How UltraHLE changed Nintendo 64 emulation forever | MVG

In the history of video game

emulation

there are a few moments when something truly revolutionary is revealed that is simultaneously applauded and criticized, even misunderstood, but ultimately it is something that changes the landscape

forever

with the launch of the Nintendo 64. In 1996, it came with a 64-bit processor and powerful 3D graphics. Nintendo skipped an entire generation of processors and went directly from 16 to 64 bits. This was the beginning of the era of 3D graphics and the Nintendo 64 came complete with a powerful chip known as a reality display processor or RDP. Super Mario 64 was the killer. launched the app and it was a huge success selling over 11 million copies;

It's still considered one of the best games of all time, even to this day, but people wondered what it would take to emulate the Nintendo 64 on a PC back then,

emulation

was in its infancy. MAME existed Ground Zero for launch mainly supported 8 and 16 bit games, then there were other emulators like Mystical which was a fast NES emulator that ran on two. Genesis was one of the first Sega Genesis emulators that was fast even on a Pentium-based machine. Super NES emulation was still very early in its development, Gary Henderson's SNES 96 was merged with Jeremy CUDA's SNES 97 and became snes9x.

Pentium-based PCs had become fast enough to emulate 16-bit 2D sprite-based hardware at good speeds around the same time that the PC was the push for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics 3D effects released Voodoo one cut in 1997 and They quickly followed it with dedicated voodoo slicing in 1998 before the CPU rendered 3D hardware acceleration games in software that ate up CPU cycles. Hardware acceleration downloaded the 3D. The graphics code left the CPU free to do more work, which meant that processor-intensive CPU techniques such as particle effects could easily be done on a 3D card for near-free performance with 3D effects. and other 3D chip makers entering the PC market and with faster Pentiums and Pentiums. 2, like GL quake and others, started delivering high frame rates and people were still wondering if there was ever a possibility to emulate a Nintendo 64 on a PC at the time, most people dismissed the idea that there wasn't way to do it, they said.

There is no way to emulate the power of silicon graphics based hardware on a consumer PC with a 3D card, you would need at least an 800 megahertz machine which was out of the question at the time, extremely fast 3D didn't stop the However, people on news network groups were advertising Nintendo 64 emulators on PC all the time. Here's one known as the n64: mu claims it was developed by 17 programs and that it ran on a Pentium-based machine at 120 megahertz with a 3D card and how it was coming soon, but this was clearly a fake post like this one frequented by groups of Nintendo 64 news, no one really believed it was possible 64-bit instructions and 3D were so complex that there was no way to run it anywhere near playable speeds the first real attempt at a public Nintendo 64 emulator was known as Project Unreality.

It began development in 1997 and by early 1998 I was able to run some homebrew and boot some commercial games, but the emulator was very slow. Another emulator known as reality was announced. 64 this emulator was only in very early stages before being discontinued, but in January 1999 history was about to be made for the developers known as epsilon and the reality man spent only three months before quietly releasing an emulator of Nintendo 64 known as Ultra h le emulator took advantage of modern Pentium 2 processes and 3D effects cards like Voodoo 3 and claimed performance at or near full speed, the public had heard this before, almost everyone days there was a new post on the news network with another fake Nintendo 64 emulator that just another virus when ultra HL II was announced it was assumed to be the same one but word quickly spread that ultra HL e was real and when The people who started it were surprised.

Mario 64 was running on 200 megahertz Pentium 2 PCs and they couldn't I can't believe my eyes, just Ultra h version 1 allowed you to enjoy Mario 64 The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time starfox 64 mario kart 64 doom 64 and about 15 other games at astonishing speeds with occasional glitches here and there of course, but these two developers had achieved the unimaginable, not only that, but thanks to dedicated 3D graphics acceleration, games could be boosted to resolutions 640 by 480, 800 by 600 or even 1024 by 768, something the Nintendo 64 hardware was not capable of doing. and playing Nintendo 64 on your PC on a CRT at those resolutions looked incredible, make no mistake, this was an epic moment for emulation.

I was there the day Ultra hele was released and I was one of those people who downloaded it. I couldn't believe that this emulator was actually real, but when I heard stories that it was and that it was incredibly fast, I ended up downloading a couple of roms from a dial-up modem at the time, which took me hours and hours to download, but once I downloaded it. these roms and started playing them on the ultra hele emulator. I was completely blown away, so how did Epsilon and Reality Man manage to achieve this full speed performance on a 266 megahertz Pentium 2?

How does that happen, especially considering what the Nintendo 64 is? daily struggles on raspberry pi hardware sometimes ultra hle pioneered a new approach to emulation HL e means high level emulation before HL e traditional emulation was all low level in other words if you look at something like an arcade system neogeo, we know that there is a motorola 68000 cpu as the main processor such as the e8 eco processor and a yamaha ym an assisted mule instruction by instruction to be able to reproduce the exact execution of the code, this is what is known as low-level emulation or interpreted emulation.

Low level emulation is not fast but it is very very accurate ultra hla takes a completely different approach the main CPU, the mips r 4300, was emulated instruction by instruction using traditional low level emulation techniques, however, the RCP o Code processor was actually handled in a completely different way. intercepting the high level API graphics and sound calls that the games were sending to the RCP chip and the developers figured out what they were doing and replicated them as best they could, for example if we take a look at the ercp ultra HL code. we can see these things known as display lists, a display list is simply a set of GPU instructions that are loaded and sent to the GPU in batches for execution and there are display lists for the graphics and audio that ultra a djeli emulate as best as possible.

You can display these lists by intercepting function calls for all 3D graphics, including vertices, creating triangles and quads, mapping textures, background color, and more, or the 3D effects of the Voodoo graphics API known as Glide can handle these lists. display very easily, in fact the card works in a very similar way to the Nintendo 64 3D hardware which supported these instructions so working on the 3D effects was simple to do. This approach meant that performance was fast with 3D effects managing display lists. A fast Pentium 2 processor could handle the MIPS processor emulation. and thus high-level emulation techniques were born.

However, the drawback of this approach is that the interception of these function calls for 3D graphics would vary game by game. The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time has different address locations that these features are compared to, for example. Mario 64, so it was necessary to incorporate patches per game, this was done through any file, but there is more: hle's approach was flawed and only ran a total of around 20 Nintendo 64 games, while the percentage Compatibility testing of the Nintendo 64 library was extremely fast. games was extremely low and there was also the little thing known as microcode. The Nintendo 64 has this feature, which means that the graphics and audio can be completely programmable, in other words, create new effects.

Optimized 3D graphics, adding new channels to the audio and even Plus, because the microcode was completely customizable, it meant that any game that used it wouldn't work. Developers like Factor 5 use custom microcode in games like Rogue Squadron and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which incidentally took many years for Nintendo's current batch. 64 emulators to play these games after the launch word about ultra chili spread so quickly that it was rumored that there were around 300,000 downloads of the emulator on the first day, which was intended as a technical proof of concept to outline a method new and exciting. of emulation became that most people became interested in acquiring illegal copies of game roms due to the constant pressure of this epsilon and reality man removed ultra hle from their website and announced that they were discontinuing the emulator.

We do not tolerate the use of illegal roms in any form in this emulator was not designed to be used for this, the reaction we saw was not what we expected, it seems that the emulation community is not ready for something like this. The Ultra HL II project is now on hold and will be suspended if this activity is carried out. continues our goal is to further develop the emulation technology so as not to harm Nintendo without them none of this would be possible in February 1999, a few weeks after the launch, Nintendo confirmed that they were starting legal proceedings against Epsilon and the reality man , with Nintendo pointing out the authors in their statement, however, the lawsuit never made it to court.

Epsilon and the reality man disappeared from the scene. There were some rumors that they both got jobs at Nintendo working on the GameCube architecture in 2002. The Ultra H Le source code was leaked and gave a good idea. about how they managed to use h le's techniques, reality man resurfaced in 2003 and made some updates discussing the next version of ultra HL e, but only after a few updates he disappeared again in the end, although ultra HL e never saw another update official of his legacy. and the HL e techniques were used in many other Nintendo 64 emulators that eventually surpassed ultra edge le compatibility, but they extended the same technique that made fast Nintendo 64 emulation a reality on modern computers at the time, so there it is. you guys that's the story of ultra hele released for PC in 1999 it was truly a historic and iconic day in the history of emulation and one that will stay

forever

for those people who remember Nintendo 64 emulation you will no doubt remember this day and I want to hear your opinions.

Were you there in those days when Ultra Hele was released? You probably should have known and I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below your stories. What were you doing when Ultra Hele was released? Some of you probably weren't even born. when this emulator came out, but it was really something that really defined Nintendo 64 emulation in the future even to this day, as well as many other emulators that use the hele technique that we take for granted these days, all thanks to this one. emulator that came out in 1999 well guys, I'll be here to watch this video.

I hope you enjoyed it, if you liked it, you know what to do, give me a thumbs up and as always don't forget to like, subscribe and I'll see you in the next video, bye for now.