Now here is something truly special for our retro fans. A team of modders has just ported one of the best Nintendo 64 games, Banjo-Kazooie, to the PC.
Banjo: Recompiled is a project that takes Banjo-Kazooie and turns it into a native PC port using N64: Recompiled. This new version adds many new features, improvements, and lots of mod support. It also uses RT64 as its rendering engine to give the game better graphics.
The cool thing about this PC version of Banjo-Kazooie is that it supports high framerates and high resolutions. This means you can play the game at more than 60FPS. There is also support for mods, as well as for ultra-wide screens. All the advanced visual effects, like the jigsaw puzzle screen transition and Bottles’ Moving Picture Game, work as intended. Even small details, like the game’s original mipmapping, are kept with very accurate quality.
The music and sounds are exactly like the original N64 version of the game. All of the audio processing works correctly, with no popping or stuttering. Any scenes that match sound to visuals have been fixed so the timing stays perfectly in sync, just like on the original hardware.
This unofficial PC port is similar to all the other PC ports of the console-only games we’ve covered in the past. In other words, it does not contain any assets. As such, you’ll also need its ROM file, otherwise, you won’t be able to run it. To be more precise, you’ll need the North American 1.0 version.
To play it, PC gamers will at least need a GPU supporting Direct3D 12.0 (Shader Model 6), Vulkan 1.2, or Metal Argument Buffers Tier 2. You’ll also need a CPU supporting the SSE4.1 instruction set. ARM64 builds will work on any ARM64 CPU.
You can go ahead and download this PC port of Banjo-Kazooie from this link. Below, you can also find a trailer for it.
If you enjoy projects like this, there are plenty of other unofficial PC ports you can try. You can download PC versions of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Crash Team Racing, and Duke Nukem: Zero Hour. There are also PC ports of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark, Jak & Daxter, and Sonic Unleashed. And, as I mentioned earlier this month, we may soon get a PC port of the canceled GoldenEye 007 Remaster.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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