Harbor Masters, the team responsible for the excellent PC ports of N64 classics such as Ocarina of Time AND Majora’s Maskhave returned with an amazing adaptation of Star Fox 64. While the classic arcade flight sim game has been playable outside of its native hardware for some time, the up-to-date port, called Starship, brings a number of improvements to the original, including support for ultra-wide resolution, unlocked frame rates , and even rumble support for contemporary Bluetooth controllers.
Nintendo has developed a reputation for being a bit touchy when it comes to emulating its hardware or using original code from ROMs, but Harbor Masters has developed a workaround by converting the original ROMs into PC executable code, which technically doesn’t utilize any of Nintendo’s proprietary code assets.
In addition to making the game easier to understand for PCs and enabling better performance, porting the original code also creates modding opportunities, which opens up a world of potential for up-to-date resources and community creations.
If you want to try running this port yourself, the Harbor Masters crew has fortunately made the process effortless.
First you need to download and unzip the Starship emulator GitHub. You then need to LEGALLY acquire a copy of the Starfox 64 ROM, specifically version 1.1 (Rev A), which must utilize the z64 file format. If your ROM uses the .n64 format, you can convert it with this online tool. Once you have the correct ROM, you can drop it in the same folder as the Starship emulator and run the generate_otr application, which will extract the necessary files. Once this is done, you can launch the Starship app and press F1 to configure your controller and graphics settings. If the app crashes, try installing the latest C++ redistribution and start over.
