#i'm a project64 warrior i use that shit literally all the time. mupen64 is way less intuitive and its controller support never works for me

[taffywabbit]

i appreciate the overall message of this post and in general it's good advice for people interested in emulation! there ARE a lot of platforms where the most functional/popular emulator for it hasn't been updated in 15 years, and it's also pretty common to keep using the emulator you downloaded years ago if you kept the same computer/files and it doesn't have some kind of update checker built-in.

but like. project64 is not really a good example of that? it IS still actively being updated and maintained and the current 3.0 version is excellent. literally just go update your shit! it's free! what are you doing!! the website doesn't even LET you download versions older than v2.3; you'd presumably have to go digging through some old forums or obscure githubs to find the now-unsupported builds that have these security issues if you didn't already have them downloaded. v2.0 was released in 2013, who the hell is going around still using a version of the program from over a decade ago unless they have incredibly specific technical needs?

PJ64 v3.0 not only runs way better than previous versions and has more configuration options, but it's ALSO hardware-accurate enough that you're allowed to use it for some speedrunning/racing events now (it's frequently listed as a separate entity from pre-3.0 builds because of how much of a difference it makes). it fixes the weird pause lag that older versions had in OoT, and gives you options to remove common visual glitches in a bunch of popular platformers. it can even run DK64 and Paper Mario properly!! that's huge!! those both used to be notoriously difficult games to emulate!

the one other thing i'll mention is that a lot of emulators that have been around for like 20 years are also open-source! which means that sure, something like VBA might've stopped getting updated in 2004, but others have picked up the slack since then and you can instead use VBA-M, a fork that is still getting updates and works way better. same goes for DS and SNES emulators - my personal recommendations for those are MelonDS and Mesen-S, respectively, but my point is that you've pretty much always got alternatives besides shitty broken apps that have been dead since 2007. do some research! ask around! ask your friend who keeps talking about hacking their 3DS, i bet they know stuff.

but yeah tl;dr just make a habit of checking periodically if the emulators you downloaded a while ago have received updates or improved forks, don't keep using outdated software and assuming it's fine just because it still runs. there IS usually a better option out there

Don't use Project 64.

Hey all, a new extremely dangerous vulnerability was discovered in Project64, a very popular N64 emulator. If you emulate N64 games, I highly highly recommend switching off P64 for an alternative, such as Mupen.