Hopefully some YouTuber with a M64 reads this but, it would be nice to see someone try one of the new M64 game paks in a real N64. I wonder how they perform. Something tells me that we wont get a breakdown of a ModRetro game pak until after the M64 is released.

With the July 28th launch just around the corner, I’ve been closely following the updates. ModRetro’s recent blog post showing the v1.8.0 Beta core improvements and GoldenEye overclocking fixes looked incredibly promising!

Before that update, a few early previews pointed out some performance lag in more demanding games. Because the m64 supports easy Wi-Fi updates, I'm curious if ModRetro plans to push this latest firmware out to the early PR/reviewer units before release?

It would be great for the community to get a community-verified look at the performance gains and increased accuracy ahead of launch day.

Hey y’all! I plan on buying a M64 (hopefully a red one) and four controllers for my after school game club students to use.

I’m looking for some game recommendations that are a bit off the beaten path. Games that showcase interesting ideas, regardless of how well they work.

My experience growing up with occasional access to the console is limited to Perfect Dark and Star Wars pod racing.

I’ll have access to an Everdrive, and I’ve budgeted money to support newer official releases.

So in the Q&A awhile back it was revealed that the NSO controllers won't work without an adapter. Did they ever say if they would work by plugging them into the USB ports on the back of the M64?

I already have NSO controllers and if I have to buy additional adapters to make them work I feel like I should just pay the extra for the analogue 3D.

sorry dad, but this is a must, must buy.

(If I told him the truth, the answer will be a big fat NO!).

Hi all - I redeemed my loyalty points last week for a 20% off coupon that I was planning to use with the M64 (I wanted to order the M64 + 4xPro controllers).

The wording in the recent email that the "early bird" discount will be a code has me worried I won't be able to to use the coupon with the early bird discount... has there been any word on this?

Here is what I meant to say, and what I had mostly scripted out. I can't believe I messed up that badly. Thank you for pointing it out, or it would have stayed that way! My apologies to everyone!

I was wondering if ModRetro was doing any livestreams? Is anyone else? On my videos I get asked how does this play? Or why didn't you show this or do this? Are they doing any? Should I do one? I mean I've never done one.

Finished this one, and over the week I am trying to get a top 5 games on the Nintendo 64 that aren't made by Nintendo or Rare out. Thanks for the support guys!

Last night I went to bed and posted my Xibalba64 review. I had three videos on my Mac that I had done for it. One with a ton of multiplayer footage and a lot longer, and a revised script. The one I posted? The original. It had mistakes, errors, and something that needed changed and I am so sorry about that. I am redoing everything and will have it back up today. My apologies!

It’s been an intense month of work for M64 and we’re excited to share some new performance metrics. Within the last month we’ve made M64 more accurate and added the ability to overclock our M64 core and maximize performance across a couple key areas. There is much more to come, but for those interested in following along here is a peak under the hood.

Accuracy: Scalar Unit Single Instruction

We have been using the ever-popular n64-systembench test to assess this. This is a pretty complicated but exhaustive test bench, and the scalar unit tests are just one part of it. The original test covers 10,000 runs of 10 random RSP instruction blocks and measures the clock cycles each block consumes. We’ve modified this to split out and focus on the Scalar Unit Single Instruction and Vector Instruction tests.

In our prototype v1.0.3 software at the beginning of the month, per our expectation, M64 wasn’t ready to pass these tests. Our core was slower than N64 in random situations and slower for continuous scalar unit instructions. This isn't necessarily game breaking, but it was an inaccurate aspect of the design that would manifest as minor slow downs.

M64 v1.0.3

Meanwhile, the Analogue 3D also doesn’t fully pass this either.

A3D v1.4.0 (Force Original Hardware On)

We’re happy to report that this isn’t going to be an issue for you on launch day. We’ve been able to update our design to match the N64 perfectly on this point. See the image below.

M64 v1.8.0 (Beta)

Overclocking

James Lambert posted a video comparing the two systems earlier this month. Here’s a graph of his results from earlier this month. This graphic describes the relative performance of A3D and M64 to an original N64. 

James has given us a behind the scenes peek at his test methods and even sent us the source code so we could run the same tests here. His tests seek to isolate and measure the various components of N64’s performance profile in isolation. He was kind enough to also share what each one entails:

• Fill Rate: Renders a full-screen triangle multiple times to measure rasterization and fill-rate performance.
• Texture Load: Measures the texture load speed.
• CPU: Runs a particle simulation repeatedly to benchmark floating-point performance and overall CPU processing speed.
• RAM: Repeatedly accesses main memory while avoiding cache usage to measure raw RAM access performance.
• RSP: Renders a high-vertex-count model entirely offscreen so that performance is limited by the Reality Signal Processor (RSP), isolating geometry processing throughput.

Source: James Lambert, https://youtu.be/RMROAr8VOxg?si=hbW75jeF0jXXdnFu

We went ahead, with James’ help (thank you again for sharing those tests), and pitted M64’s beta overclock implementation against A3D’s Unleashed implementation. We were pleasantly surprised at the results.

https://preview.redd.it/fa3p26yyvo9h1.png?width=1622&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5f9f9a6e520c1da8090796314a3673cc800531d

Our RAM performance is to be expected – we intentionally slow this down with artificial delays of ~3 cycles for each read and write to fulfill accuracy tests. While we purposefully kept this in, it would be something we could easily disable when overclock mode is active.

Show Me The Goods

Synthetic tests are great, but what really matters to you all is how well M64 performs for your favorite titles. As you may remember from the 90’s, rocket launchers in Goldeneye result in quite a bit of slowdown.

Video of 007: GoldenEye on M64 overclocked

https://reddit.com/link/1ugj6wt/video/xo7st9d2xo9h1/player

Video of 007: GoldenEye on A3D Unleashed

https://reddit.com/link/1ugj6wt/video/09cvd4eowo9h1/player

What’s next?

We aren’t slowing down on making more improvements to the core as we get ready to ship these consoles. Even more updates will come after they are in your hands soon. The M64 is well on the way to being the most performance and the most accurate N64 recreation ever made in every metric, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.