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.

Permitted Emulators

These emulators are permitted for the RTA leaderboards.

Project 64 (v1.6 only) | → Setup Guide
OpenEMU
Mupen64plus

Other versions of Project64 are banned from the leaderboards owing to load-time inconsistency. The setup guide covers installation and optimal configuration. OpenEMU and Mupen64plus are allowed so that Mac and Linux users can play too. Any of these emulators can be used on any platform, but Project64 is recommended for Windows.

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