Last week, the folks behind Ship of Harkinian – the unofficial PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – announced that Star Fox 64 is the next Nintendo 64 classic to get the lavish port treatment. That means we’ll all soon be able to enjoy Star Fox 64 in full 60 FPS, widescreen glory, with loads of room for mods and other enhancements to the original game.
In a Discord announcement on November 22, the group said that it’s “pleased to announce the development of Starship – a PC port of Star Fox 64 (aka ‘Lylat Wars’)! Led by Sonic Dreamcaster and Lywx, and thanks to the hard work and dedication of many others over the course of several months, we have gotten the game to a state where we feel comfortable showcasing it for you.”
That showcase took the form of a two-hour stream hosted by Rakanai, which you can see below. (Be warned that a brief glimpse of Rakanai’s slightly horny desktop background early on makes this video ever so slightly NSFW.)
Starship brings Star Fox 64 to a higher resolution, widescreen display, with options for things like improved anti-aliasing and texture filtering. The big one is the better framerate, though, as Starship will run Star Fox 64 at 60 FPS or whatever other frame rate target you can imagine. The internal game logic still runs at its original frame rate, but the smoother visual motion makes the game a whole lot more pleasant to look at.
While the ire of Nintendo lawyers is infamous, they’ve historically not bothered with the devs behind the PC ports of games like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time despite widespread notoriety across the internet. These projects all require you to provide your own game ROM in order to make them work, and the fact that the devs aren’t distributing any copyrighted materials seems to have kept them safe from the old cease and desist action.
The devs behind Starship say “we do not have a timeframe for a release,” but in the stream Rakanai hints that the project could go public in December.
Fans keep making the best N64 games even better.