Free-Emulators.com

January 28, 1999 is a day which wrote emulation history. UltraHLE was released, the first succesful Nintendo 64 emulator. What many thought of as impossible was achieved by UltraHLE as the first (and only) release was able to properly play many popular titles, including Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

UltraHLE is an emulator allowing games for the Nintendo 64 game console to be run on a computer. It was hailed as a massive step forward in emulation technology upon its release in 1999. Emulating the N64 (which at the time was only 3 years old), it was the first of the N64 emulators to run commercial titles at a playable frame rate on the hardware of the time.

Earlier emulators had concentrated on accurately emulating all of the low level operations which the target machine was capable of. This had worked well for older consoles such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Co-authors Epsilon and RealityMan realized that since N64 games were programmed in C code, that instead of intercepting machine level operations, they could concentrate on intercepting (the far fewer) C library calls, and write their own code to implement the libraries. Thus UltraHLE software is in fact an emulator with some parts implemented as a simulation. The HLE approach is therefore not true 100% emulation, and the technique is not used in purist emulation projects such as MAME. It did however open the doors to create playable game emulators which use complex graphic routines that require considerable computation power that could be simulated easily with available PC graphic cards.