N64 App on Switch Online to Get Switch 2 Exclusive Features - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 27 May 2025 / 3,757 Views
Nintendo announced the Nintendo 64 app for Nintendo Switch Online will be getting exclusive features on the Nintendo Switch 2.
The exclusive Switch 2 features for the N64 app includes Rewind, CRT Screen Filter, and View / Change Controls.
The View / Change Controls will also be available on the Switch 1.
View a trailer of the features below:
Read details on the features below:
- Rewind – If you make a mistake, easily rewind gameplay and try again.
- CRT Screen Filter – Recreate the look of a CRT television.
- View / Change Controls – Check what each button does in the game your playing, and reassign button mappings to suit your play style. (works on both Switch and Switch 2).
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Ok, the button mapping is great. Hated that the C-buttons were mapped to the right control stick playing Ocarina of Time.
Now an additional feature I want for all of the NSO games are scanned in manuals. These games often included background story bits, artwork and tricks in the manuals. Reading them was part of the experience of playing those games, but are still not there.
Rewind and CRT filter are……Switch 2 exclusive??????
Not enough RAM available for the Switch to rewind N64 frames effectively.
It probably can’t do the same CRT filter the Switch 2 does, but it would be interesting to see what kind of CRT filter it could do.
What technical reason does the Switch 2 have over the Switch 1 that would prevent it from doing a shader effect like a CRT filter? It's all done on the CUDA cores using the same math.
Again. PC was doing this stuff to N64 games decades ago.
They can do a CRT filter. Just not the same quality filter Switch 2 uses.
I don't think you understand how easy it is to do a CRT filter.
What is the Switch 2 doing with it's CRT filter that a PC from 20 years ago isn't doing?
I think they could do a filter better than the one they use for NES and SNES that understandably is not used for N64 because it would look even worse on that.
I think you might be right that it’s a care issue from Nintendo that has stopped them coming up with a decent CRT filter for N64 on Switch.
I’m certain the hardware for Switch 2 makes it far easier to implement a good solution. I also think the way they do it for Switch 2 wouldn’t work on Switch.
So apologies if I have hedged my bets at points by saying Nintendo physically can’t make a good CRT filter for Switch. I’m coming around to believing more strongly that it’s a lack of care factor on their part.
I was emulating Nintendo 64 games on Windows 98 with 256MB of Ram back in the early 2000's.
I could rewind stuff just fine.
The system they were using was something like 32MB of RAM for each of the more complex frames.
That’s cool that you had a good setup. N64 emulation was out of my reach for a few more years. I was sticking with SNES emu.
The Switch has solid state storage, they could do what I couldn't do 20 years ago and stream direct from the SSD.
It’s pretty slow NAND from memory. I don’t think there’s the bandwidth for it to maintain a minimum speed of more than 100 MB/second and it won’t have all of that available for a virtual memory scenario.
Their method might be inefficient with RAM though.
I think I remember getting Mario Kart 64 to run mostly ok back in the day but not with rewind.
Internal storage of the Switch 1 is rated for around 300MB/s.
MicroSD tops at around 90-100MB/s.
But it's not the transfer rates that are the benefit of solid state storage.
...It's seek times, or lack there-of. That is what ultimately enables this kind of thing, because seeking data over a stream is very IO intensive.
Does it actually maintain a consistent speed of 300 MB/s?
I’ve been assuming it’s faster than the MicroSD connection, but dipped down to something like what I said pretty quickly in practice.
That’s kinda neat if it’s more than twice as fast as I assumed.
Like all kinds of storage, performance can and does decrease depending on the kinds of transfers that are taking place.
The issue with MicroSD cards is that performance tanks when doing concurrent transfers... Not an issue for the Switch 1's internal storage.
Thank you. That makes sense to me.
Edit: Okay at least we're finally getting control remapping on both Switch/S2... Still no reason to lock the others to S2
I am not surprised in the slightest.
