UltraHLE prompted a great revival in emulation and caused a greal deal of conflict in the emulation world as it was seen as the first step towards newer systems being emulated at a quicker pace. The amazing thing about this emulator was it used a technique called High Level Emulation (HLE) that allowed the relatively still powerful N64 to be emulated on relatively slow PC computers.

This emulator caused a great influx of new blood into emulation and for many of those people in emulation is the emulator they remember playing first. Be sure to check out this copy of the first official UtraHLE page which has some great information!

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The emulator was revolutionary in its design. Previously, emulator programmers had concentrated on accurately emulating all of the low level operations which the target machine was capable of. It had worked well for older consoles such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Co-authors Epsilon and RealityMan pioneered a paradigm shift in emulator programming. They realized that since N64 games were programmed in C code, that instead of intercepting machine level operations, they could concentrate on intercepting (the far fewer) C library calls, and write their own code to implement the libraries. Thus UltraHLE software is in fact an emulator with some parts implemented as a simulation. The HLE approach is therefore not a 100% emulator and the technique is not used in purist emulation projects such as MAME. It did however open the doors to create playable game emulators which use complex graphic routines that require considerable computation power that could be simulated easily with available PC graphic cards.

The final implementation was written in C and used the Glide API, which has since fallen out of use due to being specific to 3dfx adapters. Due to its popularity, several Glide to DirectX translating utilities were made specifically for UltraHLE for non-3dfx video cards.

High Level Emulation had its drawbacks. At the time of release, UltraHLE was only able to emulate approximately 20 games to a playable standard. The software only emulated and simulated the calls that were required for specific games; it was required to adapt the software for games that used different parts of the N64 hardware.

A sizable community were interested solely in the piracy of N64 games, and thus were distributing ROMs, waiting for the release of an emulator to play them on. UltraHLE filled a massive vacuum in the warez community, and was downloaded 300,000 times on the night of release.

Before the release on January 28, 1999, the emulation community had been a tight-knit circle of programmers interested in the technical aspects of emulation. UltraHLE was revolutionary, and many in the scene were genuinely impressed at the accomplishment. However, within hours of its release, much of the discussion was not about the technical accomplishment of UltraHLE, but where to find titles to run on it.

Inevitably, Nintendo found out about the piracy facilitated by UltraHLE, and threatened the authors, Epsilon and RealityMan, as well as the site hosting UltraHLE, EmuUnlim, with legal action. Despite this, UltraHLE had grown beyond either its authors' or Nintendo's control. Subsequently Epsilon and RealityMan abandoned their pseudonyms and went into hiding.

After the source code was leaked in 2002, an OpenGL version of UltraHLE was released, though it garnered little acclaim as many more powerful emulators had been released by that time. The new release, titled UltraHLE 2064, was available at its official site until the site was deregistered.

Source Information: Wikipedia