ares VS libdragon

ares, takes 2 minutes to compile if it isn't in the app center, or whatever.

ares

There's great retro console games you probably missed out. You might want to learn how to use an multi-emulator like Ares however I must warn you in advance, emulation is a legal gray zone, and a licencing hell.

Ares is a multi system emulator which you can use on Mac, it has support for Nintendo 64 games!

ares is another option to explore if you're unaware of it - [https://ares-emu.net]

Try ares: https://ares-emu.net/

that one is old and missing aarch64. here's the latest https://github.com/ares-emulator/ares/tree/master/libco

ares is a very accurate N64 emulator (similar to simple64) that has built-in shader support including at least 2 different CRT filters

Per the Portal 64 creator, the library in question was libultra,[1] which is owned and was distributed exclusively by Nintendo but has been extensively pirated.

There are open source alternatives, including libdragon[2] and libn64[3]. Not sure how feasible replacing libultra with either of those would be considering the scale of the project.

1: https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Libultra

2: https://libdragon.dev/, https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon

3: https://github.com/mikeryan/n64dev/

To do 2D on N64, I suggest you to use the libdragon unstable branch https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/wiki/Unstable-branch

I was thinking of doing this for Wii (via GRRLIB), or potentially N64 (via libdragon), but Godot would probably be too resource heavy for the N64, so I'm leaning more towards the Wii.

And an open source sdk at https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon libdragon is well on its way to surpassing Nintendo's libultra, but the discord has people knowledgeable about both.

It is pretty much understood in most aspects that pertain regular software development, though there are still corners that are investigated.

The most accurate and fast emulator right now is Ares (https://ares-emu.net), which bundles the Vulkan-accelerated RDP emulation with a recompiler for both CPU and RSP. It is extremely accurate in many regards and in general much closer to the real hardware than any other emulators (with cen64 being a close second). Other emulators manage to run most of the game library but using several hacks, while Ares keeps a zero-hack approach, so not everything works, but it is for instance far more compatible with advanced home-brew stuff which use the hardware in ways that the Nintendo SDK did not.

The most advanced open source library for N64 development is libdragon (https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon) which is currently growing very advanced RSP ucodes that do things that are not possible with Nintendo SDK. For instance, it was recently merged a command list support to send commands from CPU to RSP without any lock in the happy path, and fully concurrent access from both the processors. Another example would be its DMA support for fetching data from ROM that exploits undocumented partially-broken features of the RCP that were previously unknown to allow for misaligned memory transfers.

The most accurate source of hardware documentation is the n64brew wiki, which is slowly gathering accurate, hardware-tested information on how the whole console works. https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Main_Page. Unfortunately, it's still lacking in many areas (eg: RSP). It's a painstaking long work because there are many many documents floating around with partial or completely wrong information.

Well...it would be the engine that you write for it, likely using libdragon or something similar as the SDK.

libdragon is what you are looking for: https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon