Buttons were from Labfifteenco, custom screen decal was from retrogameEVO on Etsy, back decal from sakuraretromodding on Etsy. Paint for the back shell is Tamiya ts-15 blue with primer and clear coat added.
Seeing videos now of side by side of all of them, Mod retro fails in donkey kong (dk dies in the intro gameplay instead of getting across the vines), lags behind on mario 64 and also star fox. Why? This seems like a huge problem. Games are also crashing or freezing.
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 everyone,
I’m a bit confused about the upcoming Retro Rewards change on July 15.
We received an email explaining what we should do before the change, especially regarding claiming/using our Retro Rewards coupons, but there was no mention of whether people who get the M64 early bird price will also be able to use an already-claimed coupon on the same order.
Usually, ModRetro does not allow stacking discounts when an item is already discounted, so I’m worried the M64 early bird price might count as a discount code and prevent us from using our existing coupon. That would be pretty disappointing, especially because ModRetro could theoretically have made the early bird price an automatic price adjustment instead of a code to avoid this issue. Maybe that is not the case, but right now it is unclear.
For people in the US, there might still be a workaround: placing one order for only the M64 with the early bird price, and another order using the Retro Rewards coupon for other items like the Pro Controller, games, accessories, etc.
But for international customers, this is much less practical because shipping costs are now way too high to justify splitting orders. Since the carrier change, shipping seems to be around €35 minimum and up to around €65.
For reference, that is approximately:
€35 = $40 USD / £30 GBP / $57 CAD / ¥6,460 JPY
€65 = $74 USD / £56 GBP / $106 CAD / ¥12,000 JPY
And that might be even higher for the M64 depending on its size and weight compared to the Chromatic.
Another thing that feels odd is that product pages seem to indicate that the displayed price includes taxes and duties, but once you reach checkout, shipping also appears to add customs/duties-related fees. That makes the final cost much harder to predict for customers outside the US.
I’ve also included screenshots to show what I mean about duties being displayed in different places. On the product page, it clearly says “Taxes + Duties Included” under the item price. But on the checkout/shipping page, the shipping option also says “Duties Included”, and the pricing summary breaks the shipping charge down into shipping plus duties and fees. In my example, the total shipping option is €35.59, made up of €19.79 shipping and €15.80 duties and fees. So it looks like duties are both included in the product page pricing and then also shown again during checkout, which is confusing for international buyers.
Has anyone contacted ModRetro support about this yet? Do we know for sure whether the M64 early bird price and existing Retro Rewards coupons can be used together in the same order?
Anyway, have a great weekend everyone, and take care!
Hey. Does anyone know how much shipping to the UK is likely to be for the M64?
The Analogue 3D pics are 4K screenshots taken on the 3D itself. The M64 image was grabbed from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLGu0_rLbAU
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
Hey ModRetro team / Palmer! You've mentioned the Trident controller uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with custom Short-Interval Connections (SCI) for ultra-low latency, but also works natively on PC and Android.
When running in PC/Android mode, does the controller broadcast using standard, universal BLE HID gamepad profiles?
Basically, will it be recognized as a standard, generic BLE controller right out of the box by standard Bluetooth hosts, or will the custom SCI connection intervals require a proprietary firmware decode to map the inputs?
Thanks!
