Back in the 1990s, the home console race came down to two main competitors: Sony's PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64. Both of these titans came with their own game legacies; Goldeneye for the N64 remains one of the most cherished examples of a console FPS game, for example.
Thanks to the work of a developer named Paul Holden, you can bring back those heady days of the '90s through a JavaScript emulator. He's managed to built an N64 emulator in JavaScript.
You may know Paul Holden's name if you follow the emulation scene. He was the original developer of Daedalus. When he ceased to develop it, others soldiered on, calling it DaedalusX64. Since then, Holden was inspired by the JavaScript Linux emulator. This led him to ponder the feasibility of constructing a JavaScript N64 emulator.
After what was probably a lot of late nights and empty cans of Red Bull, Holden has the project in a working manner. He admits it is still limited, but that it works for a small number of games. Super Mario 64 plays, and a number of other games do, but he warns they may display graphical glitches.
If you'd like to give Holden's N64 emulator a go, try it here. You need your own ROMs, and either Chrome or a Firefox Nightly build. Older versions of Firefox do not have the same features needed to use the emulator, which he feels will still take time to become usable. Now you can either relive old classics, or try out the competition's games.
The videos do show that the project has some development ahead of it, unfortunately. You'll notice that the game isn't running particularly smoothly, and that may be a limitation of the project at present. It definitely has a future in spite of this, because who wouldn't want to slack off in work with some Super Mario?
Source: N64JS
Emulator: HulkHolden
34 Comments - Add comment