I've been playing with Mupen64 and SixtyForce today to see how feasible it would be to play Ocarina of Time on my Powerbook (12" 1.67 GHz, OS 10.4.8, 1.25 GB ram). While things have improved dramatically since tried about a year ago, unless you have a newer faster machine, there is still a ways to go before it becomes enjoyable.

Mupen64 seems slightly faster than SixtyForce, but both are jerky on my machine, which makes the audio essentially unlistenable. Mupen supports more ROMs (e.g. Master Quest wouldn't get past the profile creation screen on SixtyForce), but Ocarina of Time seems to display the same glitches under both emulators. The deal breaker for me is that Mupen doesn't yet support USB gamepads. Navigating with arrow keys just doesn't do it for me. SixtyForce has a few more options on how you can configure the level of detail, some of which are buggy at this point, but with all the bells and whistles turned on, Ocarina is absolutely gorgeous, albeit unplayably slow.

I'm not putting a star-rating at this point, as it seems a bit unfair to rate the software this early in its development. Both look like they will be great emulators given another 6 to 12 months of development. If I get a new Intel iMac in that time, I might try it again to see how much the extra horsepower makes a difference.

Much thanks to the developers for all their efforts.