What Happened To The Mega N64 Emulator?

The Mega N64 emulator was removed from the Google Play Store and is no longer available to install. Back in its heyday, it was known for being one of, if not the best N64 emulators for Android, but due to a series of unfortunate events, it had to be removed from the Play Store.

Back in 2018, Mega N64 was infected with malware and infected version was said to have been installed by millions of Android users due to the Google Play Store’s automatic update feature. This reddit post here explains what happened.

Reddit user Reiley360 said that they had the Mega N64 app installed and found that on September 24, 2018 the app suspiciously started using over 249MB of data on their phone. What’s odd is that they hadn’t even used the Mega N64 app in a very long time so why was it using all of this data in the background?

They went on to check their device’s Wifi usage and it turns out that it had consumed over 20.66GB of internet. It turns out that not only was the app using egregious amount of data in the background, but was also causing the device’s Chrome browser to randomly open up a website called LiveMobileSearch.

A large number of users reported the app to Google who eventually took it down off the Play Store. What’s scary is that at one point at its peak, the Mega N64 emulator had been installed over 10 million times. This means that over 10 million different devices could have been infected by this malware.

A brief analysis of the app revealed that it contained the following libraries:

• 8.0K libae-exports.so
• 12K libae-imports.so
• 1.5M libaudio-sdl.so
• 552K libcore.so
• 44K libfront-end.so
• 1012K libgles2glide64.so
• 156K libgles2n64.so
• 1.2M libgles2rice.so
• 24K libinput-android.so
• 56K librsp-hle-nosound.so
• 56K librsp-hle.so
• 568K libSDL2.so
• 20K libxperia-touchpad.so

What’s interesting about these libraries is that when further inspected, members of the community began to see that they were very similar if not identical to the ones in the Mupen64Plus emulator. Further investigation also found that apparently there was even some OUYA related code!

Many users of Mega N64 had to eventually factory reset and wipe their devices because the full-screen popups that began to appear were unable to be removed even after uninstalling the app.

Unfortunately the app now ceases to exist and for good reason.

That being said, an alternative to Android emulation is to setup a Raspberry Pi and RetroPie. Be sure to check out our guide on how to setup RetroPie N64 if interested.

There are also other Android emulators available on the Google Play Store as well. Emulators like Mupen64Plus FZ are essentially just as popular on Android as the Project64 emulator is on PC.