UltraHLE is a discontinued
emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use peri ...
for the
Nintendo 64.
Emulating the
Nintendo 64 (which was only 3 years old at the time) made it the first of the
N64 emulators to run commercial titles at a playable
frame rate on the hardware of the time,
and the first emulator for a currently-sold console system, which drew Nintendo to seek legal action against the developers.
The Ultra High-level (UHLE) technique
Earlier emulators had sought to accurately emulate all low-level operations of a target machine; this worked well for consoles such as the
Super NES and
Genesis
Genesis may refer to:
Bible
* Book of Genesis, the first book of the biblical scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, describing the creation of the Earth and of mankind
* Genesis creation narrative, the first several chapters of the Book of ...
that were substantially simpler than the computer running the emulator.
HLE was done even before the UltraHLE emulator (to emulate the BIOS, and the SNES enhancement chips). But UltraHLE introduced aggressive optimization and time-savers which go beyond traditional HLE.
Co-authors Epsilon and RealityMan realized that since N64 games were programmed in
C, they could intercept (the far fewer) C library calls rather than machine-level operations, and simply reimplement the libraries. Thus UltraHLE is an emulator that is partly implemented as a
simulator, in contrast to projects such as
MAME
MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve ...
. However it paved the way for playable emulators of recent consoles that require considerable graphical computational power which could be simulated easily with available PC graphic cards.
The final implementation was written in C and used the
Glide API
Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their ''Voodoo Graphics'' 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to rendering performance, sup ...
, specific to
3dfx
3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the l ...
adapters. Due to the emulator's popularity, several Glide to
DirectX translation utilities were made specifically for UltraHLE for non-3dfx video cards.
UltraHLE's high-level emulation had its drawbacks; at the time of its release it was able to emulate only approximately 20 games to a playable standard
as it emulated and simulated only those calls required by those specific games; it was necessary to adapt the emulator for games that used different parts of the N64 hardware. Nevertheless it supported many more titles than other contemporaneous N64 emulation projects such as
Project Unreality.
The technique was taken over by the
Cxbx-Reloaded emulator, which emulates the
Microsoft Xbox
Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the ...
, uses HLE to reimplement the Video, and audio DSP.
Emulators other than UltraHLE eventually adopted variants of high-level emulation as well. For example, the
Dolphin emulator, which emulates the
Nintendo GameCube
The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wi ...
and
Wii
The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, ...
, uses HLE to reimplement the Wii's IOS operating system, and it also has an option for HLE of the GameCube's audio
DSP.
Nintendo's response and UltraHLE's discontinuation
Also notable for its time, UltraHLE was capable of playing commercial games while the console was still commercially viable, a feat which was ultimately noticed by
Nintendo. In February 1999, Nintendo began the process of filing a lawsuit against the emulator's authors, along with the website hosting the emulator.
Speaking to ''
PC Zone'', Nintendo representative Beth Llewellwyn commented: "Nintendo is very disturbed that RealityMan and Epsilon have widely distributed a product designed solely to play infringing copies of copyrighted works developed by Nintendo and its third-party licensees. We are taking measures to further protect and enforce our intellectual property rights which, of course, includes the bringing of legal action."
Despite this, UltraHLE had grown beyond either its authors' or Nintendo's control. Subsequently, Epsilon and RealityMan abandoned their pseudonyms and went
silent.
After the source code was leaked in 2002, an
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
version of UltraHLE called UltraHLE 2064 was released, though it garnered little acclaim, as several more powerful emulators had subsequently been released. UltraHLE 2064 was available at its official site until the site was de-registered.
See also
*
List of video game emulators
The following is a list of notable video game console emulators.
Arcade
* Visual Pinball
Atari
; Atari 2600
* Stella
Nintendo
Home consoles
; Nintendo Entertainment System
* FCEUX
* NESticle
* Nestopia
; Super NES
* Snes9x
* ZSNES
; ...
References
External links
UltraHLE Resources on Zophar's Domain
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ultrahle
Nintendo 64 emulators
Windows emulation software
Proprietary video game console emulators