Banjo-Kazooie (Nintendo 64)

The music adapts seamlessly to the different areas, and the voices are fun and silly. It's very well implemented, but it all gets a bit on my nerves after a while.

I tested out how exiting a level before I got every item worked. It was quite disappointing - the game resets the collected musical notes and the little colored dudes you save, so you have to collect them all again to get everything. Very annoying. The lesson is that I should get absolutely everything before exiting a level.

This seems to work perfectly on the new MiSTer N64 core, and the game is quite fun. I played through the first level.

The part where you get turned into an ant to climb the anthill in the first level is great.

Some of the games give me trouble because of the weird N64 controller layout. My main problem are the 4 C-buttons, which are next to A and B on the right side of the controller: they don't map well to any controller with 4 buttons on the right side. I searched a bit for USB N64 controllers and adapters, but think I found an even better solution:

The 'HORI Fighting Commander OCTA for PS5' works with fighting games on the PS4/5 and has 6 buttons on the right side. This might just work well for emulating a N64 controller, as I can map △/○/R1/R2 to the C-buttons, and it has more or less the same D-pad and joystick configuration as the N64 controller. We'll see if it works.

I got the HORI now, put it in PS5 mode (PC mode didn't work on MiSTer), assigned the buttons, and it seems to work very well for the Nintendo 64. The controller feels good, the buttons are precise microswitches, the D-pad is great, and the joystick feels good with a nice smooth octagonal gate. I'm proud of my solution to the N64 controller problem, and the HORI should come in very handy for playing fighting games on the PS5 as well.