There's a Star Fox 64 fan port on the way, and it looks incredible

While Nintendo has put the kibosh on several emulation projects like Yuzu, it’s been an incredible year for native ports of retro classics. Decompilation projects have recreated the source code of classic titles like Majora’s Mask, which now have fully native Android ports with higher framerates, widescreen support, cheats, and much, much more.

Over the weekend, the team revealed a new project on Discord, this time targeting Star Fox 64. This title really put the original Nintendo 64 hardware to the test, and considering the limitations of N64 emulators, it hasn’t been the best experience.

The new port is called Starship, and it was shown off in a live stream embedded above. It runs in a buttery smooth 60+fps, with widescreen support to give you more time to react to sneaky enemies popping in from off-screen. It also has built-in cheats for infinite bombs, infinite lives, and permanent Hyper Laser.

This is the third project from the Harbour Masters 64 team after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Unfortunately, it’s still not open to the public. Rakanai, the person playing the preview, noted that Titania is the only level that isn’t finished and multiplayer still needs some tweaking. He mentioned that it should be ready sometime in December, although in the official announcement, there’s no timeframe for release.

If it’s anything like previous projects, it will be released as a patch that you apply to an existing ROM of the game. It will extract assets from the ROM (which are protected) to create a new version of the game that runs natively in C. The initial release will likely be available for PC, Mac, and Linux, but considering it’s open-source, it should only be a matter of time before someone ports it to Android.