Mupen64plus Setup Tutorial (Stand Alone not Launchbox Compatible)

[Lordmonkus]

***Boring stuff first, skip this to get to the actual guide***

I wanted to make this guide because this is an emulator no one talks about, well no one around here it seems. Project 64 as an emulator isn't bad but the devs are shady with previous releases being packaged with ad-ware and now with 2.3 using the PJ64 UI you get a stupid nag screen which according to @SIMPLY AUSTINpeople are reporting it doesn't go away after a while. Now I have been using 2.3 through Launchbox bypassing the UI and I do not see the nag screen unless I need to load it up manually to tweak some stuff. I have also noticed that while Project 64 and the Mupen64 core in Retroarch are decent enough emulators neither of them can play one of my favourite N64 titles, Beetle Adventure Racing very well. Even the Vulkan powered Retroarch Mupen core does not run this game well. The stand alone Mupen64plus does run this game extremely well and it even has some texture pack support. Anyways, enough of my rambling lets get started.

This guide is only intended for people wanting to set it up and use this emulator on it's own. This setup will not work through Launchbox. For whatever reason after I set it all up this way and setup Mupen64plus as an emulator in Launchbox and pointed it at the mupen64plus-ui-console.exe it does not load with all the tweaks made using the UI. If someone has figured it out and can tell me what I did wrong I will make the appropriate edits.

I will make a second Launchbox specific guide and it will be much shorter.

Step 1

Go to the Mupen64plus homepage http://mupen64plus.org/ or as of the time of this guide go straight to the 2.5 release page https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-core/releases/tag/2.5. You will want to get the mupen64plus-bundle-win32-2.5.zip or if you are running on lower end hardware get the dynarec version.

Step 2

Because Mupen64plus is a command line you will probably want some sort of GUI to go with it. You don't need to have this but it makes setting it up and tweaking easier. There are several available but the one I like is mupen64plus-qt which is available here http://www.emutalk.net/threads/54976-Mupen64Plus-Qt or https://github.com/dh4/mupen64plus-qt/releases get the file mupen64plus-qt_win1.9.zip or newer if at the time of reading this there is a newer version.

Step 3

Create a folder where ever you plan on keeping this emulator on your hard drive and extract the contents of both of these zip files. You should now have a bunch of files like the pic below

Step 4

Run the mupen64plus-qt.exe and the first thing you should do is go to the settings tab at the top and then configure. The first tab you will see is Paths, you can leave everything as it is if you like. But at the bottom of this tab you can set your path to your roms directory.

Step 5

Go to the Graphics tab and this is where you will turn on Fullscreen and set your Resolution. Set your resolution to match your monitors resolution to match your monitors if you want but if you use a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ration monitor the game will be stretched. If you prefer a more natural 4:3 ratio set your resolution to something like 1280x1024 on a 1080 display or 1600x1200 on a 1440 display

The rest of the tabs are all optional and up to you to learn about them all and tinker with. Click the Ok button and it will take a second to generate.

Step 7

You can now do some further custom settings by getting into the mupen64plus.cfg file which will either be located in "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Mupen64Plus". You can either edit the file with your favourite txt editor or click Settings > Edit mupen64plus.cfg in the GUI.

A couple of settings I recommend are:

Mipmapping = 3

MultiSampling = 4 (8 or 16 works too)

AnisotropicFiltering = 16

You should now have the basics up and running to use Mupen64plus in a stand alone manner.