N64 Classic Star Fox 64 Gets A Glorious Fan-Made PC Port In Time For Christmas
Alternatively, you could just play it on your current gaming PC and enjoy modern conveniences like 60 FPS, ultra-widescreen support, and control rebinding—nevermind having full freedom to use whatever control device you like. That's a very real and available option to you now thanks to the Harbour Masters, the same group who brought you Ship of Harkinian (the Ocarina of Time PC port).
The new project isn't called "Star Fox 64 PC" or anything like that, and if you Google that, you're likely to find a pile of articles like this one. Instead, the name of the project is "Starship - Centauri Alfa". That's because "Star Fox" is a Nintendo property and would give Nintendo reason to sue.
Indeed, if you're a little savvy, you might be thinking that Nintendo's ninja-like lawyers are surely descending on the Harbour Masters as we speak. That's probably not the case, though because this is a court case that Nintendo would definitely lose—at least in the United States. You see, these PC ports were created through a process called reverse-engineering. They're not distributing any copyrighted Nintendo material; the source code for the PC port is fully created from scratch based on Nintendo's game.
Reverse-engineering is protected by law in the United States, but as you've likely caught on to (since, as we established, you're a little savvy), that means they can't ship the game assets with the game code. As such, you will require your own copy of Star Fox 64, dumped into ROM format, to legally play the game on your PC. Simply owning the cartridge doesn't necessarily give you legal protection, because that dump you've downloaded from the internet was not your own backup copy—which is the part that is legal.
Assuming you've dumped your Star Fox 64 cartridge, though, you're basically ready to go. This isn't emulation but instead a native PC game, and as you can imagine, the system requirements for PC games that originally ran on the N64 are quite low. Make sure you have a suitable gamepad connected and grab the Starship - Centauri Alfa files from the Github repository here. Binaries are only available for Windows at this time, but the source is fully available if you'd like to contribute to a Linux version.
