I’m using a steamdeck and retroarch with a mupen core to run N64 games. I’m nearly through with DK64 and all of a sudden, I can’t pickup bananas, coins or the key that gets me to the final level.
I’m not sure what’s going on. It’s not frozen, It just won’t let me pick up the collectibles. I may have freed it up once before by leaving and traveling around the game and trying again. This time it doesn’t seem to let me continue.
Any ideas?
Here’s an idea: did you try using the ParaLLEl plugin for both RSP and RDP emulation? Mupen64Plus defaults to HLE alternatives, which are lighter, but less accurate. If you haven’t yet, try playing using ParaLLEl and see if the issue is solved. Both save files and states are compatible between those plugins, so there’s no problem switching them.
I don’t know If it matters for this case, but dk64 has an memory leak issue, for this reason it can be helpful to not use RA savestates.
I researched a bit and found this reply in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/donkeykong/comments/1cvnx4o/comment/l4rr0wd The part that is interesting to me is:
A similar glitch happens in the final area of the game, in which the game fails to have banana medals stay collectible after a restart. These cannot be obtained after a certain event in the story happens, as the event to spawn them in cannot be repeated. If this event happens and they are not obtained before a restart, it becomes impossible to get 100% on that save file. Fortunately this was fixed in all non-US releases of the game.
I don’t know if this is the exact issue you run in. The game is known to have bugs, so I would not be surprised if this is a similar issue to what you got. So it maybe not an emulation issue at all, but can’t rule it out here.
Edit: Found a list of bugs for this game. You might want to check if the bug you describe is known here, otherwise it might be an issue with emulation: https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Donkey_Kong_64_glitches
Damn, so this happens on the actual retail release? Quite a buggy mess. I remember being interested by this game, back then, but ended up buying another. I wonder how my experience would’ve went…
yeah. You can search for the fact that the devs require the extra Ram module only because there was a memory leak. Without it the game would crash much faster, but the extra memory can play the game longer. Its amazing that such a game made it to the public. They could not figure out. Not saying its the problem you have, just how messy it was/is.
Edit: The leaking memory issue really seems to be an urban legend and not true at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/t2owki/psa_dk64s_expansion_pak_usage_was_not_to_fix_a_bug/
So I did try ParaLLel plug in and core for Retroarch. It didn’t help. Looks good though and I didn’t realize it’s a more current emulator for N64. Thanks.
I think the memory leak thing is an urban legend.
I think the answer is in the incredible number of glitches and bugs that are tagged by thingsiplay. That is a long list.
Ultimately, I think it’s just a crap game even though I enjoyed it so much with my kids when it first came out. I suppose that extends to Conker’s Bad Fur Day too.
5th-gen games, in general, were always trying to push the envelope on hardware not yet fully matured for 3D gaming, so there are examples of games “overshooting” and being ridden with issues like game-breaking bugs, constant clipping, poor draw distance and framerate dropping to single digits. Blame it on the times, when making advances was more sought after than polish and stability. In my opinion, a misguided generation.
While a buggy AAA game was an outlier back then, a relative bug free AAA experience at launch is the outlier today.
Unfortunately, true. Being able to patch things up made developers careless. It’s the “nah, we’ll fix it later” mentality. You can add further complications: the sheer size of each project preventing a tight and well-communicated team; general focus on higher and higher-level programming languages, straying farther from optimization and hardware knowledge; over-dependence on middleware as a cost-effective solution, taking away control from the coders. All these conspire to reduce programmers to the lowest common denominator, to maximize profits and ease human replacement, at the expense of the end product.
In that regard, projects like RetroArch are a haven to secure the “simpler times”, as it’s clear that the current gaming industry has grown beyond its own control and stability. I have the same opinion for music, movies and basically all forms of art. There needs to be a balance between money and creativity, so both sides benefit and can keep producing quality content. Alas, over-optimization keeps making victims, even more so these days.
Sorry for the long text! Didn’t mean to, I just kept writing.
The parallel CORE is not more recent, it’s older. The Parallel RDP plugin in the Mupen core is what you want to use.
More and more people get confused by this.