Gopher64 v1.1.15 Update Bumps Rust Dependencies for N64 Emulator

Gopher64 v1.1.15 landed on March 6, 2026, and while it's primarily a housekeeping release, one change buried in the update will immediately affect anyone with existing save files: the emulator's save-file naming convention changed entirely, meaning it won't find saves created under the old format until you rename them manually.

The update itself is straightforward on the dependency side. The headline change is a bump of the eframe UI framework requirement from 0.30 to 0.31, handled by @dependabot in PR #221. Lead contributor @loganmc10 accounted for the rest of the commits, fixing address masking in sc64 read/write (#222), patching an out-of-bounds ROM DMA issue (#223), doing further sc64 cleanup (#224), adding a Cargo.lock file (#225), removing some dependencies (#226), cleaning up controller code (#378), and removing framebuffer tracking (#381).

The save situation deserves attention before you do anything else after updating. Emunations flags it prominently: the naming convention changed in this version, and the emulator simply will not locate saves that previously existed. The old format used a CZL- prefix followed by the sha256sum of the ROM. The new format drops that prefix entirely and goes to a full ROM title plus sha256 string. The new filename for Ocarina of Time looks like this: THE LEGEND OF ZELDA-49ACD3885F13B0730119B78FB970911CC8ABA614FE383368015C21565983368D.sra. You'll need to navigate to your save folder and rename each file to match the new convention before launching a game, or your progress won't load.

For anyone unfamiliar with the project, gopher64 is an open-source N64 emulator written in Rust and described as the spiritual successor to Simple64. It runs the parallel-rdp graphics engine alongside original CPU and RSP interpreters, skips game-specific hacks entirely, and includes integrated online netplay with cloud servers and upscaling support. It uses a Slint-based UI on Linux and distributes via Flatpak. Windows 10 and above is the listed minimum for that platform; Linux ARM binaries and source code tarballs are also available alongside the standard Linux build.

The previous notable release, v1.1.11 back in December 2025, included a libdragon compatibility addressing hack (#620), a controller assignment fix to only update input after user action (#629), and a Rust toolchain update to 1.92.0 (#634). The 1.1.15 dependency notes don't specify the exact Rust toolchain version bumped this cycle, only that Rust and other dependencies were updated to their latest versions.