UltraHLE

UltraHLE is an emulator allowing games for the Nintendo 64 game console to be run on a computer. It was hailed as a massive step forward in emulation technology upon its release in 1999. Emulating the N64 (which at the time was only 3 years old), it was the first of the N64 emulators to run commercial titles at a playable frame rate on current hardware.

The emulator was revolutionary in its design. Previously, emulator programmers had concentrated on accurately emulating all of the low level operations which the target machine was capable of. It had worked well for older consoles such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, however, the N64 defied this technique. Co-authors Epsilon and RealityMan pioneered a paradigm shift in emulator programming. They realised that since N64 games were programmed in C code, that instead of intercepting machine level operations, they could concentrate on intercepting (the far fewer) C library calls, and write their own code to implement the libraries. The final implementation was written in C and used the Glide library, which has since fallen out of use due to being specific to 3dfx adapters.

High Level Emulation had its drawbacks, at the time of release, UltraHLE was only able to emulate approximately 20 games to a playable standard. However, there was a sizable community who were interested solely in the piracy of N64 games, and thus were distributing ROMs, waiting for the release of an emulator to play them on. UltraHLE filled a massive vacuum in the warez community, and thus was downloaded 300,000 times on the night it was released.

Before the release on Thursday, 28th January 1999, the emulation community had been a tight-knit circle of programmers interested in the technical aspects of emulation. UltraHLE was revolutionary, and many in the scene were genuinely impressed at the accomplishment, however, within hours of its release, much of the discussion was not about the technical accomplishment of UltraHLE, but where to find titles to run on it.

Inevitably, Nintendo found out about the piracy facilitated by UltraHLE, and threatened the authors, Epsilon and RealityMan, as well as the site hosting UltraHLE, emuunlim.com (http://www.emuunlim.com), with legal action. Despite this, UltraHLE had grown beyond either its authors' or Nintendo's control. Subsequently Epsilon and RealityMan abandoned their pseudonyms and went into hiding, making the following public statement that UltraHLE had been discontinued:

Well I guess it had to come.....

" I have done some hard thinking this evening (well morning now actually - 1:39am) and decided that my hobby is no longer of public concern. As far as I am concerned UltraHLE is dead and buried and I will be deleting the source, roms and all the documentation I have (they will be gone by the time you receive this e-mail). Also, the RealityMan nick is, as of this e-mail, terminated. No doubt some people will say that this is another smoke screen or delay but to be honest I have had enough of the back biting etc that I have receivedfrom [sic] people that do not even know me personally or who have seen my work. HLE is dead now but it set out to achieve its aim and succeeded - to prove N64 emulation was possible. I will miss many of the people I have met in the community and will stay in contact with a select few but this is it for me. I have a family and new life to consider now - time to face the real world. Jagulator will continue privately as an interest for me when things are quiet. This is the final statement I am making so if you want to post it then do so. Kindest Regards."

RealityMan

RealityMan returned to the emulation scene in mid 2003 and appeared to be rewriting UltraHLE for OpenGL support - Nothing came from it however, so it is unknown whether it was actually RealityMan or just a hoax.

External links

• ultrahle.com (http://www.ultrahle.com)
• UltraHLE site (http://www.emuunlim.com/UltraHLE)

Many of the news articles surrounding UltraHLE can be found on IGN and other commercial news sites (which therefore cannot be linked to)