Goldeneye 64 Best Setup and Some Quirks

Hello!

I’m currently undertaking figuring out a “prefect” (or as close to perfect as I can get) setup for Goldeneye 64 using the 1.3.4 Retroarch branch of Mupen64plus. I’m running Retroarch on a Windows 10 system with an i5 4590 3.3GHz, a GTX-970, and 8GB of RAM. Based on my understanding of N64 emulation, I shouldn’t struggle at all performance-wise, just with general emulation quirks. So far, in my quest for old school cool, I tested all the main plugins and rsp plugins and took notes on their pros and cons. While testing, everything else was set to defaults with no shaders. However, resolution was set to 1280x960 and the angrylion vi overlay was enabled. Here are the results:

Glide64 with hle/cxd4 (no apparent difference) -Text issues (edges cut off, missing first letter of selected words) -Multiplayer crashes -Visual problems (doors in multiplayer, see-through wall flashes) +Sky renders perfectly

gln64 with hle/cxd4 (no apparent difference) -Issues with intro (triangles instead of rare logo etc.) -Missing background on main menu -Missing text on “file” tabs -Character selection page shows triangles instead of top pictures, and bottom has distorted pictures -Strange lighting issues (lighting darkens around player) -Sky tears when panning +No multiplayer crash +No issues with doors

rice with hle/cxd4 (no apparent difference) -Sky is blocky (enlarged texture pattern?) +Text renders correctly +No multiplayer crash +No issues with doors +Background is present on main menu angry lion with cxd4 —crash on boot

angry lion with hle —weird garbled, unintelligible mess on boot (worse with angry lion vi overlay, but still present without it), but not frozen

Here’s where you guys and gals come in. Based on my testing, rice is the best option for Goldeneye 64 given that it only has issues with rendering the sky, and the rest runs buttery smooth. Has this been everyone else’s experience as well? Is there a better setup that preserves full multiplayer function?

Also, a quirk I’m running into: I’m wanting to test out changing the CPU core option and see how that changes things. However, every single time I change it, it the setting changes back to dynamic_recompiler. How do I get it to actually save my setting? It save every other setting just fine…

Until the glideN64 code is fully implemented into the core you’ll need to use the glideN64 plugin with PJ64 or Mupen64plus for the best experience; especially with multiplayer. If you must use RetroArch, use glide64 for most everything and gln64 for 3 or more multiplayer. I should note I’ve never had any crashes in multiplayer with either plugin.