The Nintendo 64 is about to receive its first commercially available emulation hardware, as confirmed by the maker of Polymega Playmaji for Nintendo’s life that it will soon add the Nintendo 64 to its list of supported systems.
Price and release date details were not disclosed, although Playmaji sells similar mods covering Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16 consoles for $ 80 each. The Polymega base unit supports a handful of disc systems, including the original PlayStation and Sega Saturn.
While Playmaji has expressed interest in adding support for a number of other platforms, CEO and co-founder Bryan Bernal told the site he chose to prioritize Nintendo 64 due to customer demand.
“There are hardly any other options to legally play the N64 library, other than the original hardware – so it’s an obvious choice for us,†Bernal said.
Nintendo recently released its own N64 emulation offering as part of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack service, but this has been criticized for the quality of its emulation and its unsupported features.
Bernal said that at least 90% of N64 games will perform “very well to near perfect” on Polymega when the add-on launches, with that number increasing “probably” with system updates.
Bernal said the company is planning more add-ons, some of which “aren’t directly related to game consoles (like NES, SNES, etc.) but improve the gaming experience on Polymega.”
Additionally, Bernal said that Playmaji is “quite advanced” in its plans to open a digital store on the system to sell downloadable copies of games for the supported platforms, and has set up a development operation. and internal publication to produce original content exclusive to the system.
