Pilotwings 64 For Switch Online Appears To Be Targeting A Higher Frame Rate

Wonder if other games will see a frame rate boost.

Oh lordy! One of my fave N64 games. It...it looks lovely!

@Fizza
It's potentially a bit tricky for some games because the in game clock is often tied to the frame rate. and sometimes not directly but in odd ways which can cause weird behaviour. Sometimes even a thing for suprisingly recent games at higher frame rates

Remember, these games are basically just ROMs with small patches. Some of them to "fix" would involve a LOT of tinkering. Probably a bit beyond the scope of NSO

@PLATINUM7 I think it is engine dependent. Pilot Wings was always capable of 60fps, but didn't due to hardware limitations. Seems like the Switch emulator though allows it to hit what the engine was always able to!!! So here's hopping more N64 games are setup to do it!!!

Not the type to nitpick on framerate, but 60 FPS Wave Race? Bring it on!

This kinda makes me wanna dig out my 3DS pilotwings and give the game another go.
I remember seeing it at a 3DS kiosk and going: "Whoooa."
...
And now I rarely use the 3D on my 3DS. (Mostly due to that weird double image thing with really bright colours)

Also, It's weird seeing gameexplain videos again.

Nice to see some improvements. I only ever rented this way back in the day, so it'll be cool to jump back in when it comes to NSO.

Most of the time during gameplay on real hardware it was around 30 but it was possible if you were aiming towards nothing, just the ocean horizon the game did run at 60 FPS, so it was really just a game that was not capped just that the performance was always very much pushing the engine on the N64.

This N64 emulator is genuinely not accurate at all, where pretty much every game run as if they were running on an overclocked N64, which would reach the highest framerate that the games were programmed to have, which some could support 60, some 30, some even less. If the other games did not run as well it's really just because they were never meant to run that great, and Nintendo will not improve those games, it's too much work.

In fact, this can even become a problem for games that actually expect the performance issues for timing reasons, and they actually hack certain games to introduce lag, such as Zelda Ocarina of Time for the credits where a moment runs a bit too fast, Banjo Kazooie for certain prerecorded gameplay moments, and so on.

@Fizza
It's super game dependent. Some games will have no issues, others will have the in-game time speed up, others will have minor niggles and others will just do odd things. Eg recently I learnt that GTA5 on PC stutters for a good fraction of a second when you go over 180fps

Probably Pilotwings just happens to be one of the games where there are no significant downsides to just unlocking the framerate. Which makes sense because it was an early N64 title and wasn't really pushing the hardware that much so didn't really need any fancy programming tricks. Especially compared to other games on the N64 where 15fps wasn't unheard of

Landing the glider was always a pain.

I would love more older N64 games to have higher framerates not even 60 just as long as they weren't dropping so low and were closer to 30 as I get these emulators can take up a lot of resources quickly it would certainly make going back to some games more bearable.

Wouldn't be surprised if this was due to Nintendo having to up their game because of Steam Deck emulation.

@6thHorizon lol if only that was the reason, no it's just that the N64 emulator is technically so bad that the games run better because they don't bother with N64 timings, and it's been that way from Wii U too, games also ran better on that.

if true why aren't the other N64 games on NSO at 60fps?

Nice. Although part of the reason it looks so much worse here than we remember is because we played on CRT. And the low frame rate looks more jarring on a modern TV. OLED etc. has a very fast grey-to-grey pixel response, which is sample-and-hold, accentuating low frame rate frame transitions much more harshly than CRT. Of course it still looks crisper and smoother - I'm very nostalgic for the N64 though, so love putting that cart into my N64 & playing on a Trinitron.

Hope this means Goldeneye will not crawl when playing multiplayer with rockets and mines. Not expecting 60fps, but just a smoother experience would be great

@KBuckley27 Because the game's engine purposefully didn't plan for it. Pretty much every game run at their max capped framerate that their engine was meant to support. The emulator is not going to magically come up with more frames than the game supports by itself.

By that I mean, if you overclock your N64 somehow, the games would not run any better than their capped framerate, even if they could in theory run at like 200 FPS overclocked, if the engine is meant to run at 30 FPS, then it's not gonna be higher than 30.

Nice to see GameXplain videos again. As for Pilotwings, this looks great.

@Fizza try playing Mario 64 at 60FPS, it'll get you dizzy. It seems the game was amde to be played at 30 FPS, because the way the camera moves and maybe even the graphics, won't allow for a good gameplay experience at a higher framerate.

This is awesome to see! This is the kind of stuff that I definitely wanna see get added back into the other games on the N64 NSO app

The only thing about N64 NSO that I'm annoyed with, so much, are the default controls and their insistance to put N64 A and B buttons on the A and B buttons on Switch controllers which are absolutely not good for games which were clearly meant for your thumb to rest on both buttons.
It's also very awkward to use ZL for Z but only R for R.

And no, I hate using the Switch OS controller remapping, I get constantly confused when I use the menu, it's a last resort thing.
They can legit provide ways to deal with this and they don't even need to add controller remapping.

Though I prefer to play old games the way they played originally, I'd love this as an option for all games. (Not that I'm subscribing to NSO+ before I can order a N64 controller.)

I hope more people start to appreciate this game, or at the very least, its soundtrack. The only person I've seen do remixes of PW64's music is the original composer, Dan Hess.

@TheCrabMan Body Harvest would be a dream come true. Such a great game.

Most N64 titles were capped at 30fps by the developers, Pilotwings being a rare example of where that wasn’t. If you fly out over the ocean you can actually hit 60fps in some cases.

That’s why this NSO version hits 60fps 99% of the time, from the trailer footage at least. And it bodes well for Goldeneye as that was capped at 30 I believe.

The leap will be even greater for those of us who played the 50hz PAL version back in the day!

@LuigiBlood Correct me if I'm wrong... but aren't all N64 emulators since the original, UltraHLE, inaccurate hackjobs that pull off tricks in every game to make up for/fix all their timing and other problems? My understanding is that this is a problem with N64 emulation in general, not necessarily exclusive to Nintendo's emulator, or really any single N64 emulator. From the beginning developers have chose to write N64 emulators using high-level emulation and patch games as bugs appeared, instead of writing a cycle-accurate emulator from the ground up.

It's understandable why this may have been the case in the past (these buggier emulators could run on less powerful processors of the past and it may have been more worth it to patch all the bugs to "fix" all the games), but with the powerful processors we have these days it's unfortunate that no one seems to be willing to break the trend and make an N64 emulator focused on cycle accuracy.

What we need is an NEStopia/BSNES in the world of N64 emulation!

@UltraZelda64 Each emulator does their things differently honestly these days. Most of them have timings emulated now, even if not necessarily accurate, the biggest problem tends to be the graphics emulation beyond the popular games, that said the Switch ain't going to run a cycle accurate N64 emulator ever. I've had slowdowns in N64 emulators like it could on a real N64.

That said if you want a BSNES of the N64 emulation, it already exists and was in active development by the same dev of BSNES, then taken over by other talented people to make it better... including myself. It's called Ares, which is a multi emulator which includes N64 and 64DD emulation.
Project64 is also under active development with the goal of being able to be accurate in the future, but that will take some time.

Nintendo...improved an N64 game? Didn’t think they had it in ‘em! Give that programmer a raise!

NINJA APPROVED

Never made time to really sit down and get into Pilot Wings so looking forward to it.

Unofficial emulation had this game running 60 fps for years lol

@GrailUK,

So excited for this, had the game at launch for the N64, but never gave it much playtime due to being totally engrossed by Mario 64, so glad I will now be playing the definitive version, with sharp HDMI visuals and smoother framerate on my OLED LG telly, and OLED Switch in handheld mode... life is pretty sweet.

@BloodNinja,

Totally agree, but got to give credit when it's due.

@johnvboy Agreed. I haven't played it in years, but I used to play it being in awe at what the N64 was doing. And that was with a low frame rate! (But I dunno, folk didn't moan about stuff like that back in the day. They just got on with it.)

Good sign for the 2027 re-release of Goldeneye

@GrailUK,

I got a SVHS cable for my N64, and it was a pretty decent upgrade compared to the standard composite cable, you got a more stable sharper picture, and unlike RGB, you could alter the color, very underrated console connection imho.

@Mattock1987 Landing the hang glider was harder.

@DrewBA77 I meant the hang glider, I forgot the plane was also called a glider

@TheCrabMan

Goodness me yes!

Theoretically what's stopping every N64 game from being 60fps...?

@Bizzyb The programming of those N64 games.

@LuigiBlood @Fizza @skywake I wonder if maybe they're just using interpolation to make it -appear- to run at 60fps. I believe that's how fans did it with the OoT source ports.

@Asaki I can assure you they don't, Pilotwings 64 can sometimes run at 60 FPS during gameplay on real hardware, the emulator is just so inaccurate and ignores a lot of the N64 hardware to emulate it that it just bypasses all performance issues.

Every game on N64 NSO pretty much runs at their highest framerate, sometimes even introducing lag manually to fix specific problems.

@PLATINUM7
Its not always that simple as, at least in older games, cutscenes and othere events are somehow bound to frametime meaning speeding up framerates would also cause speeding up certain animations ending up looking goofy. I guess as Pilotwings just doesn't have any cutscenes, this just wasn't an issue here.

Nice!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah baby!!!!!!!!!!!

As long as Goldeneye gets a boost too. It's such a framerate eyesore on the N64 nowadays.

All eyes on Goldeneye.. No it won't be 4K but a little sharpness and framerate help would be lovely.

@Edu23XWiiU in general i don't care for the obsession with maxing out frame rates. first off 60fps can sometimes look almost weirdly plasticky in its smoothness, i know it's because we're condition to think of 24fps as "cinematic" but still. more importantly if a game was designed and balanced to be played at a certain frame rate, it can really throw off the look, feel, and even gameplay significantly

Me too, when the game has stable framerate, it plays like butter, but, when you try to force a higher framerate on a game that wasn't designed to be played like that, it really breaks the experience.