Corn was a software emulator of the Nintendo 64

Nintendo 64

The , often referred to as N64, was Nintendo′s third home video game console for the international market. Named for its 64-bit CPU, it was released in June 1996 in Japan, September 1996 in North America, March 1997 in Europe and Australia, September 1997 in France and December 1997 in Brazil...

 (N64) games console targeting x86 computers running Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. Corn was developed by a programmer using the alias ContraSF.

Features

When Corn was released in 1999, it was renowned for being one of the highest performance N64 emulators available. This exceptional performance is reputedly attributed to the use of fully static recompilation of the MIPS instruction code for N64 programs to the native x86 instructions. High performance was also achieved through the use of high-level emulation

High-level emulation

High-level emulation is an approach for construction of emulators, especially for video game consoles, which attempts to simulate the response of the system rather than accurately recreating its internal design....

 techniques. A limited overview of the technical features, and goals of Corn were discussed in an interview with ContraSF.

Corn's compatibility with N64 programs was highly limited, and Corn was initially only optimised for Mario 64. While other games would run with Corn, there were often emulation inaccuracies and other major problems. This lack of compatibility is due to:

• The limitations of HLE techniques; which can require significant new code to be written for each original game title to be supported.
• The challenge of statically recompiling a binary program from one computer architecture to another.
• An apparently limited development life after initial release.

Development status

The last official release of Corn was version 0.29. However, a beta version of Corn 0.30 was leaked onto the Internet, allegedly after a fraudulent e-mail claiming to be from ContraSF asked one of the beta testers to release the program.

After the leaked 0.30 release, development of Corn ended and there is little information about any further development plans or the status of ContraSF.