Emulators and firmware blobs are about as far apart from each other as trees and hippopotamus. You need the firmware blob for the emulator to work, but I highly doubt Nintendo just had a source code repo of emulating an n64 hardware system on x86-64.
Need is probably a strong word. Why bother working through a proper port when you can port a single emulator and sell dozens of your own pirated games?
The 2020 gigaleak proved that they still keep old source code and assets, and they still need to pirate their own roms?
Emulators and firmware blobs are about as far apart from each other as trees and hippopotamus. You need the firmware blob for the emulator to work, but I highly doubt Nintendo just had a source code repo of emulating an n64 hardware system on x86-64.
Need is probably a strong word. Why bother working through a proper port when you can port a single emulator and sell dozens of your own pirated games?