The Harbour Masters 64 Discord has announced the development of "Starship," a native PC Port of Star Fox 64 subsequently demoed on Twitch and YouTube by Star Fox speedrunner Rakanai. Harbour Masters 64 is the development community behind Ship of Harkinian, a 2022 native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
"Harbour Masters 64 is pleased to announce the development of Starship—a PC port of Star Fox 64 (aka "Lylat Wars")! Led by Sonic Dreamcaster and Samplywx," reads the announcement on the Harbour Masters 64 Discord. "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."
You've been able to play Star Fox 64 on your PC for many years now via emulation, but native ports represent a new threshold of quality. Emulation is a broad tool that will allow most, if not all, of a console's games to run on PC (or a powerful enough device like a Steam Deck or smartphone) to an acceptable standard. A native port, meanwhile, is a specific effort to make a game run on PC without a demanding emulation layer. Native ports require painstaking decompilation of a game's source code and a great deal of development effort, but result in a far superior experience. Some advantages include:
- High resolution support without stretching the UI or otherwise compromising the experience.
- Ultrawide support.
- Elimination of persistent glitches present in emulation.
- High framerate support without introducing speedup glitches.
- Lower system demands.
- Modding potential.
All pretty desirable, exciting stuff, and the beta gameplay shown off by Rakanai is incredibly crisp—N64-era art still holds up remarkably well even at super-high resolutions and fast framerates. What's more, native ports are, like emulation, perfectly legal—you still have to supply your own ROM to run native ports like Starship.
In the past, I've found the OpenGOAL native ports of the Jak and Daxter games to be absolutely essential compared to straight up emulation. Rakanai said on-stream that the Starship port of Star Fox 64 is planned to release sometime in December—just in time for everybody's time off for the holidays.
