Mupen64Plus is ancient in emulator terms. It uses legacy pipelines. Modern graphics drivers—especially Intel integrated graphics and the open-source nouveau driver for NVIDIA—often deprecate these legacy calls, resulting in a startup crash.
You are dealing with the most infamous issue in the N64 emulation scene: mupen64plus crashes on startup
: On some Linux systems, the default PulseAudio configuration causes a crash during initialization. You can often fix this by editing the mupen64plus.sh script to set SDL_AUDIOPLUGIN=alsa [5]. Mupen64Plus is ancient in emulator terms
Here are three survival workarounds:
This seems obvious, but it accounts for 15% of startup crashes: mupen64plus crashes on startup
If you compiled from source and it crashes, you likely lack the SDL2 framework. Use Homebrew: