Based on recent interest in the N64 hard-drive thread, I thought I'd take some time to provide educational resources to the community about emulation and other game-related tools.
Note: Check my top-level replies in this thread as I ran out of space
[Informational Resources]
[Emulation]
Emulation is process of re-implementing the functionality of something (hardware and/or software) in a separate software environment. You're probably most most familiar in the term as it relates to game system emulation (like the Dolphin Wii and Gamecube emulator).
While emulation does cover physical systems, it can also cover things that strictly exist as software (for example, the recent server emulator created for Genshin Impact). If you've ever played on WoW or any other MMO private servers, the actual underlying software that was being run was likely a server emulator (or in rare cases the actual server software itself may have leaked). These server emulators are created by analyzing the network information exchange (packets) sent from the game client to the server and those received by the game from the game server. A painstaking and brutal process of analyzing these packets allows server reverse-engineering projects to then re-implement the functionality of the official servers and then we can point the game client towards our reverse-engineered private server (that speaks the exact same "language" as the official servers). This then allows the private servers to provide additional/changed functionality (for example, more exp per quest) which is a much more customizable experience.
It can also be used to re-implement vendor solutions like the Steam API which provides various utilities like DRM (which the emulator could choose to ignore). A great example of an emulator in this regard is the Goldberg Emulator.
Let's say you've acquired (through legal purchase only of course) the clean steam files for a game and want to run it offline. Normally you wouldn't be able to because the steamworks DRM check wouldn't be able to authenticate against the official steam servers. If we instead replace the steam_api.dll (this could also be named steam_api64.dll depending on the game) with the one provided by the Goldberg Emulator, when the game makes the check for the steamworks drm status, the Goldberg Emulator's implementation of steam_api.dll will simply return true and let us play our game offline. The game itself just knows that it asked for a DRM verification check to a service, and the Goldberg variant of steam_api.dll looks (to the game) exactly like the "real" version, except that it always returns that the steamworks DRM has been verified.
Refer to the readme within the Goldberg project for more information about what to do with specific games. Also take note that this only works with games that only use steamworks drm (most of them) and games using other/multiple DRM solutions won't work with this method for offline play.
[Emulators]
All of the emulators listed below are my personal per-console pick. Each is at least in the recommended section of a great general emulation resource, the Emulation Wiki
Game Platform | Emulator Name | Emulation Platform | Comments
Nintendo Consoles
NES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac
SNES | Ares | Windows/Linux/Mac
SNES | bsnes-hd | Windows/Linux/Mac | Widescreen modifications for some SNES games
N64 | Simple64 | Windows/Linux | N64 emulation has a lot of viable candidate emulators, check the page here
GC | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac
Wii | Dolphin | Windows/Linux/Mac
Wii U | Cemu | Windows/Linux
Switch | Ryujinx | Windows/Linux/Mac | Has a free multiplayer-enabled build called LDN 2.4 on Patreon
Switch | Yuzu | PC/Linux | Less accurate emulation than Ryujinx but generally more performant
Nintendo Handhelds
GB/C | mGBA | PC/Linux/Mac
GBA | mGBA | PC/Linux/Mac
DS | MelonDS | PC/Linux/Mac
3DS | Citra | PC/Linux/Mac/Android
Sony Consoles
Playstation | DuckStation | PC/Linux/Mac
Playstation 2 | PCSX2 | PC/Linux/Mac
Playstation 3 | RPCS3 | PC/Linux/Mac
Sony Handhelds
PSP | PPSSPP | PC/Linux/Mac
PSVita | Vita3K | PC/Linux/Mac
[Graphics Packs]
A lot of emulators have texture replacement capabilities built into them. What this means is that users can manually and/or AI upscale textures from the game into higher resolution or outright replace them with other textures. There aren't currently (that I'm aware of) area that have consolidated links to these things, so you'll unfortunately have to search individual project forums and look for texture or graphic packs links.
Some known graphics packs repositories:
[Graphics Post-Processing]
With a utility called ReShade we're able to inject various post-processing effects into the final stage of the graphic rendering pipelines of games. This allows you to adjust color curves, inject path-traced global illumination (a method like ray-tracing), and add a bunch of other effects to DirectX9/11/12/Vulkan games.
[Graphics API Translation Layers]
Sometimes there are scenarios where a game may only use DirectX to draw it's rendered graphics to screen and we may not want this. This could be for performance reasons (maybe the Vulkan graphics api has better performance, maybe DirectX isn't available on our OS, or maybe the DirectX version is really old and not properly supported by our OS/GPU/Driver combination). In these instances we can use translations layers to translate DirectX graphics api calls into Vulkan calls using utilities like DXVK . Explaining which files to copy over depends on a per-DirectX version basis, so you'll have to use a combination of the PCGamingWiki and DXVK documentation to figure out which files to replace.
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