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→Emulation issues
==Emulation issues==
Emulation for the N64 is not at the point where many may have expected it to be by now. The system is extremely complex compared to its contemporary consoles and confounded with compounded by almost no documentation being available to emulator developers, leading to it being difficult to create an emulator with a high degree of compatibility with games. Many games require specific plugin set ups with specific emulators to be played decently.
===High-level vs. low-level graphics===
One of the biggest hurdles in the road to proper N64 emulation has been accurately emulating the N64's graphics hardware, known as the Reality Display Processor, itself a part of the N64's Reality Co-Processor. The N64's RDP was the first real 3D accelerator GPU on consoles. In fact, it was the most powerful consumer-grade GPU in the world at the time it came out. It is very hard to emulate all of its functions accurately due to the aforementioned lack of publicly available documentation for emulator developers. Many RDP functions have to be reproduced in software for accuracy, which takes a lot of power.
For this reason, most developers have instead opted to approximate the RDP's functions using high-level emulation (HLE) through various APIs such as Direct3D, OpenGL, and even Glide. While this results in much more reasonable system requirements for emulation along with prettier, higher resolution graphics, this method can be hit and miss, often requiring per-game tweaks and settings to prevent graphical glitches on many games. Some games that implemented custom microcode (which has yet to be reverse-engineered) such as Factor 5's games do not work no matter what using high-level graphics plugins.
