RTA Guide/Emulator

An emulator is an unofficial platform that is supported on the official leaderboards. Emulators are the second fastest supported platform. They have the same load times as N64, but do not lag at all during gameplay.

→ Setup Guide

This covers Project 64 v1.6 installation and optimal configuration.

Permitted Emulators

The only permitted emulator version is Project 64 v1.6. Later versions of Project64 are banned from the leaderboards due to load time inconsistency. Additionally, OpenEMU and Mupen64plus are also allowed so that Mac and Linux users can play too. Any of these emulators can be used on any platform, but it is preferred that if you are on Windows you stick with Project64

ROM Acquisition

N64 ROMs are stored as either .z64 or .n64 files (Never as an exe file). They can be obtained by using a cartridge dumper to copy the ROM from your own Nintendo 64 cartridge, which is legal in some countries like the USA. Distributing ROM files is illegal. To verify that you have the correct ROM, you can compare your ROM's MD5 hash to the following:

NTSC-J (Original)	85d61f5525af708c9f1e84dce6dc10e9
NTSC-U	20b854b239203baf6c961b850a4a51a2

Versions

While any version of Super Mario 64 can be played on Emulator, there are only 2 relevant versions (since the benefits of NTSC-J Shindou are irrelevant due to the fact that lag is not present on emulator).

NTSC-J (Original)

This is the first Japanese release. This version has a shorter intro cutscene, less text overall, and small differences in a few stages. it is faster for 1 Star, 16 Star, and 120 Star

NTSC-U

This is the North American release. Text boxes scroll more quickly and 15 star MIPS runs more slowly in this release. It is faster for 0 Star and 70 Star