Palmer Luckey, a military contractor who makes killer drones, military gear, and surveillance equipment for the U.S. government, would like to sell you a Nintendo 64. I finally had the chance to try out the ModRetro M64, and it left me with a terrible emotional cocktail of love and loathing.
I had no place to direct these anxieties. Luckey, the CEO of weapons manufacturer Anduril, wasn’t in the room. But the M64 uses off-the-shelf silicon. So who could I shake my fist at? Myself? I was the one playing the thing, after all. I was the one considering writing this piece. You cannot talk about something without promoting it, without promoting the people who make it. There is no “death of the author” for console makers and war profiteers alike.
Before I get into all that, the basics: The ModRetro M64 will launch on July 28 with several exclusive titles. AMD, the maker of the FPGA chip housed inside the console, had the system on display at its Computex showcase, including the controllers (which are sold separately). One of those titles, Extreme-G Turbo Fusion, was running in AMD’s booth.
As a child, I owned the original Extreme-G for the N64. I was as terrible at it as I was at all games in 1997, when I was literally 3 years old. You can play it now through the Nintendo Classics collection on a Switch or Switch 2. Extreme-G Turbo Fusion is a double pack of the original game and its sequel, Extreme-G 2. Using the M64, I ran along one course at night, with rain pattering along the track. The game stuttered every time there was a lightning strike in the distance, as the hardware itself buckled, much as the N64 often did almost 30 years ago.
The console will work with old N64 controllers as well as modern recreations like 8BitDo’s wireless mod kits and modern-feeling 8BitDo 64 controllers. ModRetro’s option, with its three prongs, which you still don’t know how to hold correctly, felt reminiscent of the original design, though with a thumbstick that seems less likely to break.
The M64 uses a field-programmable gate array chip, the AMD Artix UltraScale+ FPGA. This allows the console to emulate the N64’s original chip logic, letting you play your cartridges on your modern TV via regular HDMI. The device supports 4K resolution, though its software is much less robust than that of the very similar Analogue 3D. You can add filters to bring back scanlines or a soft CRT ambient glow. Analogue’s 3DOS lets you choose among the looks of multiple cathode-ray tube varieties, both professional and nonprofessional sets.
ModRetro’s new console has a few extra parts that neither the Analogue3D nor the N64 had. A dial wheel on the top lets you select options without a controller. It also features several USB-C ports alongside the HDMI slot. But what truly sets this console apart is its support for homebrew. The console is launching alongside titles like Extreme-G, the Doom-like shooter Xibalba 64, and the top-down arena shooter Xeno Crisis. It’s that rare support for small dev teams and their passion projects that gives me so much anguish about this device. After all, this indie-friendly console is also fronted by a man who makes and sells killer drones. This year, Luckey’s Anduril has sold Bolt-M “kamikaze” unmanned aircraft, also called “loitering munitions,” that act as AI-enabled hunter-killer explosives to the U.S. military under a $23.9 million contract.
You don’t have to look hard to find examples of major tech companies buddying up with the current regime inside the White House. President Donald Trump bought more than $1 million in Dell stock before last week, when the company was awarded a $9.7 billion defense contract. The same company that makes the XPS 13 I wrote about earlier this week will now be making billions of dollars by purchasing Microsoft services for the recently renamed “Department of War.”
That’s only one example of a tech industry that’s more than willing to work directly with the U.S. military or the Trump family. You are hard-pressed to buy devices that don’t, in some way, support a massive military industrial tech complex in some small way. But they do exist. For example, at Computex this year, I stopped by the Framework booth to check out a Framework Laptop 13 Pro. It’s the first device from the repairable laptop company that will ship with the open-source operating system Linux right in the box, meaning buyers aren’t giving Microsoft a dime.
Nevertheless, I don’t tell people how to spend their money. My job is to give folks the information they need before they make their next impulse buy.
A ModRetro M64 starts at $230, but you can get it for the $200 special launch price on July 28. An Analogue3D costs $270, and you can buy one today, though you’ll miss out on the fun colors of its limited-edition sets, since those are sold out. We cannot confirm whether Chromatic cartridges will work on Analogue’s hardware, though Luckey has previously stated that its games can slot into the original 1995 consoles, so maybe there’s still a way to support these homebrews without buying the arms dealer’s N64.
Source: Gizmodo