This program is a port of a Nintendo 64 emulator called True Reality for UNIX machines.
With this program it is possible to play Nintendo 64 games on your own Power Macintosh computer, without any added hardware. You'll need to have one or more game images to play on Mac TrueReality.
At the moment several commercial games will play, and a lot of demos work great.
The emulator was ported to the MacOS by Gil Pedersen.
The Menus
File: Use this menu to load the game and quit the emulator.
Prefs: You can enable & disable several option here.
•SpeedLimit: used to enable and disable Speed Limiting. This might be needed for some demos on very fast machines.
•FPS Counter: used to enable and disable the FPS Counter. If enabled a small fps counter will be displayed in the upper left corner of the screen.
•Microcode 0-3: used to select which microcode to emulate. Different games require this to be at different settings to work correctly. Check the compatibility list.
•Eeprom on/off: used to enable and disable the eeprom savegame support. Some games require this to be on, while other require it to be off.
•Wireframe: for displaying the 3d vectors regardless of other info in a simple mode.
•Ignore All Warnings: when enabled Mac TureReality won't display any errors in the emulation, and just silently continue (if possible).
N64: This is for resuming the emulation, and resetting it.
The Controls
Mac TrueReality is using InputSprockets so the controls are completely configurable from that.
Joysticks should work fine, and the mouse works as an analogue device too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Mac TrueReality require?
Mac TrueReality requires a PPC Macintosh, with a minimum of 32 MB RAM installed.
A fast G3 is preferable, although it can run on slower computers too.
Because Mac TrueReality relies on DrawSprockets for resolution switching, you need to have DrawSprockets installed. Furthermore Mac TrueReality requires at least v1.2 of InputSprockets along with any relevant drivers.
The latest version of DrawSprockets & InputSprockets can be found at:
OpenGL from Apple does also need to be installed. You can get it from:
http://www.apple.com/opengl/
If you have a 3dfx card, and wan't to have hardware accelaration of the graphics, the you can download and install the Mesa3dfxEnabler for OpenGL available at:
http://www.mesa3d.org/mac/
If you want to use the enhanced open dialog, then you'll also need "Navigation Services" or MacOS 8.5 or later.
Lastly Mac TrueReality requires one or more game images, commonly referred to as "ROMs", in order to play anything.
Which games work?
I've tested most of the games that work with the UNIX version. Currently the following games are known to work. There should be a lot more, though:
Demo list (not up-to-date):
Pong - Perfectly playable! The speed is good too!
Firedemo - Works fine.
Rotate - Works fine.
Sinus - Works fine. You have to wait a long time to see the wavy text.
Fractal Zoomer - Works fine. Now it even displays the fractal.
SP Crap - Works fine.
Plasma Demo - Works fine.
Hi_CFB - Works fine. Uses 640*480 graphics mode.
Pause - Works fine.
77a - Displays first screen.
Lightforce Demo - Works fine.
Spice Rotate - Works fine.
RPA - Works fine.
Demo Tetris - Works perfectly.
vNES - Starts up, shows 3 images and then the emulation stops.
+ a lot more
Commercial list (partial):
Mario Kart 64 - Uses Microcode 1 -Emulationwise this game seems almost perfect. You can play the game itself, and the graphics are mostly positioned right. The only problem is the textures.
Super Mario 64 - Uses Microcode 0 -Works great!!! Some texturing/color problems though.
Madden 64 - For some reason this game doesn't seem to work at the moment.
Extreme G - For some reason this game doesn't seem to work at the moment.
Of games that displays intros I can mention (they might display more than the intro actually):
Mystical Ninja
Turok
Clayfighter 63 1/3
Bettle Adventure Racing
Bust A Move 2
Mortal Kombat Mythologies
Mortal Kombat Trilogy
Micro Machines Turbo 64
+ several games that display more or less interesting stuff
On a final note the following games don't work:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Golden Eye 007
If you find any other games that work with Mac TrueReality, then please mail me about it.
Where can I get the games?
There are several places where you can get legitimate demo game roms to test on Mac TrueReality. A couple of sites, which carry demo roms:
http://www.blackbag.org/
http://www.dextrose.com/
Don't mail me asking where to get commercial N64 ROMs.
If you own a Nintendo 64 along with a backup unit, you can transfer your games to the computer and test them on Mac TrueReality. Or if you own the game, you can download it of the Internet.
Is there any way to make the games take up less space?
Nintendo 64 games vary in size from 1.2 MB to 32 MB. Therefore I have implemented gzip support in Mac TrueReality, which means that you can compress you games with a gzip compression utility as Easy-Gz. This can shrink the size of the games down to about 60 KB, if it's one of the small demo games.
Why is it showing a black/garbled screen?
This emulator is still not complete, and a lot of games still won't run on it. It is possible that you simply have to wait for the graphics to show up, as the emulation is very slow even on high-end machines. If it shows stuff, but the colours are incorrect, then it most likely because textures aren't implemented correctly yet.
Alternatively you can try to change the microcode emulation to a different number.
Note: Because the graphics doesn't look right doesn't mean that there is something wrong with your computer. 3D graphics are still in the progress of being implemented, and often don't look right.
Why did it suddenly stop and pop up a dialog?
This happens when Mac TrueReality encounters an un-emulated instruction. This means that the game isn't emulated propperly yet. You now have the option to ignore this, and continue the emulation, as though nothing had happened. If you don't care to see this dialog again, then just press the ignore all button.
Note: A lot of games still work even though errors appear. All commercial games displays errors at the moment.
Mac TrueReality gives me out of memory errors?
This is because the game you have selected is to large to copy into the available memory. Either load another smaller game or make sure that there is 24 MB of free memory before launching Mac TrueReality. If the game is larger than 144 MBit (for example Zelda 64), then you'll have to increase the amount of memory allocated to Mac TrueReality.
Be carefull not to give Mac TrueRelality too much memory. There should be at least 4 MB available to the system when you open Mac TrueReality. Otherwise Mac TrueReality will quit immediately, without warning.
Mac TrueReality won't open. What is wrong?
Mac TrueReality now uses OpenGL. OpenGL requires there to be at least 4 MB of free system memory to function. OpenGL is inited at startup, and if there isn't the neccesary memory available it won't start up, and Mac TrueReality will quit. At the moment there's no error dialog explaining this.
If you experience this kind of problem, then you can try to quit any unneccesary open programs to free up memory, or reduce the memory allocation for Mac TrueReality. If you reduce the memory allocation, then some of the bigger games might not open, because they need a lot of memory.
The games play really slow, like 2-3 fps. Is this normal?
Yes, speeds of around 2-3 fps is not unnormal. Unless you have a Blue & White G3 or a fast iMac (at least rev. B) then it is perfectly normal. In future versions the speed will hopefully improve.
Version History
• 27.07.99
- A major bug in the last release is now fixed. The bug caused all 3D graphics to not get displayed on many machines.
- Slight graphics improvement. The text should now be easier to read in Mario 64.
- Enhanced Open Dialog(Navigation Services Only). Now it only displays N64 games.
- Slight speed increase due to a cpu emulator optimisation and the fact that Mac TrueReality is now compiled with CodeWarrior 5.
- Improved savegame handling. Now only games that use the eeprom saves the data.
- (Miklós Fazekas) Added support for Mesa3dfxEngine.
- (Gabrielle Harrison) Added an option to never display error warnings(default).
• 05.07.99
- It seems that there was several serious bugs in the last release, and I've fixed at least some of them, so that Mac TrueReality will be more stable.
- The graphics have been improved quite a bit in this new release, especially in Super Mario 64, where the graphics are now almost perfect (well good enough to be playable, except the non-transparent water).
- "Bomberman Hero" should work now, although there are graphics bugs.
- "Mario Kart 64" really works now. I had introduced a bug that made it not work, just before release and I didn't notice untill it was too late.
- Added support for saving the eeprom. This allows for "Super Mario 64" and other games to load & save games. The data is saved in a file called "romname.epp" where romname is the name of the game. Currently all games will create an "*.eep" file, although they don't use the eeprom. It even works with savegames dumped with copiers or downloaded from the Internet. You just have to give the file the right name. If the size of the save is over 1K (1024 bytes) it won't work yet.
- Now all that is needed for "Super Mario 64" to be truly playable is speed!
• 01.07.99
- It has been a long time since the last version of Mac TrueReality was released, but I hope it was worth the wait. Finally commercial Nintendo 64 games can be played on MacOS computers.
At the moment several commercial games are known to be playable, but in a lot of other games you can get pretty far before the emulation stops for one reason or another.
Not only commercial games work, but a lot of new demos work too. You can check the compatibility list to see the status of some of the tested games.
- A new "Prefs" menu with several options has been added. The preferences doesn't get saved yet.
- A Microcode selector is now available in the "Prefs" menu. This is for choosing which version of the N64 microcode that should be emulated with High Level Emulation (HLE).
Most demos/demogames work with the "Microcode 0". Most commercial games need the "Microcode 1", except "Mario 64" which uses "Microcode 0" and Wave Race 64(US) which uses "Microcode 2". You can change the microcode while the game is running, and all that it effects is the display of 3D graphics.
- Another new option is the "Eeprom on/off". At the moment this doesn't do much, but some games might require it to be either on or off. The eeprom is used for saving information, but as Mac TrueRelaity doesn' save this information to the Harddisk, then there is not much point in this.
- Framerate display has been added, although at the moment it isn't calculated correctly. Instead it's more of a display of how fast the emulation is.
- A speed limiter has been added, as a few demos actaully run too fast on my computer. There should be more use for it once Mac TrueReality has a dynamic recompilation cpu core.
- An option to continue the emulation, even after an unemulated instruction has occured, has been added. A dialog will pop up when such an instruction occurs. Simply press ignore if you want to continue. This is required for most commercial games to work at the moment, and often makes the games display something more.
- As you might have noticed Mac TrueReality has got a new set of icons, which has been made by JC Capp. Nice stuff!
- Instead of RAVE support, there is now support for OpenGL. All the 3D graphics are rendered using OpenGL. Textures aren't implemented properly yet, so some things might look weird.
You will need to have OpenGL from Apple installed on your computer in order to play Mac TrueReality. I'll add MesaGL support too in a future version, so that 3dfx users can get hardware acceleration of 3D graphics too.
- Ernesto Corvi has worked on adding audio support to Mac TrueReality, and he did a good job. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the MetroWerks compiler, which will make the computer crash when Audio emulation is enabled. Therefore it isn't enabled untill a fix has been found.
• 17.03.99
- It been quite a while since the last update, and I wish that I could tell you that Mac TrueReality had progressed more than it actually has.
- Work has now been begun on adding RDP support, which is what we need for 3D graphics. So far only a couple of 2D instructions are partially implemented. Only one demo is known to display new graphics. It is the Tetris demo.
- Changed the way the mouse works in the games. This seems to be better in pong at least.
- RAVE support is not ready to be included yet. It will have to wait for the next release.
- I suppose some new demos are working now. I don't know which, though.
• 07.01.99
- RSP/RCP emulation has progressed, but there stills needs to be emulated more instructions for games to work.
- Basic sound emulation has been added to the unix port, but I haven't implemented it into the MacOS port yet. I'll possibly add it to the next version.
- Really fixed that Firedemo bug. I didn't test the last version of Mac TrueReality before releasing it and afterwards I discovered that Firedemo wasn't working properly as I had promised. Turned out to be a compiler bug, when a certain optimization was enabled.
• 13.12.98
- Switched over to using InputSprockets for input, as otherwise it would be impossible to have 2-player support, where both players could use an analog device, such as a mouse or joystick. This means that Mac TrueReality now requires InputSprockets.
- Removed the dependensy of Appearance Manager, which means that Mac TrueReality doesn't need Apple's Appearance Manager to run.
- Speed has increased dramatically in Pong, and maybe other games too.
- Fixed the bug, that caused Firedemo not to work. This bug actually affected other games too. This means that Mac TrueReality can now run more demos, and that soon commercial games might start working!
- Work on RSP/RCP emulation has begun, which is essential for making commercial games run.
- Sound emulation is also progressing, although I don't think that Mac TrueReality can run any game, which plays sound. I haven't worked on adding it to the MacOS port of TrueReality yet.
- As more of the cpu is emulated more demo's are now working.
- Added a pause function. This will pause the emulator completely, and as it is right now, you have to unpause the game before you can press escape, and return to the regular interface.
- Added a screenshot function, which will save the current screen image onto a file.
- More stuff that I can't remember.
• 21.10.98
- Updated the emulator with the new 1998211001 Linux sources. This means that the colours should now be correct.
- There has also been added improved controller support, which means that you'll now be able to actually play pong! See control section for more info. I'll add more keys as needed.
- A preference menu has been added, which allows you to select whether you are going to use the mouse/joystick for analog movement, or the keyboard. This preference won't be saved yet.
• 07.09.98
- Initial release.
Contact Information
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or bugs you want to report then please feel free to contact me.
Gil Pedersen
Email: gil@mailme.dk
ICQ: 13683696
Mac TrueReality homepage:
http://mtr.dht.dk/
or
http://www.emuhq.com/truereality/macos/
Original True Reality homepage:
http://www.emuhq.com/truereality/
Thanks
A special thanks goes to JC Capp who has given Mac TrueReality a set of new icons.
I'd like to thank Ernesto Corvi too, who have made Mac TrueReality support audio output in demo games.
Thanks also goes to Richard Bannister<titan@indigo.ie>, who made me begin porting TrueReality and for helping me along the way. And a thanks goes to Ben Mackin<Kupan787@aol.com>.
I'd also like to thank Niki Waibel, the creator of the original TrueReality for UNIX, without who's work on emulating a Nintendo 64, there would not have been any Nintendo 64 emulator for the MacOS.
Also thanks to all the beta testers, who have tested my different versions of Mac TrueReality.
