Analogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64

https://sopuli.xyz/post/4744576

Analogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64 - Sopuli

4K output alone doesn’t provide much (if any) benefit. The article (and I assume the company as well) says nothing more. For this to mean anything, they need to talk about the console doing something to internally render at a higher resolution or talk about what upscaling techniques it will use to go from whatever internal resolution the N64 runs at (480?) to 4K.

Putting 4K in the title seems clickbaity, considering there is “no there there”.

It’ll almost certainly render internally at a higher resolution. The Analogue team’s past projects have been pretty technically advanced, their Super NT (SNES) does 1080p for comparison.

I may have used the wrong term. When I talk about internal resolution vs upscalers, I’m trying to differentiate between what resolution the games are initially rendered at by the “console” vs post processing what comes out of the console and upscaling there. From what I understand, many PS1 emulators are able to actually render polygons in game at higher resolutions so that you get crisp 3d graphics. I think N64 emulators can do the same (but I’ve never really dug in to those).

Thinking more, since this is not an emulator, it seems unlikely that it could increase the render resolution (but we can hope). That just leaves upscalers to increase output resolution. This is what the Super NT does - which makes sense for sprite-based games/systems anyway.

Yeah the games are still going to be using their original graphics, etc, so you’ll have Mario 64’s Mario’s like 1000 polygons… in glorious 4k resolution.

It will look higher fidelity but it’s not gonna be a modern looking game or anything. There are some other disadvantages of using a modern system like this, but tbh unless you have a full 1990s rig (CRT and all) it’s gonna look different.

They’ll probably have a more faithful reproduction mode, too.