Despite its 1996 release, the Nintendo 64's original hardware and games have both remained relatively hot-button in enthusiast circles here into 2024. Now, the next frontier of high-end N64 gameplay may be through recompiled PC ports instead of emulation, courtesy of Mr-Wiseguy on GitHub. Wiseguy is responsible for the release of both N64Recomp and Zelda64Recomp, a project that ports The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask to PC with N64Recomp's graphical and QoL improvements, as screenshotted above and highlighted by YouTuber Nerrel below.
So, what makes crazy graphical improvements like real ray-tracing, uncapped FPS, and proper ultrawide support possible for N64 games? If you've been in the Nintendo 64 enthusiast scene for a long time, you may recall the waves made when a completely decompiled Super Mario 64 PC Port dropped in 2020 and allowed for features like real ray-tracing, full model replacements, and so on. It still gets mods to this day.
Recompiled ports aren't quite the same as decompiled ports like the SM64 PC port in this context, but both will run natively on PC and thus be able to truly maximize performance and effect accuracy to the original hardware while still providing the PC-expected enhancements that come with emulation. N64Recomp is basically the best of both worlds, and since manually decompiling N64 games takes years of labor from one or more people, a tool to more efficiently recompile them into a quickly playable-on-PC state is a godsend for preservationists everywhere.
A tool like this also ensures that old classics that aren't currently receiving the attention of big mainstream hits remain playable well into the future in an ideal state. A Twitter post by Dario, who makes the RT64 plugin leveraged by N64Recomp and some N64 emulators, highlights this.
Even as we speak, advancements like this aren't the only huge boons we're seeing for fans of the Nintendo 64's library or even original hardware. The open-source SummerCart64 recently dropped and is basically the definitive flash cart for the old console since it also implements full 64DD support. Several real hardware-compatible homebrew N64 games and ROM hacks also keep releasing, including highlights like the 30-fighter Smash Remix and Mario 64 engine rewrite, Peach's Fury.