PS3 N64 Emulator (PS3 PoC wii64 Port by emukidid) Surfaces 9 years after first announced

We have more Nintendo 64 Emulation news following the recent port to the Vita, It appears after 9 years since it was first announcements and previewed, the mythical PS3 Port of wii64 (mupen64) has finally surfaced, From one of the developer behind the port emukidid, the developer recently found the files for the old (unreleased) PoC for the PS3 on an old HDD and decided it was time to release the PoC to the public, However, don't get too excited as the emulator is very rough around the edges and is simply a proof of concept as stated that needs alot of work but the developer does leave some bits of info and even a lending hand. Back in 2011 development did not get off the ground to far past the initial phases due to various roadbloacks (explained below), In the current form its only running in "interpreter only" and does not have the advancements needed to run many games at all, but compiled in pslight v2 could provide some recent changes and maybe even better support. Below you will see a quote from the developer (emukidid) and also some instructions / video demo from psx-place user @SniperSnake whom recently was exploring some N64 options himself.

Its great to see this emulator and its source finally emerge and perhaps gives some hope or inspirations for others to bring this project full circle and create a stable n64 emulator for the PS3.
-STLcardsWS



  • 300px-Nintendo-64-wController-L.jpg
    wii64-ps3 proof of concept

    Found this on my HDD from way back in 2011 when we were messing with porting wii64 (mupen64) to the PS3. It has software rendered graphics limited to probably Mario 64 only as well as pure interpreter only and likely no audio.

    I'm not sure what state the release I've attached is in because I compiled it a long time ago, it's messy and it was just considered a "test"

    A very old proof of concept in porting mupen64 (wii64 specifically from 2011) to the PS3 using PSL1GHT v1.​
    Features

    • Bad audio
    • Preliminary hardware accelerated graphics
    • Basic input
    • Pure interpreter
    • Menu
    • USB loading
    • USB saving
    Future

    • I've had a go at getting this to work with PSL1GHT v2 (https://github.com/ps3dev/PSL1GHT) and have run into some issues I'm looking into (basially the menu loops once every 3-4 seconds and everything becomes unresponsive). Once this is resolved I'd be happy to try and merge upstream changes from newer Wii64 releases back into this and even try at porting the Wii64 dynarec over to ppc64.
    • Issues we'd run into at the time with the state of homebrew on the PS3 were mostly due to the newness of the library and toolchain but also the fact that we couldn't get decent performance at all from the pure interpreter and we were unable to execute from heap (no dynarec). The pure interpreter ran faster on the Wii than it did with the PS3's main CPU, probably due to the fact that there's no branch prediction.
    • UPDATE (1): Ready to jump back into some PS3 Dev after 9 years with this nice HORI 720p/1080i display I picked up for $39!
      • EX0FRYPVAAAKK3C.jpg

  • via @SniperSnake:

    Emukidid has decided to take a 2011 build of wii64/cube64 a mupen64 fork thats been ported to ps3 has finally be relased. It works in interpeter mode as dynarec haddent been worked on yet for ps3.
    • I have tested it myself via ps3 multiman self loading off usb.
    • The roms run off dev_usbX/wii64/roms folder.
    The ground work is here and supposedly ps3 dynarec is already a thing iin the shadows lets make this happen!!!



 
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I had big hopes hearing something new on this project on Christmas :(
A question to the moderators: Would it be possible to start a fundraising for this project, maybe from someone trusted here? Maybe this would give also some other talented programmers some motivation to start on this where emukidid stopped?
 
Is this using an old version of wii64?

This is a port of wii64 for the PS3, not sure which version it would based off, but it was the same team as the wii port. It's based off mupen64.Most of the development was done in 2011 for the PS3 port, Source Code and the PoC build was released in 2020.
 
So is this still a dead project? I don't have a pc and good enough phone for n64!

possibly. during its heyday the ps3 had a lot of devs working on projects, but now there are very few. I don't have a lot of confidence that there will ever be a good n64 emulator on the ps3. a good emulation machine these days might be the series x, if you have the cash. it can do up to wii, ps2, cube or so, so the n64 shouldn't be a problem, though I've never tested it beyond a real quick, if game will boot test, on retroarch. I'm a playstation and nintendo fan through and through, but I do buy bc and play emulation on my series x. it doesn't get much use beyond that.
 
Sm64 has been ported to PS3, but it's weird that oot hasn't been. I've been playing N64 games on NSO. Say what you will about old games, but NSO is cheap compared with PSN+, and I don't need the PSN+ games. I just need cloud saving. $20 compared with $80 or so. It's definitely a ripoff.
 
has anybody ever compiled this with dynarec enabled? i'm curious about the performance gains
I dont think the performance is truly a dynarec problem, I think its because afaik nobody has made homebrew that utilizes the rsx due to missing drivers so the 1 PPE is emulating everything, even the graphics

I hope I'm wrong on that but it seems likely as the homebrew scene for the PS3 is tiny when it comes to 3d emulation, the lack of 3d accel may be the culprit
 

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