Dear Future Gamer,

A number of excited words were written about UltraHLE in issue 14. Some believe that it could signal the "Death of Nintendo". The creators of the emulator have heard these opinions. And they have also seen the mad rush to download illegal ROMs from the Internet. This is not what they wanted, and so they've cancelled the project. It is also reported that Nintendo is suing them.

It IS still possible to get the emulator from the Internet, but every respectable emulation site - and even some of more dubious repute - have removed it, and any commercial N64 ROMs from their sites. As such, we are left with a hard-to-find download which supports only a handful of already-released games. Nintendo are distributing small pieces of code to attach to the beginning of future N64 releases which execute a few little instructions to ensure incompatibility with UltraHLE.

The N64 may be less powerful than even a £500 3Dfx PC, but for that same money you can get the machine itself plus up to about 10 games for it, which will easily keep you happy for an entire year or more. You can play them with the proper controllers, with Rumble Paks on a screen as big as the largest TV in your house (which is likely to be larger than your PC monitor - unless you're a computing science student... erm, like me).

And incidentally, 1024*768? That's Voodoo 2 SLI unless I'm very much mistaken. £170 plus VAT, according to one retailer's website...

Anon

FG: This emulation topic is getting very hot and it raises several different points - as the next reader points out. Watch out for the Future Gamer emulation feature coming soon.