Project64 and Beetle Adventure Racing

It’s 1999, my old broken down Super Beetle is sitting in the driveway, probably waiting on another rebuilt part for its underpowered engine, and Volkswagen wants me to know that it’s about to release brand new Beetles, and I could get one.

If I were rich, maybe. I had a Nintendo64 and enough cash to buy Beetle Adventure Racing. The kids and I spent many days racing pixel Beetles around. I never did get a new Beetle. By the time my financial picture improved, I could afford a VW GTI.

I’ve been playing a lot of old games on emulators lately. PlayStation, PlayStation 2, SNES and Sega Saturn games, I’ve played them all via emulator.

I had a weird nostalgic urge to go back to Beetle Adventure Racing after all this time. I still have the cartridge; it’s in a box downstairs, along with my old Nintendo 64. I doubt I’d even know how to hook one of those old systems up to modern displays these days, and I for sure don’t have the space here to load up all the old systems. (I know for certain that there are probably lots of people out there who have a cool setup with instant access to every classic game console, but those people are not me).

Was there a Nintendo 64 emulator? There was! Was it decent? It is!

Project 64 is probably the best emulator out of all I’ve tried. It supports the rumble and mem paks (though not the transfer pak). It has upscaling for some of the 3D texture in the games, and can use various tricks to try and get the 2D elements to look better. Even complex scenes lock the frame rate at a smooth 60FPS. Contrast the resolution of the 3D vs the 2D textures in the screenshot.

Set up is fairly simple. It took a little bit of experimentation to get my XBox controller to work with the emulator. It also took some twiddling to dial in the graphics. Totally worth it.

Assuming you have your legitimately obtained rips of your entirely owned original Nintendo 64 carts, this emulator will bring you right back to the turn of the century.