'For someone like me, setting up Dolphin netplay is easy,' he said.The emulation world is forever going and one of the most searched questions is “What are the best SNES emulators?”. 'But, to get to that point, I've been using the emulator for nearly a decade. I know every little thing that I need to do and every little thing that I need to avoid. For Nintendo Switch Online, no one has to be familiar with emulation. Anyone who owns the service can invite a friend to play online.

It opens up N64 netplay to a lot more people. It's just disappointing that it's so bad at launch.' It does matter that something like this exists. On PC, multiple Nintendo 64 emulators have supported netplay for many years-heck, some of the earliest emulation software built for online play dates back to 2001. With popular emulator Project 64, for example, many players use a plugin called AQZ and game-specific hacks to get netplay working. It's not simple to set up, so Nintendo had an opportunity for an easy win-this is absolutely an area where it can improve upon fan-made emulators. And while it technically has, its implementation really just highlights how much better its emulator should be. Programmer OatmealDome, who also contributes to Dolphin, has datamined the Switch Online's emulator and learned a few things about it, including its 'lockstep' netcode that requires every player be in perfect sync at all times. Throw in a single dodgy wifi connection, and, well. Lockstep is essentially the simplest way to implement online play, and that makes it ripe for issues.

A poor internet connection might not be the only culprit: if the emulator drops below 100% speed for a single player, that would cause issues for everyone else, too.

Fighting game player Ricky Pusch does a good job in this article of breaking down the common problems with lockstep code and the benefits of rollback netcode, which has become so popular with fighting games that it's now being patched into decades-old games like King of Fighters '98.

Best n64 emulator for netplay