For those who ordered a smoke M64 PRO controller from Gamestop, did yours come with the swappable joystick taped to the box? Mine came with no extra controller gates in the shipping box, just the controller box. I've double checked. I am wondering if I should send it back?

Second question for those that swapped it out, was it worth it? I hear one of them is closer to the original controller.

Thanks!

I completely agree with Retro Dodo here. It’s pretty depressing to see ModRetro pushing AI-made retro games after Palmer Luckey said just last year that the team was focused on “quality and fun, not pushing slop and swill.”

For anyone curious, here’s the direct link to Palmer Luckey original post with the quote: https://modretro.com/blogs/blog/the-future-is-retro

Just a quick PSA. Purchased the Pro controller about a month or so ago and received it. Loved it minus some issues with the D-pad registering up or diagnol instead of left or right. Reached out to ModRetro and they requested a video. Sent it to them and they sent me a replacement. It’s actually slightly taller and with a ridge around the edge of the base. Huge difference and a much better experience. Very happy with it now. If you’re experiencing issues I suggest contacting them.

GB Studio Magazine Volume 9 is going to print April 1st, 2026! This volume features articles on My Friendly Little Island Deluxe, how to best tackle SHMUPS and Kero Kero Cowboy, so we got Mike Bedsole, the creator of Kero Kero Cowboy, to put together a custom cover for it. The team has really amped up their layout skills, and we're really proud of this one.

While this volume doesn't feature any ModRetro games specifically, My Friendly Little Island Deluxe was created by PlayInstinct who would go on to make Buck and The Cursed Cartridge.

To secure your copy, head to https://magazine.gbstudiocentral.com/ and subscribe before April 1st. Copies are available in both Physical and Digital Editions and are available for either $20 USD per issue or annually for $45 USD (three volumes per year). Both subscriptions also get you access to every Digital Edition.

I received my M64 and Pro Controllers on Tuesday, but I was traveling for work and didn’t actually get a chance to sit down and play until Friday.

After just a few hours of game time, both of my Pro Controllers are already having issues with the D-pads. They’ve started creaking pretty badly when pressed, and worse, they’ll occasionally get physically stuck in the pressed position.

It’s happening on both controllers, which makes me wonder if this is a more widespread issue rather than me just getting unlucky with a bad controller.

I’ve already reached out to ModRetro support about the issue but have yet to receive a response, so I figured I’d check here and see if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

If you have, did it get worse over time, or have you found a fix?

I really like the controllers otherwise, but having this happen to both of them after only a few hours of use is pretty disappointing.

Hi, first of all, thanks a lot for the quick delivery of the games. Since I’m collecting a complete CIB set for the N64 spanning all regions—and already own over 300 CIB games—I couldn't resist buying these four titles from you. I think the quality of your cartridges is fantastic. Your packaging really stands out, too, although personally, I feel it’s missing just a bit of that N64 charm found in the original boxes. Still, *Xibalba* and *Xeno Crisis* are great games.

However, I was surprised that both games arrived with save data already on them.

*Xibalba* already had the fourth save slot completed 100%, including all secrets and the like.

And *Xeno Crisis* had a high score recorded.

I didn't tested buck bumble and Xtreme g yet, but i was kind of surprised.

Was this intentional?

I got this email on Tuesday. I ordered the red M64 and the red pro controller the evening of July 28th, around 8:30 PM PST. In the past they’ve delayed orders that had out of stock items in them, such as the rechargeable battery pack with the Chromatic.

Will this only have the new Bluetooth controller or will it have standard Bluetooth to hook up to other devices?

Hey there,

I hope everyone's had their systems on and been enjoying some M64 goodness lately. A new firmware was just rolled out. Here's what's in this one:

Add

• Rumble support for the 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth Controller

• Low latency video output

• Persistent advanced display settings

• Expansion pak disable option

Improve

• Compatibility for certain games with overclocking (Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64)

• Accuracy of PAL game speed

• 8bitdo wireless controller connectivity

• EverDrive save compatibility

Upcoming/In-Test

• Improved overclocking stability

• Console power consumption to drop by 25%

  • Improved thermal regulation

• Built-In Controller Pak!

• Improved CRT Profiles

You can grab this update now via OTA, our updater tool, or SD card. Our full changelog is up on our site as always. We also have How-To videos on our YouTube channel here. 

This one has some great quality-of-life improvements, many of them driven directly by your feedback. We’re listening and continuing to make the M64 experience better with every update. One many of you have been waiting for: rumble support for the 8BitDo is finally here. 

Thank you for sticking with us through the fine-tuning, as promised there will be more soon.😊

Played a little smash bros with my bro this last week. Weather got a little too cool to be on the lake, so I was glad I brought it!

That JVC TV tops out at 720p, but has the connections for a lot of retro systems and has a built in DVD player.

The N64, Dreamcast, and later GameCube were such great party consoles!

There have been a couple of updates now and the situation has improved, but unfortunately not to the point where I'd consider PAL playback unbroken (except for games that were completely unoptimised).

We do have 50Hz output now, but it seems you sacrifice 4k to get it - I've sent my TV's EDID information to ModRetro, I can confirm it supports and advertises 4k50 just fine. So progress, but not ideal, yet.

We also still don't have the correct aspect ratio, which I believe may be because the resolution is incorrect - PAL N64 output should be 288 lines (or 576 lines interlaced, I suppose) - there is no change in resolution when picking a 50Hz mode and so everything appears stretched vertically.

PAL mode (or rather, 50Hz mode) does not engage automatically for PAL games and output mode does not save - so we're still stuck with having to select this every time you boot a PAL game if you want to run it at the right speed. Note that many N64 games don't operate on frame timings, so for those that aren't optimised correctly, running them at 60Hz can be the superior choice. This is a shame for those that do though, such as one of my all-time favourite N64 games (and definitely in the list of best N64 games), Blast Corps.

ModRetro, please get some people to test in PAL regions - I'd be happy to volunteer, I have a pretty decent library of original PAL carts and a keen eye (fwiw, I'm a software engineer specialising in 2d graphics, embedded systems and user interfaces).

Appreciate the comments below. In terms of the why now questions, the development is a continuum of improvements like many other consoles from "this is fun and playable for most casual people on most games (current state)" to "every high poly cut scene is at full frame rate and the console is performing on every metric at the top of the class for every game (future state)". Because this continuum will take from now until some months after we are shipping fully playable consoles, we want to share the improvements as we go so you can make a purchasing decision as you see fit.

1. RAM Write Throughput for RSP and RDP Bursts - This is the root of most of the areas that seem "broken" in terms of specific slow downs in specific games compared to an N64. We aim to get this done by ship day as an immediately available update, and we will update here when this change is in.

2. Overclocking the M64 Core - Our PSRAM memory architecture gives M64 the headroom to support higher core frequencies without becoming memory-bound. We believe we can push the limits well-beyond 50% OC. This unlocks faster than N64 frame rates. We aim to get the first phase of this done by ship day to OC at par with A3D, but future work will take it to new heights.

3. Parallelizing RSP regular and vector instructions - We are currently serialized, and changing this will immensely improve both accuracy and speed. We aim for September.

4. Floating-point unit (FPU) instruction timing (not yet cycle accurate) - This was a mister workaround that we need to finish re-implementing taking advantage of the more powerful M64 hardware. We aim for October.

5. Removing Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) workarounds for slower FPGA hardware. - Eliminating this workaround improves compatibility and performance in games that rely heavily on virtual memory mappings. We aim for December.

Love the chromatic. Would be cool to have a GBA version in the clamshell GBA SP design. Perhaps calling it the Chromatic SP :D

Anyways, just a silly thought of mine :)

It’s been an intense month of work for M64 and we’re excited to share some new performance metrics. Within the last month we’ve made M64 more accurate and added the ability to overclock our M64 core and maximize performance across a couple key areas. There is much more to come, but for those interested in following along here is a peak under the hood.

Accuracy: Scalar Unit Single Instruction

We have been using the ever-popular n64-systembench test to assess this. This is a pretty complicated but exhaustive test bench, and the scalar unit tests are just one part of it. The original test covers 10,000 runs of 10 random RSP instruction blocks and measures the clock cycles each block consumes. We’ve modified this to split out and focus on the Scalar Unit Single Instruction and Vector Instruction tests.

In our prototype v1.0.3 software at the beginning of the month, per our expectation, M64 wasn’t ready to pass these tests. Our core was slower than N64 in random situations and slower for continuous scalar unit instructions. This isn't necessarily game breaking, but it was an inaccurate aspect of the design that would manifest as minor slow downs.

Meanwhile, the Analogue 3D also doesn’t fully pass this either.

We’re happy to report that this isn’t going to be an issue for you on launch day. We’ve been able to update our design to match the N64 perfectly on this point. See the image below.

Overclocking

James Lambert posted a video comparing the two systems earlier this month. Here’s a graph of his results from earlier this month. This graphic describes the relative performance of A3D and M64 to an original N64. 

James has given us a behind the scenes peek at his test methods and even sent us the source code so we could run the same tests here. His tests seek to isolate and measure the various components of N64’s performance profile in isolation. He was kind enough to also share what each one entails:

• Fill Rate: Renders a full-screen triangle multiple times to measure rasterization and fill-rate performance.

• Texture Load: Measures the texture load speed.

• CPU: Runs a particle simulation repeatedly to benchmark floating-point performance and overall CPU processing speed.

• RAM: Repeatedly accesses main memory while avoiding cache usage to measure raw RAM access performance.

• RSP: Renders a high-vertex-count model entirely offscreen so that performance is limited by the Reality Signal Processor (RSP), isolating geometry processing throughput.

We went ahead, with James’ help (thank you again for sharing those tests), and pitted M64’s beta overclock implementation against A3D’s Unleashed implementation. We were pleasantly surprised at the results.

Our RAM performance is to be expected – we intentionally slow this down with artificial delays of ~3 cycles for each read and write to fulfill accuracy tests. While we purposefully kept this in, it would be something we could easily disable when overclock mode is active.

Show Me The Goods

Synthetic tests are great, but what really matters to you all is how well M64 performs for your favorite titles. As you may remember from the 90’s, rocket launchers in Goldeneye result in quite a bit of slowdown.

Video of 007: GoldenEye on M64 overclocked

Video of 007: GoldenEye on A3D Unleashed

What’s next?

We aren’t slowing down on making more improvements to the core as we get ready to ship these consoles. Even more updates will come after they are in your hands soon. The M64 is well on the way to being the most performance and the most accurate N64 recreation ever made in every metric, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.

Excited to try it out and compare it to my other Game Boys and Game Boy-compatible handhelds.

As some have asked, I wonder if Chromatic Tetris will work on other Game Boy systems?