I’m surprised no one ever tried to compile all the hacks into a single open source plugin or emulator. There are only around 400 retail games for the N64 which seems pretty manageable to have some sort of game detection ruleset for various hacks.

It seems like in recent years N64 emulation is finally improving somewhat with lower level emulation like the parallel64 core in retroarch.

Long term decompilation is the better solution regardless but it’s going to take a good amount of time to decompile all the games of significance for the N64.