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Nintendo 64 is an iconic console that gave life to such awesome games as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and many more. However, nowadays, they can't really be favorably compared with current-gen games graphics-wise.
Thankfully, software developer Darío managed to reanimate some of the N64 titles with their emulator plug-in. The creator added ray tracing, object motion blur, widescreen, DLSS, and 60+ FPS to make games look almost as good as modern titles.
"I started this project a month ago as a way of optimizing the PC port's backend as much as possible, and I quickly realized it could evolve into a generic emulation solution that would allow me to apply these enhancements to far more games," shared the author. "The footage I've shown from both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask have been captured in mupen64plus, and I intend to bring this to other emulator cores as I learn more about how the hardware and the software works."
The project is still early in development, according to Darío, and it won't be possible to make every N64 work with the graphics enhancements "as it's still a manual process to create lighting for a particular title."
"I also intend to make this plugin compatible with the methodology used by the existing SM64 and OoT PC ports, as it'll bring significant performance improvements for HD model replacements thanks to its decoupled rendering."
The developer is planning to include HD texture replacements in the same way existing plug-ins work and a detailed graphics debugger that exposes all the parameters of what's showing on screen, but don't expect to see it soon.
The project will be open source under an MIT license when it's finished.
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