Tom Selleck on part of a Japanese poster for the movie Mr. Baseball

Friday Starter – MiSTer N64 Core Progress

 September 22, 2023  Posted in Friday Starter 563 Views

MiSTer Baseball Returns

I decided to check in on the in-progress N64 core for the MiSTer FPGA this week. To quickly summarize, MiSTer FPGA is an open source hardware emulation project. It’s a little kit you can put together that can (ideally) provide a more accurate emulation of old game hardware than software emulation.

I like the MiSTer especially for this site, because it’s generally less dependent on game-specific patches or fixes than software emulation. And old sports games just aren’t the top priority for game-level emulation fixes, so it’s not uncommon to see even 16-bit baseball games work imperfectly on the best software emulators.

For reasons well above my level of understanding, emulating N64 on the MiSTer’s current chips was thought impossible as of a few months ago. But huge progress has been made, and now almost every game can at least boot up, with most being playable.

An important general tip: We’re still at the early beta stage before the MiSTer update scripts will just do everything for you. So it’s important to follow the steps here closely. For instance, if you’re seeing “auto-detect failed,” that means you need to download the database file from the FAQ there and put it in your N64 games folder on the MiSTer. That database file is necessary for many of these games to run at all.

New updates are coming in on almost a daily basis in the #test-builds channel on the MiSTer Discord, improving compatibility and accuracy each time. But here’s how things stand for baseball video games on the N64 as of September 22nd, 2023, based on both the compatibility spreadsheet and my testing each game:

U.S. games

  • All-Star Baseball ’99 – Doesn’t boot.
  • All-Star Baseball 2000 – It no boot.
  • All-Star Baseball 2001 – No boot on this guy either. (what was this series up to that’s got the core so flummoxed?)
  • Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest – Graphics don’t look perfect yet, but completely playable.
  • Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. – Some textures are clearly not 100%, especially in the menu. But runs and plays really well.
  • Mike Piazza’s Strike Zone – Menu is squished and some graphics are too dark. But playable.
  • Triple Play 2000 – Video and audio glitchiness, but playable.

Japan games

  • Choukuukan Nighter Pro Yakyuu King – Looks perfect far as I can tell. Maybe some small polygon gaps in player models that shouldn’t be there?
  • Choukuukan Nighter Pro Yakyuu King 2 – This one hangs on launching exhibition games for me.
  • Famista 64 – Fully playable so long as you skip the intro, but with lots of graphical glitches.
  • Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 4 – Some rough textures and small graphical glitches.
  • Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 5 – Couple small issues on the intro movie. Extremely minor graphical imperfections during gameplay.
  • Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 6 – Graphical glitch in the intro. Extremely minor graphical imperfections during gameplay.
  • Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2000 – Really good!
  • Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu Basic 2001 – Flawless. Beautiful.
  • Power League 64 – Several elements are just a bit too dark. Fully playable.

The Japanese titles are way ahead of U.S. ones in playability and accuracy for the moment. I’ll be keeping an eye on progress and report here on any major developments.

PawaPrime

From the multi-talented YouTuber emmdotfrisk comes this Pawapuro version of Deion Sanders, AKA Coach Prime.

For posterity after the Twitter embeds inevitably break some day, the image itself:

Deion Sanders in his Colorado University get-up, drawn in the Power Pros style by emmdotfrisk

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