Emulators
Emulators are programs with the purpose of simulating certain consoles on a PC and exist for nearly every console on the market.
The most common Nintendo 64 emulators are Project64, Mupen64 and Bizhawk.
N64 Emulators
- Originally released on December 10th 2001, Mupen64 is most commonly used for Super Mario 64 Tool Assisted Speedruns. It was designed to support multiple operating systems like Linux and Windows, and ports have been created for FreeBSD and MacOS, among others. Though the main emulator does not have TASing capability, many forks of it exist, one of which is Mupen64-RR.
- Bizhawk is a multi-emulator program started in 2012 that can emulate most consoles, including the N64. Bizhawk is also used for making TASes, but it has inaccurate emulation. However, it is preferred over Mupen64 on TASVideos because it standardizes loading times. Mupen64 TAS movies can be converted into Bizhawk TASes. Bizhawk's N64 emulation is based on Mupen64plus, a fork of Mupen64.
- Project64 is used to play most N64 games and Super Mario 64 ROM hacks, but has no TASing capability. Project64 versions v1.6 and/or v1.7 are commonly used within the speedrunning communities, while versions v2.x are usually banned. Project64 v1.6 is used for Super Mario 64 speedrunning (Mupen64plus/OpenEMU can also be used).