TL;DR
- The Nintendo 64 classic Star Fox 64 has been decompiled and ported to PC.
- The project, called Starship, supports widescreen output, up to 360fps, enhanced graphics, cheats, and more.
- This is the third project from Harbour Masters 64, after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.
A native port of Star Fox 64 has just dropped on PC, just in time for the holidays. Harbour Masters 64, the team behind other native N64 ports for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, have decompiled the original source code to push the classic title beyond the constraints of N64 hardware.
Called Starship, it takes just a few minutes to set up. All you need is a ROM of the original game (from your own physical collection, of course) that matches the hash for the 1.1 US release. Then, download the latest assets from the GitHub page, put the ROM in the same directory, run the executable, and you’re good to go.
Starship supports 2x upscaling, widescreen output, cheats, and more.
The result has several enhancements over the N64 version, including upscaled graphics (up to 2x), widescreen output support, up to 360fps, cheats, and more.
I found the default controls to be pretty bad, but you can remap everything to a controller in the settings for a better experience. Regardless, it runs far better than Nintendo 64 emulators since the console’s unique hardware makes it difficult to emulate. Although to be fair, the game ran pretty poorly on original hardware, too.
For now, there is no native Android version of Starship, but if it’s anything like the team’s previous efforts, it’s just a matter of time. The Majora’s Mask port, which launched earlier this year, is fully playable on Android and works like a dream. This is also just the initial public release, so expect further improvements in the coming months.