I don't have a huge love for Star Fox 64. I mean I played it with friends and I still have the cartridge all these years later, but it's not as big a part of my childhood as Ocarina of Time was. That said, the Ocarina of Time PC port was one of my favorite things from a few years ago, and now that team has done the same thing with Star Fox 64 in a project called Starship.

For clarity, Starship does not include any code or assets from Nintendo or the original game. The intended use case is to rip your own copy of the game to a ROM and Starship will import the files it needs from that. This can of course be used for ilicit means, but that's on the infividual users, not the creators of the app.

Starship is a full PC port of the original game. Not emulation, but a full on port. That means the team is not restricted to how the game originally worked, they can expand on it in interesting ways. As for the 1.0 release that just came out yesterday, that mostly means you can play at any screen resolution or aspect ratio you want (4:3 like the original, 16x9, 16x10, ultrawide, or anything in between, it's up to you), and at any frame rate you want. This was a good chance for me to enjoy the silky smooth 240Hz of my new monitor, and it didn't disappoint. Obviously the game wasn't meant to be played at 4k, it was intended for more like 360i, but it is super fun to play it like this anyway. And again, the magic of this port is that if I wanted to, it's about 3 clicks and I'm playing at that original resolution and feeling 10 years old again.

The current Starship release is only for Windows, although they have said the macOS and Linux versions are coming soon, which seems to mean the next few weeks if everything goes to plan.

Here's a video of the first 3 missions in the game (don't judge, I haven't played in nearly 30 years!) if you were curious how it looks.