In the world of emulation, the Nintendo 64 is among the hardest consoles to run at its best, along with the Sega Saturn and the original Xbox. For years, you could play Super Mario 64 at 60 FPS, but increasing the frame rate caused constant issues with physics and visual quality. To fix this, Kaze Emanuar discovered how to solve it, and we'll tell you all about it.
Super Mario 64 was a paradigm shift for Nintendo, bringing Mario into the third dimension. Its predecessor on the Super Nintendo was Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the plumber's last adventure. It became the best-selling game on the Nintendo 64, with 11 million copies sold.
Emulation of the game has been functional for a while, but we could never achieve a steady 60 frames per second without running into problems, both visually and when controlling the plumber. That's where Kaze Emanuar, a YouTuber and SM64 enthusiast who develops exciting mods like Super Mario Maker 64 or the adaptation of the latest Switch game, Super Mario Odyssey 64, among many other curiosities. In this case, Emanuar managed to run Super Mario 64 at 60 FPS with correct physics and no gameplay-breakdowns.
Improvements in this mod
- Everything runs at its correct speed
- All known crashes were fixed (all stars are now collectible)
- Fixed animations that weren't properly interpolated (due to animation speed variation)
- Fixed the sliding animation
- Fixed lag
- Fixed flickering
- Fixed intro problems
- Fixed global timer issues
