Could this project sound the death knell for emulators on Android?

At a time when Apple users are discovering the joys of emulators, the Android world is entering a new era, that of porting. What does it mean? That thanks to a new procedure called static recompilation you will potentially be able to play all old titles on your Android phone natively, with much better quality and performance. In practice, at present, if you want to play a title from an old console, like the Nintendo 64, you must use an emulator, which acts as an intermediary between the console on which it is running, your phone and the game. In a way, you can think of it as an interpreter that translates the program’s instructions into a form that your phone (or PC) can understand, but the program itself doesn’t change, which is why emulated games are called ROM (Read Only Memory). ). There is one problem: emulators impact performance because they are essentially virtual machines. This is even more true for emulating historically complicated consoles, like the Nintendo 64. Porting avoids the middleman and simply runs the program directly on the target platform. The problem in this case is that unlike emulation, you have to work on the program and modify it, even profoundly.

But the advantage is that it will work much better, use less resources and also allow you to enable unexpected features, such as much higher resolution, up to even 120 fps and even Ray Tracing on gaming games. ‘twenty years ago. Porting games is nothing new, but until recently a process called decompilation was used, which for Nintendo 64 titles took years for a single game. Decompilation involves extracting the game’s original machine code (the ROM), then reverse engineer it through a reverse engineering process. The result is developer-readable code that can be modified to improve or modify games so that they run on modern hardware. Even though the process is long, the results are amazing. Super Mario 64 was decompiled in 2020 and supported different screen formats, much better frame rates, and even Ray Tracing. Now, thanks to static recompilation, this procedure can be done in seconds, because the process of reverse engineering the ROM code is automated and it is possible to read it directly, without doing anything. Be careful though: the developers release an executable that requires a stock ROM, not the game itself. An example of this procedure was posted on YouTube by Wiseguy, who recompiled Majora’s Mask for PC in two days (below) and hopes to be able to port the entire Nintendo 64 library shortly.

The results are incredible, much better than what you could get with Nintendo Switch Online, which is still an emulator after all. At this point, you’ll want to know how to play it. This is still early work, but other developers have taken Wiseguy’s work and created a port of the Android port of Majora’s Mask. Here for example, you can find a project on GitHub, but we only show it to you as an example without taking any responsibility, because as we said the project is very recent, and for example it only works with the controller (no touch controls at the moment). This process could also protect the proceedings from Nintendo’s wrath. As we said, decompiling and recompiling does not release a ROM, but an executable that requires an original ROM, so in theory Nintendo would have no leverage to attack projects, and given that it is almost always open source programs for which the developers earn nothing, they could not even be attacked from this point of view.