Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 takes cartridges from your roms/nintendo_64 folder and plays them like any other console here.

Underneath it goes the 64DD — the magnetic disk drive that only ever shipped in Japan, and the reason the hatch in the console’s floor is there. The drive is taller than the console it carries, so the N64 stands on top of it, and a cartridge can be in the console while a disk is in the drive.

The controller, and the port in its back

New in v0.6.0: a modelled N64 controller, with the expansion port in its underside that the console’s peripherals plug into. Spawn a pak, push it into the back of the pad, and the machine is told what is in there — RetroXR sets the running core’s pak option for that port to match.

Three paks go in it, and only one fits at a time, exactly as on the hardware.

Pak	What it does
Controller Pak	32 KiB of save storage, counted in pages
Rumble Pak	Force feedback in games that support it
Transfer Pak	Takes a Game Boy cartridge, for games that read one

A pak works on a real gamepad too

The expansion port is not only on the virtual controller. If you play on a physical pad, the receiver it connects through has a port of its own — otherwise the paks would exist and the one socket that took them would be on a controller you were not holding.

The models are placeholders

The controller is modelled; the three paks currently wear placeholder shapes. They seat, work and save regardless.

Controller Pak saves

A Controller Pak is a memory card that lives in a controller, and RetroXR treats it as one: point at a seated pak and open its panel and you get the notes written on it, counted in pages the way every N64 game counts them. A pak has 123 usable pages — the first five hold the ID block, the index, its backup and the note table.

Each pak keeps its own file, named for the pak rather than for a game or a slot, so a pak carries its notes between controllers and between machines. Its saves are stored per-pak as a .mpk image.

A pak whose file has gone missing runs unbacked

Only a pak this session created will have its image file made for it. If a pak comes back from a saved room and its file is gone, it deliberately runs without backing rather than silently starting a fresh blank one.

That is on purpose: a blank pak where your notes used to be looks exactly like a wipe, and would become one the moment a game wrote to it.

Transfer Pak saves

The Transfer Pak takes a Game Boy cartridge, which is what Pokémon Stadium and friends read. Socket a Game Boy cart into the pak and the console gets both halves: the cartridge’s ROM, and its save.

The important part is that the save is the Game Boy cartridge’s own, kept exactly where that cartridge’s save is always kept. Play the cart in a Game Boy, carry it to the Transfer Pak, and it is the same save — which is what the hardware did, and the whole point of the accessory.

The Expansion Pak

The N64’s memory expansion goes in the console itself, under the lid on top, replacing the Jumper Pak that ships there. Both are in RetroXR as of v0.6.0.

Fitting the Expansion Pak sets the core option for you, so a game that wants the extra memory gets it and one that does not is unaffected. There is nothing to configure — the state of the console is the setting.

The console wears a stand-in

The Nintendo 64 has a new primitive model as of v0.6.0, but not a modelled shell.