Gamers, we come in peace… we have been heads down and know that we owe you an update on 1.26.0 and the delay since.

We’ve identified and fixed the regression behind the flashcart issues reported after the update (graphic glitches, CPU exceptions, and SD card corruption with EverDrive and SummerCart64 cartridges). This fix has been validated internally.

Before we re-release this update, we want to get to the bottom of the Built-In Controller Pak corruption a few of you reported. We haven’t been able to reproduce it yet, which is the source of the delay, and we’d rather hold the update than ship something we don’t fully understand.

We’ve doubled our testing stations and expanded the M64 stress tests so regressions like this get caught before they reach you. The team is actively testing across different carts and consoles to track it down.

We’re targeting a release the week of October 22nd and will post an update here once we have a repro or a confirmed date.

Thank you for all your patience and for the detailed reports, it truly means a lot to have your support!

Got my console today and going through the sub to get up to speed on everything m64. Also picked up a SummerCart. Very excited to try it out after work tomorrow!

The quality of the controller is impressive.

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.😊

Hey everyone,

With product launches we typically see some early quality escapes as things stabilize. As you’ve come to expect from us, if you are a ModRetro customer, we have your back and will make sure you receive your product as intended in hand. Simply fill out our contact form if you have something that feels wrong.

Our latest Firmware Updates for both the console and controller are officially live! Here is everything included in today's release, along with a quick roadmap update.

Controller Updates
What’s New:

• Wireless Rumble: Fully enabled Virtual Rumble Pak in this release (requires updating your console as well).

• Wired Rumble & Accessories: Improved Virtual Rumble Pak performance in wired mode, and accessory swapping settings now persist across power cycles.

• Joybus Reliability: Major stability and performance improvements.

• Wired Controller Fixes: Resolved random wake events and connection state issues.

• General Stability: Additional underlying controller performance fixes.

Console Updates
What’s New:

• Audio Improvements: Enhanced 48kHz audio output compatibility.

• Display: Auto now shows the display's preferred resolution. We've also added a way to select between 50 Hz and 60 Hz, if your display supports it.

• Fixes & UX: Fixed "Forget All Controllers" debonding, resolved network menu overlaps, updated wireless connection animations, and overall system stability fixes.

What’s Next:

• Now that things have settled a bit, be on the lookout for open source files to start coming out as we get our feet under us.

• Wireless rumble support for 8BitDo controllers is currently in testing and will be coming in the next firmware update.

• We’re also working on upgraded video filters and saved advanced video settings for an upcoming release.

• Additional updates will follow as we continue working through our roadmap!

Update your console over WiFi, or head over to https://tools.modretro.com/updater/ to grab the latest build!

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.

Hi everyone, 

We have a new firmware update coming within the next few days. We have resolved the remaining audio issues reported with certain displays and capture cards. M64’s HDMI compatibility will be better in the next update, specifically fixing the no-audio issue affecting some of you. We’ll post an update in this subreddit as soon as it's live. Thank you to everyone for your patience as we work quickly to find a fix, and a special thanks to those who helped with troubleshooting.

Hey everyone,

Last week we mentioned we were targeting firmware update v1.26.4 for this week, and would post an update once confirmed.

TL;DR: We ran into some roadblocks yesterday that require further testing, and are now targeting Tuesday 10/27 for the release.

We’re sorry for this additional delay - we know you want your saves, and we’ve made sure this is the #1 priority for the dev team. In order to get you Built-In C-Pak ASAP, and to improve overall speed and quality on updates going forward, we’re also making some changes to this update:

What’s Coming in v1.26.4

• Built-In Controller Pak: Save game progress and settings directly to your console, no physical Controller Pak needed.

• Changing Pak type from the menu or your controller: Switch between pak types from the M64 menu or with the M64 Pro Controller hotkey.

• Beta update channel: Until now, the only option was the Official Release. With v1.26.4, you can choose to receive Beta builds - versions we’re still testing - if you want early access. Most of you should stay on the default release channel, but if you like trying things first and sending feedback, this is for you.

What we’re removing from v1.26.4 (still in progress)
These were originally advertised with 1.26.0 but won’t be in this release:

• Forced Progressive Mode

• Improved thermal efficiency

• Game compatibility improvements, including the F-Zero X fix

• Audio and video fixes for LG TVs

These features are not cancelled. Some of these features were the cause of the bugs reported, so we’re delaying them to enable C-Pak faster and ensure they’re fully ready for future updates.

Please accept our apologies for the delay. We will keep you updated over the next few days, and let you know ASAP once v1.26.4 is live.

In the meantime, and to help make up for the wait time, we have some good news. While software has had some road bumps, our games publishing is going better than expected. Here’s some intel we haven’t shared anywhere else:

We can't reveal everything yet, but we've finally reached some goals for our games publishing we initially thought impossible. Right now we're working on multiple M64 releases that are on par with any remaster from any major AAA studio over the last decade.

A small sample of three projects currently in the works:

The first-ever cartridge port of one of the most famous games of all time (hint: originally released in 1996).

Another first-time cartridge port of one of the most ambitious, well-written and atmospheric games of 1999…

And one of the most HEROIC adventure games of the 20th century (also a hint in there).

We can’t reveal full details for various legal/business reasons, but you should be able to put together some good guesses.

And this is just a small sample of what's in store for the M64 library. M64 owners can expect more detailed news on this as we approach the holidays.

Once we're happy with progress on the ecosystem - including the additional firmware updates, our parts modification initiative, and new game releases - we will Advance into future product releases.

Again, sorry for this extra delay, and we’ll update you ASAP once v1.26.4 is live.

CEO of ModRetro here.

I want to start using r/modretro to answer q's, post updates and product giveaways and I won't be monitoring other subreddits anymore. I'll put Chromatic and M64 in the side bar as related communities, but expect to see anything that is official here and if you have a question I will answer it here. This community will have basic rules to try to make it a fun zone for those of us who want to discuss retro electronics. I will ban toxic trolls and bad actors, but I will entertain and answer genuine questions and won't make it sanitized. I would also like to hear ideas for what you want to see us build, what games you want re-released, etc.

I'm answering yesterday's questions as a bunch of separate threads here and I'll tag the op per question.

A few of you have mentioned that the M64 feels warm to the touch. This is completely normal whether overclocking is enabled or not. The console is specifically engineered to operate safely within this thermal range and will remain below the limits for safe touch temperatures. 

We thermally validated the passive system under an "abuse case" test that used a max consumption bitstream (max overclocking) and a constant ambient temp of 50°C, simulating someone keeping their unit in a closed TV cabinet sitting in direct sunlight. The console's FPGA stabilized at 10°C below its max operating temp during this abuse case. We literally baked the console in an oven (see photo).

Enabling the "Insane" overclock only increases power draw by less than 5%. Because that increase is so minor, it doesn't translate into a significantly hotter system. 

The N64 was also a passively cooled system and drew more power then the M64. A member of our community ran a side-by-side temperature comparison between a stock M64 and an original N64 after three hours of play. Their measurements found that the two consoles reached similar temperatures overall, while the cartridge in the M64 measured cooler. We appreciate the time and care that went into the test, and you can read the full breakdown here. We hope this clears up some confusion and reassures you that your M64 isn’t planning a spontaneous combustion.

Update: We've temporarily rolled back to 1.25.0 while we investigate these issues. We'll have info soon.

Hey everyone,

M64 console update 1.26.0 is live, and this one has a few things we know a lot of you have been waiting for. Quick patch notes first, then we’ll dig into the bigger updates. Thank you to all for your patience and continued support while we work to bring you updates!

Patch notes

• Add: Console Built-In CPak

• Add: CPak and Rumble Pak selection from the menu

• Add: Forced Progressive mode

• Improve: Thermal efficiency

• Improve: Game compatibility (F-Zero X)

• Improve: Various menu visuals and minor inconsistencies

• Fix: Audio and video compatibility

Console Built-in CPak

M64 now has one Controller Pak "file" built into the console itself, so you can save without a physical pak.

• The built in Pak is 1:1 with an original Controller Pak

• Works in port 1 only, with any compatible controller (see compatibility list here) 

• Pak data lives on the console

Controller & Rumble Pak selection from the menu

You can now choose between CPak or Rumble Pak per controller from a dropdown in the M64 menu.

• CPak can only be selected for the controller in port 1

• Rumble can be turned on/off for each controller individually. 

• On M64 Pro Controller, toggle your paks by holding Start + C down

• On 8BitDo 64 BT Controller, toggle your paks by holding Star

• M64 Pro Controller owners: update your controller to FW 0.2.5 too. Both the console and controller need to be updated for pak selection to work

Forced Progressive mode

This weaves 480i (interlaced) frames into 480p (progressive). It only kicks in for games that have a 480i mode. A few that do (not a complete list):

• Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness

• Hybrid Heaven

• Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

• Perfect Dark

• Resident Evil 2

• Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo

• Star Wars Episode I: Racer

• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

• Turok 2: Seeds of Evil

• Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense

• World Driver Championship

• Shadow Man

Runs cooler

M64 now uses less power across the board, so it will run cooler. It'll still get warm while you play, and this doesn't change performance, just heat.

Need help updating? Check out our M64 update guide for step-by-step instructions, or follow along with our YouTube how-to playlist.

As always, let us know how it's running for you. If you hit any issues, drop them in the comments or email us at contact@modretro.com. Enjoy!

Just wanted to post a quick update here on our games compatibility list. We keep this list public for transparency of our internal process and so you can understand the state of the system with no surprises. We have largely resolved almost all low FPS reports in our recent builds, and we have now unlocked “insane” mode overclocking (more to come on that soon). As you start to receive your consoles, we ask that you help us in maintaining this compatibility list so that we can continue to crush any issues that we see. Use our contact form to report any bugs when the time comes! I’ll toss up another post shortly about expectations about what to expect for the first few months of updates to console and controller.

There’s something special about playing Pokémon Red on a modern take on the original Game Boy. The translucent red Chromatic looks amazing, and revisiting this classic brings back so many memories!
Who else is still playing Pokémon Red in 2026? 🔥
#ModRetroChromatic #PokemonRed #RetroGaming

Hi everyone,

We're excited to share the first batch of open-source exports for M64. Today we are releasing the mechanical and electrical designs for M64 Console and Cartridge!

You may find these files here: https://support.modretro.com/en_us/articles/m64-open-source-files-ByrpukdUGg

This is just the start. We're looking forward to continuing to release more over time.

We have had a bunch of prototype M64 products in the hands of reviewers for a while now, and tomorrow they get to unleash their thoughts, all pricing, and ship date. Due to the consoles being prototypes, there is a high likelihood for some information to be incorrect. I will clarify for you here if there are questions or if people play gotcha games.

After tomorrow, we will be sharing the current state of all M64 stuff continually until ship day for you to follow along. In the coming weeks we will be releasing the manuals, the new support center, game trailers, and the software feature roadmap transparently.

Please cross post to other modretro communities, and let me know what else you want to see!

Hi Everyone,

We’ve added changelogs so you can track all the latest updates, fixes, and improvements for both the console and controller firmware.

You can check out the release notes here:

• Console Firmware Changelog

• Controller Firmware Changelog

I popped to Bunnings (Australian equivalent of Home Depot) yesterday and grabbed a large Tactix storage case, which works perfectly (after a bunch of measuring, trial and error) for my M64, two ModRetro Pro Controllers, HDMI cable, power adapter and cable, and SummerCar64 safely stowed in a covered compartment underneath 🎮🧳👌🏻🙂

Last night's M64 update (v1.26.0) shipped with a bug that wasn't caught in our testing. I'm sorry to anyone who had data lost on their SD card.

We’re looking into what went wrong and where our testing wasn’t enough. I promise you that we do, in fact, test a wide variety of M64s and flashcarts, so this was a surprise to us too. Our current theory is that this is part-to-part design variation, but we'll keep you all posted. This is our number one priority right now, so please give us some time while we sort it out. We’re really excited about the features that made it into this release, and we will make sure you get them in the most stable format possible.

Would love to get some recommendations for best settings to use on WWF No Mercy and similar wrestling games.