Rosalie's Mupen GUI 0.9.1 adds SoftRDP, a new software renderer for the N64's graphics chip
The Mupen64Plus front-end's 4 November release bundles SoftRDP, a threaded software RDP renderer that its author says passes every paraLLEl-RDP conformance test, plus input fixes and core updates.
AI-drafted from 5 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.
Rosalie's Mupen GUI 0.9.1, out on 4 November, is a small release for the Nintendo 64 front-end, its first since 0.9.0 in June. The headline change is a new video plugin: RMG now ships SoftRDP, a software renderer for the N64's Reality Display Processor, next to the GLideN64, angrylion-plus and paraLLEl plugins it already carried. The release notes thank PixelMechanic0, SoftRDP's developer, for suggesting it.
What SoftRDP is
SoftRDP draws the RDP's pixel pipeline on the CPU and only uses OpenGL to put the finished frame on screen. Its core is written from scratch in C17 and spreads the work across threads by scanline. According to its README, it passes all of the paraLLEl-RDP conformance tests against angrylion-rdp-plus, the pixel-accurate renderer most people compare against. Where SoftRDP disagrees with angrylion, the author says a test on real hardware showed angrylion was the one in the wrong, and fixes from the CEN64 emulator's RDP were ported over too.
It also has a 2x mode that renders the whole pipeline at twice the resolution on each axis, rather than scaling up a finished picture. The README says a game that reads the screen back still gets the image the console would have drawn. That mode costs about four times as much CPU work, so the thread count matters. Other settings:
- a worker count of up to 12 threads, or 0 to let it pick one for your CPU
- a scale of 1 for the console's own resolution or 2 for double
- four switches that turn off the console's video interface dither, divot, gamma dither and anti-aliasing filters, off by default because each makes the picture less faithful
On x86 it needs a CPU with AVX2, plus OpenGL 3.3. SoftRDP is MIT licensed and also builds as a Project64 plugin, and the author keeps a branch that wires it into ares.
The rest of 0.9.1
The other changes are fixes and updates:
- controller detection fixed in RMG-Input-GCA, the GameCube adapter input plugin (thanks to EIREXE)
- RMG-Input now identifies controllers by their SDL GUID (thanks to bmsuseluda)
- mupen64plus-core, GLideN64, SDL_GameControllerDB and the LZMA SDK updated
Downloads on the release page are a Windows installer, a portable Windows zip and a Linux AppImage. The project README also lists Flathub, the Arch User Repository and Fedora COPR for Linux. RMG is licensed under GPLv3.
Sources
- Rosalie's Mupen GUI v0.9.1 · (N64 emulator) (GitHub)
- Discussion: Rosalie's Mupen GUI v0.9.1 · (N64 emulator) (Reddit)
- SoftRDP: software renderer for the N64 RDP (GitHub)
- Rosalie's Mupen GUI (GitHub)
- Rosalie's Mupen GUI v0.9.1 (N64 emulator) (Reddit)
Image: Rosalie's Mupen GUI