There are quite a few details. First of all, Plug-ins. Depending on the video card, plugins vary greatly.
Running a: Geforce card.
Just about any plugin will work. If you choose glide64, make sure you get eVoodoo, which emulates glide for non Glide compatible (non 3dFX) cards. If you chose another plugin, you will have quite a variety of results. Best plugins I've seen so far? Well, Unofficial Deadalus D3D8 is excellent. Jabo's v 1.4 & 1.5 pulled from version 1.4 & 1.5 of PJ64 (pj64.net) are excellent. just copy the DLL files from the pj64 plugins folder to your 1964 plugins folder. There isn't a valid way to compare the quality of these plugins. Jabo's 1.5 is newer and implements a TON of stuff, but has higher system requirements. Glide64 is older, works really well, but it requires a glide card or evoodoo, which is more work than some want to go to. Daedalus D3D8 is excellent, and isn't as abusive to your system as the Jabo's 1.5 is (afaik). tr64's ogl plugin is very good as well. Honestly? Try all of them with your system and find out which one works best. It makes no sense to assume that the plugin that roxxors my world will do you any good.
Plugin Locations:
Daedalus D3D8:
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6928
TR64OGL v6.1
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6781
Jabo's 1.4 & 1.5:
http://www.pj64.net/
(You will need to download ver 1.4 & 1.5 to get both versions of Jabo's D3D.)
Glide64:
http://www.emuxhaven.net/~glide64/
This page also has eVooDoo, so you can get glide64 on cards other than Voodoo models.
Anything else:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/n64plugins.html
This page has links to quite a few of the plugins. Most of them are old. Use the ones above.
Audio: Azimer's are very good audio plugins. Try them, There are diff versions with 1964, available at zophar.net. .72 has the .40 beta, which works well for some people. .83 can handle Jabo's directsound, which is another excellent plugin. Sound is VERY system resource intensive at this point. Make sure to try disabling it entirely (use the no sound plugin) before you assume that your machine is too slow to emulate n64.
Plugin locations:
Most plugins come with the emu. Try
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/download/Azimer's Audio 0.30 Rev 2.2.zip
which is just what it says it is.
Jabo's Dsound 1.5 is available at
http://www.pj64.net
in the project 64 1.5 package. It's good. You may have to move msvcr70.dll to your 1964 folder to make anything jabo's 1.5 work.
Azimer's .40 beta is in 1964, you can try it, its cpu intensive though.
Input: Nrage's 1.8 is excellent, as is Jabo's 1.5. There are many others, some which work better than others, but these support the widest range of configurations.
Plugin locations:
http://members.chello.at/n-rage/dinput8/index.html
This plugin is excellent. Try it.
Jabo's DI 1.5 is available in the PJ64 package, once again at
http://www.pj64.net
It's good. very close to functionally equivilant.
http://mrdario.tripod.com/plugins/plugins.htm
This is Darkman Directinput. It's old, but decent.
There are basic keyboard plugins with 1964. It works. I hate keyboards, but they work.
NooTe's plugin is available at
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/n64plugins.html
I cannot find a homepage for NooTe.
There are others. In all honesty, these are, as far as I know, the best.
Make sure you are running DirectX 8.1, with current known good video drivers. Once you have all this, You need to know that Ogre Battle 64 is only playable with Jabo's 1.5, and the Unofficial Deadalus (read the note on
www.emulation64.com and download the file.) tr64ogl is NICE, but seems to behave oddly on some systems. Try it. It's available from the forums. I don't know if glide64 handles it correctly right now, I'm sure someone will chime in.
This is a mini-faq about just about any game, on any system, with any emulator. Try plugins in various configs first. Otherwise, you won't experience 1/2 of what you could with the current emus.
As to how to run the game? Open your Emu. Select your plugins. (Download em all, put em in the plugin folder, and run the emu. select the plugins from the config menu. You'll probably have to try a few before you get one that works.) Run the game. Get to a point where something is wrong or missing, and save it. Stop the game. Swap plugins. Restart the game. Reload the save. Once the graphics are as pretty as they are gonna get on your machine, then start swaping audio plugins until the sound is either decent or at least not choppy. After that, you determine the input plugin by whatever works best with your controller. That's it. No magic involved.
-- Karth
