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Some minor changes and cleanups
To illustrate the point, [http://bhemuhelp.unaux.com/n64mgcl/N64ConfigList.html here] is a site that, as late as 2012, was dedicated to documenting the exact emulator, plugin and settings combination necessary to get each and every game to at least a playable state, if at all possible. Unsurprisingly, this situation often led to a lot of confusion from users, who often wondered why there were so many plugins, and which ones were the best to use, only to find out it often depended on the game, and even then, some games would refuse to work as intended no matter what was tried. Hence the label "plugin hell" was coined, and stuck as a description of the travails of trying to emulate N64 games well into the 2010's.
However, as time went on, things began to change, though slowly at first. 1964's development eventually ceased, and it completely fell off the radar. Mupen64 was forked into [[Mupen64Plus]] and developed its own plugin spec that was incompatible with the older zilmar spec, making it unable to use existing plugins unless they were specifically ported to it. This left only Project64 as the only relevant and active emulator still using the zilmar spec. For some time, then, this left the fledgling Mupen64Plus missing out on most cutting-edge plugin development, as most people were still using Project64.
A semblance of parity began to come about as a result of several major developments: first, Mupen64Plus itself was forked by the [[libretro]] team, which made many changes and improvements to the core emulator, and integrated its plugins into the core itself. Second, gonetz, the developer of Glide64, unveiled his newest plugin, GLideN64, which would officially support both the zilmar and Mupen64Plus specs from the beginning. Third, the Angrylion plugin, which is the most accurate and compatible (and slowest) video plugin there isbut was initially only available for the zilmar spec, began was ported to be ported both for use with standard Mupen64Plus and integrated into the libretro fork. Finally, Themaister, one of the creators of libretro and [[RetroArch]], began developing a unique plugin initially exclusive to libretro known as ParaLLEl-RDP, essentially Angrylion running on the GPU through Vulkan compute shaders, enabling near-perfect N64 graphics emulation at actually playable speeds. Add to this the fact that most PCs and many mobile devices are now more than capable enough of running the most advanced plugins, and the plugin situation, once considered a labyrinth, has been greatly simplified to just needing a few for the vast majority of use cases.
All that said, the issue is that there are now three plugin standards to account for:
