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N64 HDMI Mod Guide: PicoCart64 and RGB Bypass Install Walkthrough

May 20, 2026 • 24 min read
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There’s a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for anyone who’s dug their Nintendo 64 out of the loft, plugged it into a 65-inch OLED, and watched GoldenEye 007 appear as a smeared, juddering ghost of itself. The console that defined a generation — that gave us Super Mario 64 in December 1996, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, and the entire vocabulary of 3D platforming — looks, to put it bluntly, dreadful on modern televisions. The composite signal Nintendo shipped in every PAL box was already a compromise on CRTs. Pumped through an upscaler designed for 1080p sources and rendered on a panel with millions of pixels, it’s borderline unwatchable.

The good news is that we are, finally, living in something of a golden age for N64 video output. The console’s notoriously awkward video DAC — the chip Nintendo deliberately neutered late in development to save pennies, removing the analogue RGB support that other consoles in the family enjoyed — has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the homebrew community. Between FPGA-based HDMI mods, proper RGB bypass boards, and modern flash carts like the PicoCart64, you can now wring a genuinely pristine digital image out of a 1996 console without ever touching the original A/V multi-out.

This guide will walk you through the entire process: choosing the right hardware for your console revision, performing the RGB bypass, fitting an FPGA HDMI board, and pairing the whole rig with a PicoCart64 to play your library at its absolute best. It’s not a trivial job — there’s soldering, there’s shielding to remove, and there’s a non-zero chance of bricking a console if you rush — but the end result is something genuinely special. Let’s get into it.

Why Bother? Understanding the N64’s Video Output Problem

Before we pick up a soldering iron, it’s worth understanding precisely why the N64 looks the way it does, because the solution depends entirely on the problem. The N64’s video pipeline is a curious beast. Internally, the console’s Reality Co-Processor (RCP) — designed by SGI and clocked at 62.5MHz — outputs a digital video signal to a separate VDC-NUS video DAC. On the NTSC consoles produced before mid-1997, this DAC could, theoretically, output analogue RGB. On every PAL console ever made, and every NTSC console after a certain revision, Nintendo populated the board with the VDC-NUS-A variant, which strips out the RGB capability entirely.

What you’re left with at the multi-out is composite, S-Video, and (on properly-equipped consoles) component-style luma/chroma. None of it is good. The N64’s anti-aliasing, its bilinear texture filtering, and its aggressive use of the VI (Video Interface) blur filter were all designed to be smeared together on a CRT. Strip away the CRT, and you get jagged edges, dithering artefacts that should have been blended away, and colour bleed that looks like a watercolour painting left out in the rain.

The Three Routes to a Decent Picture

The community has settled on three broad approaches to fixing this. The first is the external scaler route — a RetroTINK 5X-Pro (£295) or an OSSC Pro (£280) plugged into S-Video output. This works, sort of, but you’re still scaling a fundamentally analogue, noisy signal. The N64 is notoriously the worst of the major retro consoles for external scalers, because there’s so little signal to work with.

The second is the RGB mod route. Historically this meant installing a Tim Worthington THS7374-based board, which tapped the digital signal from the RCP, ran it through a DAC, and gave you analogue RGB out of the multi-out. Combined with an external scaler, this is a huge step up — but you’re still doing a digital-to-analogue-to-digital conversion, which is daft when the original signal was digital to begin with.

The third route, and the one this guide focuses on, is the FPGA HDMI mod. Here, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) board taps the N64’s digital video signal directly from the RCP, before it ever reaches the analogue DAC, and outputs pure digital HDMI. There’s no analogue stage at all. The result is, quite literally, the cleanest possible image the N64 can produce — pixel-perfect, lag-free, and with optional scanline emulation and de-blur filters that let you tailor the look to taste.

The Hardware: What You Actually Need

The FPGA HDMI mod space for the N64 has matured rapidly over the past four years. When the first community attempts appeared around 2020, they were eye-wateringly expensive and finicky to install. Today, you’ve got a small but credible field of options.

Choosing Your FPGA Board

The two dominant players are PixelFX’s N64Digital (around £165 for the board itself, plus around £25 for the mounting kit) and the open-source UltraHDMI by Marshall Holm Hochstein, which has been out of production for years but still floats around the second-hand market for upwards of £300. There’s also the N64 RGB by borti4938 paired with a digital-to-HDMI converter, but that’s more of a hybrid solution and not what we’re covering here.

For this guide, I’m going to assume you’re working with the PixelFX N64Digital, because it’s the most current, most readily available, and frankly the best-performing option in 2024. It outputs up to 1440p, supports VRR on compatible displays, includes built-in scanline simulation, de-dithering, and a properly implemented de-blur for the VI filter, and crucially it’s still in active firmware development. You can flash updates via USB-C.

The Console Revision Question

The N64 went through nine major motherboard revisions, designated NUS-CPU-01 through NUS-CPU-09 (with some regional variations slotted in between). The earlier boards — 01 through 03, generally found in PAL consoles manufactured in 1996 and 1997 — have more discrete components and slightly more room to work with. The later revisions, particularly the 07, 08, and 09 boards, are heavily integrated, smaller, and trickier to mod cleanly.

You can identify your board revision by removing the six 4.5mm gamebit screws from the bottom of the console, lifting off the top shell, and peering at the silkscreen marking on the motherboard. It’s usually printed in white near one of the corners. The PixelFX board is compatible with all revisions, but the installation differs slightly between them — the documentation that ships with the kit covers each variant.

The Full Shopping List

  • PixelFX N64Digital board with appropriate mounting kit — £190 all-in
  • PicoCart64 flash cartridge — around £75 for an assembled unit, or about £30 in parts if you fancy soldering one yourself (more on this below)
  • A Nintendo 4.5mm gamebit screwdriver — £8 from any decent tool supplier. Don’t try to bodge this with pliers, you’ll regret it
  • A precision Phillips #00 screwdriver for the internal screws
  • A temperature-controlled soldering iron, ideally with a fine conical or chisel tip. A Hakko FX-888D (£120) or a TS100/TS101 (£75) are both excellent
  • Leaded solder — yes, leaded. 60/40 Sn/Pb flows at lower temperatures and is much more forgiving than RoHS solder. 0.5mm or 0.7mm diameter is ideal
  • Liquid flux pen — Amtech NC-559-V2 is the community standard
  • Solder wick for cleanup
  • Isopropyl alcohol (99%) and a soft brush for flux removal
  • Helping hands or a PCB vice — Stickvise boards are brilliant for this
  • Anti-static mat and wrist strap — the N64’s RCP is sensitive and not cheap to replace
  • Magnification — either a proper stereo microscope (overkill but lovely) or a USB microscope (£30-50) or at minimum a decent magnifying lamp
  • 30AWG Kynar-insulated wire for the signal connections
  • Kapton tape for insulating your work

If you’re new to soldering, do not — I repeat, do not — make your N64 your first project. Pick up a cheap practice kit from AliExpress for a fiver, get comfortable with surface-mount work, and then come back to this. The N64’s RCP pads are 0.5mm pitch BGA-adjacent territory, and a slip with the iron will end your day.

The PicoCart64 Context: Why Pair Them?

Before we get into the install itself, a word on the PicoCart64. This is an open-source flash cartridge built around the Raspberry Pi Pico (the RP2040 microcontroller, specifically), developed primarily by Konrad Beckmann and a small team of collaborators. It first appeared in late 2022 and has been iterating rapidly ever since.

The PicoCart64 is not, strictly speaking, the best flash cart available for the N64. That crown probably belongs to the SummerCart64 (around £155 assembled), which has full SD card support, real-time clock for Animal Forest on the 64DD, and significantly more on-cart RAM. The EverDrive 64 X7 (£175) from Krikzz is also superb and more polished as a consumer product.

What the PicoCart64 has going for it is, first, it’s drastically cheaper, and second, it’s properly open source — schematics, firmware, the lot, all on GitHub. If you’re the sort of person installing an FPGA HDMI mod, you’re probably the sort of person who appreciates that. It’s a hobbyist’s flash cart, and it pairs beautifully with a hobbyist’s video mod.

PicoCart64 Limitations You Need to Know

The PicoCart64 has some genuine constraints. Current versions support ROMs up to 64MB, which covers the vast majority of the N64’s library — Resident Evil 2 (December 1999) and Conker’s Bad Fur Day (March 2001) are both 64MB and run fine. Games that use the 4KB or 16KB EEPROM saves work. SRAM saves work. Flash RAM saves (used by Majora’s Mask, Pokémon Stadium 2, and a handful of others) have improved enormously over the past year but can still occasionally be flaky depending on firmware version.

What doesn’t work yet, properly, is the Transfer Pak, the Rumble Pak emulation in all titles (most work, some don’t), and a few games with unusual cartridge bus timing — Banjo-Tooie being the most notorious. Check the compatibility list on the PicoCart64 GitHub before you commit. For the vast majority of the library, though, it’s brilliant.

Step One: Preparing Your Workspace and Disassembling the Console

Right. Tools out, kettle on, let’s get started.

  1. Set up your workspace. You want good lighting, an anti-static mat, and enough room to lay components out methodically. I keep a small magnetic parts tray for screws — N64 disassembly produces a surprising number of similar-looking screws that absolutely must go back in the right holes.
  2. Discharge yourself. Touch a grounded metal object, or clip on your anti-static wrist strap. The RCP is static-sensitive, and replacement consoles are getting more expensive every year — a tested PAL unit is north of £75 now.
  3. Remove the six 4.5mm gamebit screws from the bottom of the console. They’re recessed in deep wells, so make sure your bit is properly seated before turning. They can be tight on consoles that have never been opened — apply firm downward pressure to avoid stripping the heads.
  4. Lift the top shell straight up. The expansion port cover and controller ports will come away with it. Set it aside.
  5. Remove the heat spreader. This is the large black metal plate covering the motherboard. It’s held down by eight 2.5mm Phillips screws. Some revisions have a thermal pad between the spreader and the RCP — keep it in place if it’s still soft, replace it with a fresh 1mm silicone thermal pad if it’s gone hard and crusty (as it usually has on consoles approaching three decades old).
  6. Remove the RF shield. Underneath the heat spreader you’ll find a metal RF shielding cage. It’s secured by additional Phillips screws around the perimeter and small tabs that fold through the PCB. Remove the screws, then carefully bend the tabs upright with a small flathead screwdriver. The shield lifts away upwards.
  7. Remove the motherboard from the lower shell. A handful of additional screws hold the board to the plastic. Note the position of the cartridge slot, the multi-out, the controller ports, and the power switch — you’ll need to reseat everything later.
  8. Photograph everything. Take pictures of every step. When you’re four hours in and trying to remember which screw came from which hole, your past self will thank you.

Identifying Your Specific Board Revision

With the board out, find the silkscreen marking. It’ll say something like “NUS-CPU-03” or “NUS-CPU(P)-05” — the “(P)” denotes PAL. The PixelFX documentation includes a separate installation diagram for each revision, and you absolutely must use the right one. The locations of the signal tap points differ. Trust me on this.

Step Two: The RGB Bypass — Tapping the Digital Signal

This is where things get serious. The FPGA HDMI mod works by tapping the digital video signal from the RCP before it reaches the VDC video DAC. We’re effectively bypassing Nintendo’s analogue stage entirely. On the PixelFX N64Digital, this is done via a flex cable that connects to a small interposer board sandwiched between the RCP and the motherboard — which, yes, means you’ll be reflowing or socketing the RCP on some revision boards.

Removing the RCP on Earlier Revisions (CPU-01 to CPU-05)

On these earlier boards, the RCP is in a socketed-style configuration where the PixelFX interposer can slip underneath without desoldering. You’ll need to:

  1. Apply liquid flux liberally around the four sides of the RCP package. Be generous — flux is your friend.
  2. Use a hot air rework station set to 350°C with low airflow to gently lift the RCP. If you don’t have a hot air station, this is the point where you stop and either buy one (a 858D clone is £45) or send the console to someone who has one. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt this with a soldering iron.
  3. Once the RCP lifts cleanly (it should float on the solder when fully reflowed), set it aside on a heat-resistant surface, pad-side up.
  4. Clean the motherboard pads with solder wick and isopropyl alcohol. They should be flat and shiny.
  5. Place the PixelFX interposer board onto the cleaned pads, aligning carefully with the silkscreen guide. Tack down two opposite corners with a tiny amount of solder.
  6. Replace the RCP on top of the interposer, again aligning carefully, and reflow with hot air at 320°C until the chip settles flat.

The Later Revisions (CPU-06 onwards)

On later boards, the layout is denser and the RCP sits closer to other components. The process is broadly the same but requires more care with adjacent capacitors, which can shift if you’re not careful with airflow. PixelFX provides specific guidance for each revision in their installation PDF — read it twice, then read it again.

Verifying the Reflow

Before you go any further, you want to be confident the RCP is properly seated. Power the console up briefly with no shielding, just the motherboard, multi-out, and power supply, and check you still get a picture out of the original A/V multi-out. If you do, the RCP reflow is good. If you don’t, you’ve got a cold joint somewhere and need to reflow again. Better to find out now than after you’ve spent another two hours on the rest of the install.

Step Three: Installing the N64Digital Main Board

With the interposer in place and verified, the main FPGA board can go in.

  1. Mount the N64Digital board in its designated position. On most installations, this involves the supplied bracket that screws into existing motherboard holes. The board sits above the RCP area with its HDMI port aligned with the cutout in the modified rear shell (the kit includes a 3D-printed replacement panel for the expansion port cover — this is where the HDMI port will exit the case).
  2. Connect the flex cable from the interposer to the N64Digital. The connector is a small FPC ribbon — open the latch, slide the cable in, close the latch. It should be firm but not forced.
  3. Connect the audio tap wires. The N64Digital needs to sample the audio signal from two points on the motherboard — these are clearly marked in the documentation and vary by revision. Use 30AWG Kynar wire and keep the runs as short as possible. Tin both the pad and the wire end before joining.
  4. Connect the power tap — typically a 3.3V line from a convenient capacitor on the motherboard. The N64Digital’s power draw is modest (under 500mA) and the N64’s PSU has plenty of headroom.
  5. Run the OSD button cable if you want on-screen menu access. PixelFX supplies a small tactile switch with cable that can be mounted through the expansion port cover or, my preference, through a small drilled hole in the rear of the case where it’s accessible but not visible.
  6. Double-check every connection before powering on. Look for solder bridges, stray strands of wire, and any pads where the wire isn’t fully wetted. This is where your magnification setup earns its keep.

The First Power-On Test

With everything connected but no shielding back in place, plug an HDMI cable from the N64Digital to your display. Insert a known-good cartridge — I usually use Super Mario 64 for this because the title screen is so distinctive and any video issues show up immediately. Power on.

You should get the PixelFX boot logo briefly, followed by the Nintendo splash and the game. If you do, congratulations — the worst is over. If you don’t, the troubleshooting section at the end of this guide will help.

Step Four: Reassembly and Case Modifications

Once you’ve verified the mod is working, you can start putting the console back together. The trickiest bit is the HDMI port exit.

  1. Fit the replacement expansion port cover. The PixelFX kit includes a 3D-printed panel that replaces the standard plastic cover and has a precisely-cut HDMI port hole. Some kits supply this in injection-moulded plastic now, which looks much nicer. If you got the 3D-printed version and you’re picky about aesthetics, you can sand and paint it to match — Tamiya TS-29 Semi-Gloss Black is a near-perfect match for the N64’s matte finish.
  2. Reseat the RF shield carefully. The N64Digital sits within the shield’s volume, so make sure no part of the FPGA board fouls against the shield. You may need to apply Kapton tape to the underside of the shield where it would otherwise contact the new board.
  3. Refit the heat spreader with fresh thermal pad on the RCP. If you’ve put an interposer between the RCP and the motherboard, the RCP now sits slightly higher than stock — a 0.5mm pad rather than 1mm may be appropriate. The community wisdom is to err on the side of slightly compressed rather than slightly loose.
  4. Reattach the top shell and the six gamebit screws. Don’t overtighten — the brass inserts in the bottom shell can spin if you crank too hard.

Step Five: The PicoCart64 — Building or Buying

With the console now sporting pristine HDMI output, it’s time to feed it some games. If you bought a pre-assembled PicoCart64, skip to the firmware section. If you’re building your own, here’s the gist.

Sourcing the PCB and Components

The PicoCart64 design files are on GitHub. You can either order PCBs directly from JLCPCB (£15 for five boards in your choice of solder mask colour) or pick up a kit from one of the community sellers. The bill of materials runs to about 30 components, most of which are passive 0402 resistors and capacitors.

The core components are:

  • A Raspberry Pi Pico (the standard one, not the Pico W) — £4.50 from Pimoroni
  • A PSRAM chip — the APS6404L is the standard choice, around £3
  • A level shifter for the 3.3V to 5V conversion on the cartridge bus
  • A USB-C connector for power and firmware updates
  • Various supporting passives

Assembling the Cartridge

  1. Solder the 0402 passives first. Use a stencil and solder paste if you have one (£10 for a custom stencil from JLCPCB), or hand-solder with flux and 0.3mm solder if you don’t.
  2. Solder the PSRAM chip next. It’s a SOIC-8, easy to do by hand.
  3. Mount the Raspberry Pi Pico using castellated edge soldering. The Pico sits flush against the main PCB.
  4. Fit the USB-C connector last — it’s the most fiddly component and you don’t want to dislodge it while working on other parts.
  5. Clean thoroughly with isopropyl and inspect under magnification. Any solder bridges on the cartridge bus pins will prevent the cart from being recognised.
  6. Fit the cartridge into a salvaged N64 shell. The community standard is to sacrifice a copy of Cruis’n World or Hexen — both common, cheap, and not worth playing in 2024. Pop the original PCB out, drop the PicoCart64 in, screw it shut.

Flashing the Firmware

Hold the BOOTSEL button on the Pico while connecting the USB-C cable to your PC. The cartridge mounts as a USB drive. Drag the latest UF2 firmware file (from the GitHub releases page) onto the drive, and it’ll reboot automatically. That’s it — the cart is now ready.

Step Six: Loading ROMs and Playing

The current PicoCart64 firmware uses a simple approach: ROMs are flashed onto the cart’s internal storage rather than loaded from an SD card. You connect the cart via USB-C to your PC, run the PicoCart64 loader utility, and select which ROMs to write to the cart. The on-cart storage holds up to 16MB in the v1 hardware and up to 64MB in the v2.

This is, admittedly, less convenient than an EverDrive’s SD card approach — you can’t swap your game library by switching SD cards. But for a hobbyist project, it works well enough, and the loader utility supports save backup and restore via USB.

Recommended ROMs for Testing

Once you’ve got the cart loaded, here are the games I always test a new mod with:

  • Super Mario 64 — the dithering on Princess Peach’s stained-glass window in the entrance hall is a perfect de-dither test
  • F-Zero X — runs at a locked 60fps with minimal filtering, a great test for raw image clarity
  • Wave Race 64 — the water effects use complex transparency that can expose video glitches
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — heavy use of the VI blur filter, a great test for de-blur performance
  • Paper Mario — the 2D character sprites against 3D backgrounds are a brutal test for any scaler or filter

Step Seven: Tuning the N64Digital’s Output

The PixelFX firmware exposes a generous menu of options via the OSD button. Press it briefly to open the menu, hold it to switch between options. The N64 controller in port 1 also navigates the menu, which is more comfortable for extended tinkering.

The Settings That Actually Matter

De-blur: The N64’s VI filter adds a horizontal blur to most games. Some games (the Mario Party series, for instance) actually rely on this blur to mask dithering. Others (F-Zero X, Goldeneye) look dramatically better with it disabled. The N64Digital lets you set this per-game or globally. Start with “Auto” and override on a case-by-case basis.

De-dither: The N64 uses ordered dithering at the framebuffer level to fake additional colours. On a CRT, this dithering blends into smooth gradients. On HDMI, you see every dot. The de-dither algorithm in the N64Digital is genuinely excellent — set it to “Pattern” mode for the cleanest result.

Scanlines: A matter of taste. I run 25% horizontal scanlines on a 4K display, which gives a subtle CRT-like texture without looking artificial. Purists will disagree. They always do.

Output resolution: The N64Digital can output 480p, 960p, 1200p, or 1440p. 1440p is generally the sweet spot — it’s an integer multiple of the N64’s typical 240p output (6x) and looks beautiful on modern displays.

Aspect ratio: The N64 outputs 4:3. The N64Digital can letterbox to 16:9 or stretch. I leave it at native 4:3 and let my display handle the framing.

Troubleshooting: When Things Go Sideways

They will. They always do. Here are the issues you’re most likely to hit.

No HDMI Signal At All

First, verify the console still outputs over the original multi-out. If it does, the RCP reflow is good and the problem is in the FPGA mod side. If it doesn’t, the RCP needs to be reflowed.

If the multi-out works but HDMI is dead, check the flex cable seating at both ends. The FPC connectors are notoriously easy to misseat — the cable can look in but actually be one row of contacts off.

Picture But No Sound

The audio taps haven’t been soldered cleanly. Check both audio wires under magnification, reflow if necessary. Also verify the power tap — undervolted, the audio DAC on the N64Digital can drop out before video does.

Intermittent Glitches or Flickering

Usually a cold joint on the interposer board. Reflow the interposer with hot air. This is also occasionally caused by failing capacitors elsewhere on the motherboard — N64s are old enough now that the original electrolytics are dying. A full recap (about £15 in parts) is worth doing if your console is showing any electrical weirdness.

PicoCart64 Not Recognised

Most often, the cartridge edge connector is dirty or the level shifter has a cold joint. Clean the edge connector with isopropyl and a soft brush. If the cart is recognised by some games but not others, the firmware needs updating — check the GitHub releases page.

Crashes on Specific Games

Check the PicoCart64 compatibility list. Some games (Banjo-Tooie, Dr. Mario 64) have known issues that may or may not be resolved in current firmware. The N64Digital itself has near-perfect compatibility — it sees the same signal the original DAC would, so if the game runs on an unmodded console, it’ll run modded.

Pro Tips: Things You’ll Wish You’d Known

The Capacitor Question

If you’ve got the console open anyway, recap it. The original electrolytic capacitors are between 26 and 28 years old at this point, and many are beginning to fail silently. A full recap with modern polymer capacitors (Panasonic FM or Nichicon HW series) costs about £15 in parts and another hour of your time. It will dramatically extend the life of the console and eliminate a category of intermittent fault that becomes very hard to diagnose once everything’s buttoned up.

The Region-Free Mod

While you’re in there, consider adding a region-free mod. The N64’s region lock is enforced by a single CIC chip on the cartridge and a corresponding key on the motherboard. A simple switch mod (or, better, a CIC chip with multi-region support) lets you play NTSC games on a PAL console at full 60Hz. The community has been doing this for years and there are excellent guides — Marshallh’s region-free guide on the AssemblerGames archive is the canonical reference.

The Expansion Pak Reality

The Jumper Pak that ships with stock consoles can be flaky after this long. If you’ve got an Expansion Pak (which doubles the system RAM and is required for Donkey Kong 64, Majora’s Mask, and the high-resolution modes in Perfect Dark), use that. They’re more robust electrically. If you don’t, the community has produced replacement Jumper Paks (around £20) that are essentially new manufacture.

The Controller Question

None of this matters if you’re playing on a worn-out original controller. The N64’s analogue stick uses an optical encoder with a plastic gear that wears down catastrophically — a worn original stick is loose, drifts, and ruins any precision game. The Steel Sticks 64 replacement (around £25) is a Hall-effect upgrade that drops into the original shell and feels nearly identical to a fresh-from-the-box 1996 stick. Fit one. Your 1080° Snowboarding times will thank you.

HDMI Cable Quality

The N64Digital outputs a clean signal, but cheap HDMI cables can introduce sparkles at higher resolutions. A decent 2m cable (Lindy or Club3D, around £15) is all you need — there’s no benefit to spending more than that.

The Alternative Routes: Honest Comparisons

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that the FPGA HDMI mod is overkill for some users. Let’s be honest about who should and shouldn’t do this.

The Analogue Stack

If you’ve got a CRT — a proper PVM, BVM, or even a good consumer Trinitron — you don’t need this. An RGB-modded N64 (Tim Worthington’s THS7374 board, around £55) feeding an OSSC Pro feeding a CRT looks gorgeous. For pure image quality on a tube, the FPGA route offers no advantage over a good RGB mod.

The MiSTer FPGA Question

The MiSTer FPGA project added experimental N64 support in mid-2023, and it’s been improving rapidly. As of late 2024, compatibility is around 75% of the library and image quality is excellent. If you’re a MiSTer user and don’t mind playing N64 via emulation, the £350 cost of a full MiSTer setup may be more attractive than modding multiple consoles.

But — and this is a meaningful but — there’s no substitute for original hardware running an original game on its original silicon. The N64Digital gives you that, with a modern output, and that’s a different proposition to even the best emulation.

The Analogue 3D Question

Analogue, the company behind the Analogue Pocket and Analogue Super NT, has been hinting at an N64-class FPGA console for years. As of the time of writing (late 2024), nothing official has materialised. If a hypothetical Analogue Sixty-Four eventually appears at a likely £250-300 price point, it’ll be a compelling alternative for people who don’t want to mod original hardware. But that’s vapourware until it isn’t, and meanwhile the N64Digital is real, available, and excellent.

The Community Perspective: Where We Are in 2024

It’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how much has changed for N64 enthusiasts in the past five years. In 2019, getting a decent picture out of an N64 meant either an obscure custom RGB mod requiring a Tim Worthington board imported from Australia, or an extortionate UltraHDMI bought from a scalper. The community was small, the documentation patchy, and installations expensive.

Today, you can buy a fully-assembled N64Digital from a reputable European reseller and have it on your desk in three days. PicoCart64 PCBs ship from JLCPCB inside a week. The PixelFX Discord is full of helpful, knowledgeable people who’ll walk you through troubleshooting in real time. There are video guides for every major board revision. The Krikzz EverDrive 64 X7, the SummerCart64, the PicoCart64 — flash carts now exist at every price point and every level of polish.

This is, by some distance, the best the N64 has ever been as a platform. Better than it was at launch in 1996, when £250 (the equivalent of about £550 today) got you a console that looked muddy on the family Trinitron. Better than it was during its commercial peak in 1998 and 1999, when GoldenEye 007 and Ocarina of Time defined a generation. Better, even, than it was in the long collector’s twilight of the 2010s, when good consoles were cheap but viable display options were dwindling.

The Preservation Argument

There’s a preservation argument here too. Original N64 consoles are not making any more of themselves. The custom silicon — the RCP, the VDC, the CIC chips — can’t be replaced when it fails, and 28-year-old electronics are increasingly fragile. Every well-installed mod is, in a small way, a vote for keeping this hardware running into the 2030s and beyond. The N64Digital doesn’t replace the original silicon, it works alongside it. The console still uses its original RCP, its original CPU, its original sound hardware. We’re just letting the digital signal out cleanly for once.

The Mod Scene Going Forward

The next frontier for N64 modification is, probably, in three areas. First, lower-cost FPGA HDMI options — there are rumours of cheaper Chinese clones, and an open-source FPGA HDMI mod has been in slow development for two years now. Second, better flash carts — the PicoCart64 v3 is in active development, with SD card support and improved game compatibility on the roadmap. Third, controller improvements — the Steel Sticks community is exploring magnetic alternatives that could outlast Hall-effect sensors entirely.

It’s a remarkable time to be invested in a console that was, by every commercial metric, comprehensively beaten by the original PlayStation. The N64 sold fewer than half as many units as Sony’s machine. Its library is a fraction of the size. And yet here we are, in 2024, with a healthier modding scene, more active firmware development, and more dedicated hardware than the N64 has ever had. That’s a testament to the strength of feeling around this machine — to GoldenEye‘s four-player splitscreen, to Mario Kart 64‘s perfectly-tuned battle mode, to Banjo-Kazooie‘s sense of fizzing creative joy.

Final Thoughts: The N64 You Should Have Had In 1996

Here’s the thing. When you finish this install — when the heat spreader’s back in place and the screws are tightened and you’re sitting on the sofa with a controller in hand and Super Mario 64 on your 4K OLED — you’ll see the N64 the way it was always meant to look. The dithering’s gone. The blur’s gone. The colours are vivid, the lines are sharp, the lag is imperceptible. It’s exactly the same console you bought (or your parents bought, or you found at a car boot sale for £20) — but every visual indignity Nintendo subjected it to in the name of cost-cutting is finally undone.

That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s not rose-tinted glasses. It’s a 1996 console finally getting the display pipeline its designers deserved. The RCP was always capable of outputting a clean digital signal — Nintendo just chose not to expose it, in service of a CRT-era video stack that’s now obsolete. The N64Digital is, in a real sense, finishing the job SGI started.

Is it worth the time and money? If you’re the kind of person reading this in full, you already know the answer. Total cost, including the cart and tools, sits around £350 — less if you build the PicoCart64 yourself, more if you outsource the install to a professional. That’s not nothing, but in a hobby where a sealed copy of Conker’s Bad Fur Day goes for north of £400, it’s frankly reasonable for permanently transforming how your console looks and feels.

Do it carefully. Don’t rush. Have a beer halfway through, when the RCP’s reflowed and you’ve verified the multi-out still works. Take photos. Ask for help on the PixelFX Discord when you get stuck — and you will get stuck. And when it’s done, when that HDMI cable is feeding a perfect digital signal into your modern display, fire up F-Zero X, hit Rainbow Road at 1500 km/h, and remember why this funny little purple-and-grey box mattered so much in the first place.

The N64 deserved this in 1996. It’s taken nearly three decades, but it’s finally here. Get the soldering iron out.