Star Fox 64 has a fan-made PC port and it’s great

Harbour Masters, the team responsible for the excellent PC ports of N64 classics like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, have returned with an awesome adaptation of Star Fox 64. While the classic arcade flight-sim game has been playable outside of its native hardware for some time, the new port, dubbed Starship, brings a number of enhancements to the original, including support for ultrawide resolutions, unlocked frame rates, and even rumble support for modern Bluetooth controllers.

Nintendo has developed a reputation for being a bit touchy when it comes to emulating its hardware or using original code from its ROMs, but Harbour Masters has developed a workaround by converting original ROMs into PC executable code, which technically doesn’t use any proprietary Nintendo assets.

In addition to making the game more easily digestible for PCs and enabling better performance, porting the original code over also presents the possibility for modding, which opens up a world of potential for new community assets and creations.

If you’d like to try and get this port running on your own, the crew at Harbor Masters have thankfully made the process relatively simple.

First, you’ll need to download and extract the Starship emulator from Github. Next, you’ll need to LEGALLY procure a copy of the ROM for Starfox 64, specifically the v 1.1 (Rev A), which needs to use the z64 file format. If your ROM uses the .n64 format, you can convert it using 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. After that’s done, you can run the Starship application and press F1 to configure your controller and graphics settings. If the application crashes, try installing the latest C++ redistributable and start over.