#Best n64 emulator performance drivers
#Best n64 emulator performance full size
#Best n64 emulator performance series

Sound is working well on all emulators, and I haven't found any major issues with it. I was able to use it with some PS3-style controllers on the Mupen64plus standalone emulator, but I wasn’t able to use rumbling with the Libretro core. Normally you should be able to activate rumbling support of the controller, but I had trouble getting it enabled on all emulators and controllers. Thanks to Retroarch on the XU3, you can setup any controller you want by manually configuring the buttons, so every controller is 100% supported.

The Mupen64plus emulator configures the controllers automatically, but not all controllers work perfectly with the default settings. Joysticks are fortunately working fine on all ODROID devices, which means that all emulators (mupen64plus and libretro core) are fully supported with any game controller. The XU3 can use rice, glide64 and gln64, but glide64 seems to be the best plugin for now on the ODROID. The glide64mk2 plugin on the Exynos 4 devices is the preferred graphics plugin for Mupen64plus standalone.

Glide also seems to render a darker picture than rice does, which is most likely due to some missing shader options with regards to shadows.

#Best n64 emulator performance series

The glide plugin on the Exynos 4 series devices (X, X2, U2 and U3) is working well, and respects aspect ratio with an overall good quality, but it can be a bit slower than rice on some games.

#Best n64 emulator performance drivers

There seems to be a workaround using framebuffer drivers instead of X11 drivers by adding some scripts in order to switch resolution and color depth, but since my ODROID GameStation Turbo image uses X11 drivers by default, I don't take the time to perform framebuffer tests. Since the initial tests on the C1 went poorly, I decided to retest every game in 16 bit using the glide64mk2 video core. This will also cause issues if you try watching movies or want to start other applications that require more than 16 bit color depth. The ODROID-C1 performs best when using the rice video plugin, since glide64mk2 doesn’t work unless the color depth is reduced to 16 bit, which causes the transparency effects to become disabled. This distorts the picture, causing the characters and objects to appear wider than normal.

#Best n64 emulator performance full size

Using the standalone Mupen64plus, rice is unable to perform aspect ratio scaling, and always scales the game to the full size of your video resolution. However, it seems that glide offers better graphics features than the rice plugin, but has some minor glitches that are not present in the rice video plugin. While testing, I found that the best videocore depends on the game. The Libretro core offers rice, glide64 and one called gln64. Mupen64plus is able to use a video plugin called rice, and another one called glide64mk2. Whether you use Mupen64plus or the Libretro core, different plugins are used to display the game graphics. Both versions offer different plugins and methods of playing the games. Mupen64plus runs on all other ODROID devices, such as the Exynos 4 series (X, X2, U2, and U3) as well as the newer but less powerful ODROID-C1. Only the XU3 is able to use the Libretro core under Linux, which has better graphics, and is easier to control than the standalone Mupen64plus emulator. Hopefully in the future, we will see more improvement and have even better support for N64 emulators on ODROID devices under Linux. However, now that it's functioning, it's quite fun and opens up lots of opportunities for classic gaming. It took a while to get N64 emulation to work on all the ODROID boards under Linux. Please note that this article covers only Linux emulation, and does not extend to Android, although there are several Nintendo 64 emulators available for Android, such as Mupen64plus and N64oid. Now that it’s widely available, I decided to do a comparison not only between the standalone version and the Libretro core, but also between the different ODROID platforms, in order to evaluate their capabilities in terms of emulating a Nintendo 64 (N64) console. Nintendo 64 emulation has recently evolved to run on all ODROID devices, using either the Mupen64plus standalone emulator or the Libretro core for Retroarch.