one board and one rom revision to another. The right method is to try, in order: the default core, then
MUPEN64PLUS_NEXT, thenPARALLEL_N64.
START.EDIT GAME.RUN WITH and pick the emulator/core pair.The setting is remembered for that game only. To change the core for the whole system, go to MAIN MENU → ADVANCED SETTINGS → ADVANCED EMULATOR CONFIGURATION → NINTENDO 64 → EMULATOR.
The cores accept the .n64, .v64 and .z64 extensions. The libretro cores also accept .zip and .7z archives; standalone mupen64plus does not read archives — unpack your roms if you use it.
Unlike older Recalbox releases, mupen64plus is now configured automatically: Recalbox writes mupen64plus.cfg at every launch and fills in your screen's current resolution. There is nothing to do.
There are two cases where you may want to step in, through recalbox.conf:
Board too weak: force a low resolution, close to the N64 native one, to gain smoothness.
n64.videomode=640x480
CRT screen (Recalbox RGB Dual, RGB JAMMA…): let the video layer decide.
n64.videomode=default
Any manual change to
/recalbox/share/system/configs/mupen64/mupen64plus.cfgis overwritten the next time a game starts. Userecalbox.confinstead.
mupen64plus saves and save states are stored in:
/recalbox/share/saves/n64/