NTSC-U Mario Kart 64 issues

[elkatas]

It must be a frame-skip messing up due to the power of the Wii.

Actually no. Turbomode bug is also on the original NTSC and PAL carts. If you play Moo Moo Farm or Donkey Kong track with 3 or 4 players, game sometimes goes into turbomode where everything moves extremely fast. But I'm not sure that does it happen more often on emulated version.

[elkatas]

There is no excuse Nintendo.

Majora's Mask had sometimes minor errors with sounds, because original game acccessed date all the time from the cart. Cube's disc drive was maybe fast, but not by any means so fast as the cart. That's why Majora's Mask stuttered in some places, crashed randomly and there were sound glitches....

This just makes me wonder doesn't Wii's N64 emulator transfer whole rom into memory when playing? Cube couldn't do that because it had only 24 mbs. Wii shouldn't have this problem, but there is always possibility that Nintendo used Collector Discs emulator directly without making any changes to it. That would mean that instead of transferring whole game into memory, Wii actually reads pieces of ROM from SD card as they are needed. Some SD-cards are extremely fast, but by my understanding, you can't access data randomly from them. You need to read whole card through before you can access certain file / position from file. This would make it slower than you would believe.

So basically this boils down to following questions:

* How Wii's N64 emulator deals with roms? Transferred into memory, or accessed from the SD-disc?
* How fast is Wii's SD Card?

If my little theory is true, it would also explain why Nintendo doesn't allow you to play downloaded games from own SD-card. Reason would simply be that they couldn't guarantee that your card would be fast enough to deal with N64 emulation.

[SuperCoolAl]

Flash memory is extremely fast, especially for random access. This is why Vista has new features to take advantage of Hybrid Hard Drives in addition to expanding your RAM through USB Memory Keys.

Think about how fast an N64 ROM loads in the Wii in comparison to off the Collector's Edition disk. Do we sit there and watch a loading bar on the Wii, as we did on Collector's Edition? Nope, so there's really nothing to worry about

[bcass]

Indeed. Comparisions of data transfer rates are probably far superior on modern day carts and data sticks than they were on an original N64.