The History of the Nintendo 64

Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 was released in Japan in 1996. It all started in 1992, when Nintendo was trying to create CD-ROM support for the SNES in partnership with Sony. At the time, it was approached by Silicon Graphics, which was looking for a partnership to develop a more advanced CPU. This is how the 64-bit VR4300 CPU was created. Silicon had approached Sega for this, but Sega rejected it due to CPU flaws. The partnership between Silicon and Nintendo was signed in 1993 as Project Reality, the same year that Nintendo and Sony tried to create a CD console called the Play Station, later released only by Sony in 1994. In 1994, the Silicon-Nintendo project was renamed Ultra 64. According to Silicon, the development of its hardware would take at least until 1995 to be released. In 1996, they announced that their console would be released that year, under the name Nintendo 64, since the name Ultra was claimed by Konami. The Nintendo 64 was released, but with support for cartridges, which was one of its biggest problems due to the high cost of these. At the time, they claimed that they were maintaining a successful model and avoiding the long loading times of CD games, but experts in the field said that they feared being challenged by Sony, creator of the CD-ROM together with Philips. This proved to be so true that their only CD-ROM console, the GameCube, released in 2001, used a specific CD media, a mini CD created by Nintendo, departing from the standards of the creators of traditional media.

N64 Hardware

Returning to the Nintendo 64, its CPU was 93.75 MHz, but it did not operate fully in 64 bits, with the console being considered 32 bits, thus being in the fifth generation of consoles. Its GPU was also developed by Silicon, known as RCP, or reality coprocessor. It also promised to be 64 bits and had 62.6 MHz. The GPU came with two integrated processors, the RSP and the RDP. Its palette was 16 million colors, with 2 million possible colors. The console had some new features compared to the others. It did not have a sound chip, with the audio processed by the RCP GPU, which brought 16-bit CD-quality audio with 24 PCM channels. Another new feature was the expandable sound quality up to 48 MHz. And finally, it innovated by bringing a different concept of RAM memory, with it being unified for CPU, audio and video, unlike those used in other consoles, which divided it into separate banks.

Expansion Pak, Rumble Pack and 64DD

It also came with the largest memory of a home console, 4MB, with the possibility of being expanded to 8MB using a cartridge called Expansion Pak. It also innovated by bringing to consoles a joypad with analog sticks and later with vibration mode through the Rumble Pack accessory, fitted to the controller itself. This joypad ended up inspiring the PSX DualShock. And finally, I highlight the 64DD, a peripheral similar to the zip drive, which was a floppy disk at the time. This peripheral was similar to the Famicom's Disk System, with games released for these disks. The device also had a modem to connect to the Randnet service for online gaming, similar to the SNES's Satellaview.

N64 Cases/Boxes

Similar to the Sega Saturn, the console also had transparent versions, in orange, pink, green, gray, blue, purple, red, yellow, lilac and aqua green.

N64 Cartridges

Among the well-known games, we have racing games, such as California Speed, Destruction Derby 64, F-Zero X, Hot Wheels, Hydro Thunder, Indy Racing, Lego Racers, Maro Kart 64, Ridge Racer 64, Re-Volt, V-Rally, Wave Race 64, Wipeout 64 and the franchises, Cruis'n, Automobili, F-1, Nascar, San Francisco Rush and Top Gear. Platform games, we had Banjo-Kazooie, Earthworm Jim 3D, Rayman, Super Mario 64, Yoshi Story, Donkey Kong 64, Kirby 64, and the franchises, Chameleon Twist and Gex. Adventure games, such as Mega Man 64, Mission Impossible, Power Rangers, and franchises such as Bomberman, Castlevania and Zelda. Sports games such as Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, NHL 99, World Cup '98, 1080 Snowboarding, as well as the Ozumo, All-Star Baseball, Bass, FIFA, International Superstar Soccer, J-League, Jikkyou Powerful Pro, Madden NFL, NBA, NFL Blitz, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, WCW, WWF and other franchises. Fighting games such as Fighters Destiny, Killer Instinct, Super Smash Bros., Super Robot Spirits, Transformers and Xena, as well as the Clay Fighter and Mortal Kombat franchises. Puzzle games such as Dr. Mario 64, Wetrix, The New Tetris, Tetrisphere and Magical Tetris Challenge, Puzzle Dama, and franchises such as Bomberman, Bust-a-Move, Pokemon and Puyo Puyo. Shooters, such as Doom 64, Perfect Dark, GoldenEye 007, Bangai-O, Nuclear Striker, Hexen, Robotron 64, Star Fox 64, Star Wars and franchises, such as Duke Nukem, Quake and Turok. Simulation, such as Pilotwings 64, Harvest Moon 64, Racing Simulation and Sim City 2000. Cartoons, such as Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, The Little Angels, Tigger, Taz-Mania, Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, South Park, some from Disney, such as Toy Story, Mickey, Donald Duck, Bug's Life, The Emperor's New Groove and Tarzan and Japanese animation, such as Doraemon, Goemon, Evangelion and Rantarou. In addition to various game franchises, such as Star Wars, Bomberman, Mario, Pokemon and others.

The History of PSX Emulators - Part 5

SSSPSX Emulator (2005)

SSSPSX Emulator

SSSPSX Emulator was released in 2005, with one of its first releases, version 0.0.7 in April 2005 for Windows. The emulator is known as a competitor to ePSXe, with equal and even superior emulation in some games. Its visual is a clone of PCSX, using the same emulation by plug-ins. Regarding games, it only runs the .CDD, .CUE, .CDM and .ISO formats. Its creator is called something like bz7t-skmt, and the emulator is Japanese.

SSSPSX Emulator (Puzz Loop)

From the very beginning, it gained an English version, always released simultaneously with the Japanese version. Its creator is also notable for creating the SSSPSX PAD plug-ins for joypad support, and DUALSHOCK2 PAD, which supports DualShock joypads in the PCSX and PSXeven emulators, including the PS2 emulator PCSX2. The emulator only supported CD-ROMs. The last release of SSSPSX was made in August 2006.

PSX4ALL (2006)

PSX4ALL

PSX4ALL was an emulator created from scratch using the technology for ARM processors used in portable devices. It all started in 2005, when ZodTTD obtained the GP2X portable device and learned more about how it worked. From there, the development of the first attempt to create a PSX emulator for GP2X began. GP2PSX was born in 2005. In the same year, he joined forces with Unai, Tinnus, Chui and Franxis, and created the PSX4ALL project to develop a new PSX emulator. Its initial focus was on Zaurus systems for PowerPCs and Linux for the GP2X portable device. In addition to developing the emulation for ARM CPUs, Unai also developed an appropriate GPU, which bears his name. Tinnus then developed a GPU for the Pandora version of the emulator, called OpenGLES. The release order of the emulators is psx4zaurus for Zaurus and psx4gp2x for the GP2X handheld in 2006, psx4iphone for iOS in 2007, psx4pandora for Pandora in 2008 and psx4droid for Android in 2010.

PSX4ALL (Tekken 3/Driver)

There was a port for GP2X Wiz, called psx4wiz, but it is not known if it is original or not. The psx4dc port for Dreamcast was worked on in 2006, but was never released. In 2010 the project ended and Chui and Franxis created PCSX4ALL, taking the technology from PSX4ALL and merging it with the PCSX offshoot, PCSX-Reloaded, also in the handheld segment. The first releases were for the GamePark Wiz and GamePark Caanoo handhelds, still in 2010. ZodTTD, in turn, continues to develop ports of emulators for iOS, parallel to the work with PSX4ALL, in addition to games specifically for the system, both started in 2007. An interesting fact about Tinnus. He is Brazilian from Porto Alegre and his name is Bruno Ferreira. He was at PSX4ALL from 2006 to 2009, and later created Aquiris Game Studio, which among others was responsible for the creation of the game Horizon Chase Turbo in 2018.

NO$PSX (2012)

NO$PSX

NO$PSX or Nocash Playstation PSone, was created by the legendary emulator creator, Martin Korth in 2012. Martin was responsible for one of the first Gameboy emulators in history, NO$GMB. He also developed many other emulators, such as for GBA (also for NDS), SNES, Atari 2600, and computers such as Commodore 64, among others. The project began to be developed in February 2008 and was ready in the period of 12 to 15 months. However, due to the accumulation of work, he took a long break from the project, resuming it in 2012. The Doomed documentation released in the late 1990s on the internet was fundamental for the creation of his emulator. The first stable version of NO$PSX was released in December 2012 for Windows.

NO$PSX (Night Striker)

Unlike its predecessors, it comes pre-configured with specific drivers and plug-ins, virtual CD-ROM drives and its own BIOS to run ROMs as soon as they are loaded. Its BIOS is its own and makes games run faster than the original. The only thing about the BIOS is that it is pre-defined to work with some known patches, but there are some games that have different patches, so it is recommended in these cases that the console's original BIOS be downloaded. It reads all PSX ROM formats, except for the compressed ROM format, PBP, and works well on a processor with 2GHZ capacity or higher. It also reads media in physical CD-ROM drives. The PocketStation accessory is integrated into the emulator.

NO$PSX (Interface/About/Menus)

It was easy for Martin to add emulation of this accessory, because it already ran on his GBA emulator and both have the same ARM processor base. It is one of the most complete PSX emulators, with screenshots (in .BMP format), save states, CD-ROM settings, brightness and color bit settings in video, 16-bit stereo audio quality at 44kHz, GTE microprocessor configuration, use of MMX technology, disassembler and CPU configuration, joypad configuration, and dozens of other technical and emulation settings with the classic way his emulators are built. The emulator had three executable icons and top of the front, the first released with the emulator, and the other two in January and April 2013. After the May 2014 version, it went almost three years without an update, releasing its last version in December 2022.

Other Emulators

4everpsx

PS7

Avocado

In addition to the emulators described, there were also others, such as 4EverPSX, PSInex, PSXeven, pSX emulator (also running on Linux), HPSx64 (also runs PS2 games) and Avocado (also running on Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android), and emulators exclusive to MacOS, such as The Pi and FlareStorm, in addition to Sope, for Linux and UNIX.

HPSx64

As for console support in multi-emulators, we have MAME in 2003, MESS in 2004, Mednafen (own emulator) in 2011, BizHawk (port of the PSX module for Mednafen by zeromus, known for the NES emulator FCEUX) and OpenEmu for MacOS X (for the PPSSPP emulator) both in 2015, RetroArch (for Beetle PSX, which is a port of the PSX module of the Mednafen emulator and PCSX-ReARMed) in 2016 and Ares (original fork of BSNES and Higan) in 2020.

Pete Bernert

Pete Bernert

Pete Bernert (BlueDove/BlackDove) was born in 1971 in Germany. After graduating in Computer Science in Mannheim, Germany, Pete worked as an MS-Windows programmer in the 1990s. Around 1998, he lived with his girlfriend Heike near Eberbach. Along with Kazzuya, Tratax, Duddie, Nik, Lewpy and Foxfire, Pete Bernert was the main developer of emulator plug-ins. With PSEmu introducing plug-in emulation in 1998, Pete was one of its first enthusiasts, creating plug-ins for video, sound and CD-ROM. The first of their plug-ins was Pete's TNT OpenGL for video in 1998, followed by Pete's OpenGL for video and Pete's Midas for sound in 1999, Pete's Soft and Pete's D3D for video in 2000, and Pete's DSound for sound and Pete's ASPI for CDR in 2001. Outside the PSEmu Pro project, other plug-ins were released, such as Pete's DX6 D3D and Pete's MesaGL Linux in 2000 and Pete's OpenGL2 PSX in 2003, both for video, and Pete's Linux Null in 2001 for sound.

Website Pete's Homepage (1998) and SourceForge

Pete's Domain Website: Home, PSX GPU, PSX SPU, PSX CDR, CGEmu and PSX Emu Frontends

What did all these plug-ins have in common? They worked on a variety of PSX emulators, including PSEmu Pro, Psyke, ePSXe, PCSX (and some of its famous forks), Xebra, and others. Pete also released plug-ins for PSX, which were later also used for the ZiNc arcade emulator, which ran Capcom's Sony ZN-1 and ZN-2, Taito FX1-A and FX1-B, and Namco System 11 boards, all based on Sony PlayStation software. These included PEOp.S. Windows Soft, Pete's Soft X11 Linux, PEOp.S. Linux Soft X, PEOp.S. Linux Soft SDL in 2001, Pete's OpenGL2 PSX, Pete's XGL2 Linux PSX in 2003, and Pete's Windows OGL/D3D PSX in 2005 for video, eP.E.Op.S. DSound (Pete's) and PEOp.S. Linux OSS (Pete's) in 2001 sound. In November 2001, he created the PEOp.S. (PSX Emulation Open Source) project, alongside Lewpy, lu_zero and linuzappz, to make his Windows and Linux PSX and PS2 plug-ins open source for anyone interested in coding them. Pete made the OpenGL/MesaGL plugins, Soft GPU forks, DSound Audio SPU and Pete's ASPI open source.

GPU: TNT OpenGL, OpenGL Windows and Windows Soft / SPU: MIDAS and DSound / CDR: ASPI

The PEOp.S. project inspired the creation of the SexyPSF player in 2003 by Xodnizel, which plays .PSF (Portable Sound Format) files of PSX game music. SexyPSF was also inspired by the PCSX emulator. In 2012, the Android SexyPSF Player was released, a similar player using the SexyPSF core, created by Lei Yu for Android. Pete has also created PS2-specific plug-ins, such as the PEOp.S. DVD plugin in 2003, and the PEOp.S. PS2 SPU2 and PEOpS SPU2 OSS sound plug-ins in 2004, for emulators such as PCSX2. Several of his PSX plug-ins have also been updated to work on PS2 emulators. Pete updated his plug-ins until 2009. In addition to the plug-ins, he also developed pixel shaders, which are programs that manipulate the pixels of images, adding shading, reflections, and color adjustments to games running with the OGL2 and XGL2 GPU plug-ins. However, this method will only work on graphics hardware that supports GLslang (GLSL), a programming language used to write shaders within the OpenGL ecosystem. 

Guest(r)'s Shader Collection

Pete Bernert

Shader effects include broken glass, texture layers, overlays, black and white, grayscale TV-like effects, blur effects for smoothing, brightness enhancement, 90-degree rotation, resolution enhancement and image refinement (scale2x), noise and contrast enhancement, more vibrant luminance and colors, and smoothing edges and improving the appearance of graphics (anti-aliasing). In addition, it also released a specific shader package, Guest(r)'s Shader Collection, with screen smoothing, visual enhancements, color interpolation (smooth transition between two known points), observation of the render buffer (where images are stored before being displayed on the screen) to determine resolution, color adjustment, brightness, contrast and saturation, color adjustment with anti-aliasing to improve 3D graphics, artistic texture for 3D graphics and cartoon style for 3D graphics.

PCSX

        

amaZiNc and ePSXeCutor

Many of the shaders in this package increase the screen resolution for games. With his work with plug-ins, he was called to be part of some emulation projects. Among them, in 2000, the PCSX project, an important PSX emulator, where he worked on the GPU plug-ins and the emulator's GUI (interface). He was on the project until 2001. In 2005, the ZiNc arcade project, working on the rendering part of SPU plug-ins. And in 2005, the CGEmu GameCube project, working on some graphics plug-ins. Pete also created front-ends for some emulators, such as ePSXeCutor for the PSX ePSXe and amaZiNc for the ZiNc arcade, both in 2004.

    

PSSwitch, NVColorProfiler and Pete's Media Player

In addition to plug-ins, he also developed programs such as PSSwitch, which was released in 1998 to support game configuration in PSEmu, saving the plug-in configuration for each game, since the plug-ins were very precarious and not all of them worked with all games; Pete's Media Player in 2008 to play MIDI files, which were famous at the time, all because the player he downloaded had problems (imagine creating a program because the one you downloaded doesn't work? It's not for everyone [laughs]); PsxGpuCheck in 2000, an application to test the Linux GPU Plugin; and NVColorProfiler in 2005, a tool to fix a bug in NVidia drivers, which messed up saved color patterns to work in certain games after the computer was restarted. More than twenty years after the creation of his plug-ins, they are still used to emulate games. Pete was undoubtedly one of the great innovators in the world of emulation.

Emulators:

PSEmu Pro (1998), PCSX (2001), CGEmu (2005)

Applications:

PSSwitch (1998), Pete's Media Player (1998), PsxGpuCheck (2000), NVColorProfiler (2005)

GPU Plugins (Windows):

Pete's TNT OpenGL GPU (1998), PEOp.S./Pete's OpenGL Windows PSX GPU (1999), Pete's Soft GPU (1999), Pete's D3D GPU (2000), Pete's DX6 D3D GPU (2000), Pete's PSX GPU (2000), Pete's PSX GPUs (Pete's OpenGL, D3D and Soft) (2000), PEOp.S. Windows Soft GPU (2001), Pete's OpenGL2 PSX GPU (2003), Pete's Windows OGL/D3D PSX (Pets's OpenGL, D3D and DX6 D3D) (2005)

GPU Plugins (Linux):

PEOp.S./Pete's MesaGL Linux GPU (2000), Pete's Soft X11 Linux GPU (2001), PEOp.S. Linux Soft X GPU (2001), PEOp.S. Linux Soft SDL GPU (2001), Pete's XGL2 Linux PSX GPU (2003)

SPU Plugins (Windows):

Pete's MIDAS Audio SPU (1999), PEOp.S./Pete's DSound Audio SPU (2001), PEOp.S. PS2 SPU2 DSound (2004)

SPU Plugins (Linux):

PEOp.S./Pete's Linux OSS Audio SPU (2001), Pete's Linux Null Audio SPU (2001), PEOp.S. SPU2 OSS (2004)

CD-R/CDVD Plugins:

Pete's ASPI/PEOp.S. CDR (2001), PEOp.S. CDVD (2003)

Pixel Shading (OGL2/XGL2):

Pete's "Gray" Shader (2004), Pete's "Simple Blur" Shader (2004), Pete's "Brightness" Shader (2004), Pete's "Rotation" Shader (2004), Pete's "Scale2x" Shader (2004), Renee Cousins' " Pseudo Median" Shader (2004), Renee Cousins' "Pseudo Median + Luminance" Shader (2004), Luigi's "Blur AA" shader (2004), Pete's "Broken Glass" Shader (2005), Pete's "Multitexture Demo" Shader (2005), Guest(r)'s Shader Collection (2006)

Front-ends:

ePSXeCutor (2004), amaZiNc (2004)

Specific Plugins (PSEmu Pro) [Replay]:

Pete's TNT (1998), Pete's OpenGL (1999), Pete's MIDAS (1999), Pete's Soft (2000), Pete's D3D (2000), Pete's DSound (2001), Pete's ASPI (2001)

Specific Plugins (ZiNc) [Replay]:

PEOp.S. Windows Soft (2001), Pete's Soft X11 Linux (2001), PEOp.S. Linux Soft X (2001), PEOp.S. Linux Soft SDL (2001), PEOp.S. DSound (Pete's) (2001), PEOp.S. Linux OSS (Pete's) (2001), Pete's OpenGL2 PSX (2003), Pete's XGL2 Linux PSX (2003), Pete's Windows OGL/D3D PSX (2005)