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I'm writing this review because I had to ask around to figure out how to get this to run on my Steam Deck on Retroarch. I totally thought I was SOL until commenter Synulia on CDRomance helped me out. This is what they said:

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Go to Core Options and scroll down to the bottom and change Count Per Op Divider (Overclock) to 3, NOT the option above it labeled just Count Per Op.

To get the rumble actually working, go to Pak/Controller options at the very bottom and set Player 1 Pak to rumble.

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This finally worked for me. After I finally got the game to boot, the patch works as intended. The controller, in fact, rumbles. I just wish the creator spent more time figuring out how to make this patch compatible with a variety of different emulators or at least documented how to do this.

In 1997, Nintendo conducted a short lived-experiment: rereleasing games from the Nintendo 64's launch year with rumble support added in. This so-called "Shindou Pak Taiou" series consisted of only two games, neither of which left Japan in their updated forms (at least until Super Mario 3D All-Stars came along).

We all know about Super Mario 64's Shindou Edition and how it stripped the original game of some of its most iconic elements, but nobody ever seems to talk about its lesser-known twin. And frankly, that's a huge shame, because unlike Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64's Shindou Edition is without a doubt the definitive way to play the game. In addition to implementing rumble, this rerelease adds a robust new "ghost race" feature a-la Mario Kart 64 and even updates some of the music and sound effects. Honestly, the only downside of Wave Race 64: Shindou Edition was that it was never released in English, and thanks to this patch, that's no longer an issue.

While I'm glad that this fan translation finally exists, there are two things that I should mention to anyone who wants to try it out. Firstly, the ROM file that you get after applying the patch is a non-standard size: my computer lists it as 7.82 megabytes. All official N64 ROMs are padded out to an even size (e.g.: 8 MB, 12 MB, 16 MB, etc.) and some emulators or flash carts might not like the fact that this fan translation doesn't conform to this standard.

Fortunately, the fix for this is simple, if tedious: just open up the ROM in a hex editor and pad it out to 8 megabytes yourself by inserting a bunch of "FF" bytes at the end of the ROM's binary.

The second issue is a much more serious one: loading the patched ROM up in almost any emulator will cause it to freeze on the opening N64 logo screen. The creator of this patch vaguely alluded to this in the readme, but neglected to provide instructions on how to fix it.

It took me a while, especially since the unpatched Japanese Shindou ROM seemed to be working fine, but eventually, I figured it out. Most emulators (Mupen64Plus and its derivatives for sure, and I'm pretty sure Project64 too) can't run Wave Race 64: Shindou Edition with their default settings, so they use a game-specific hack to get it to work. Because this patch changes the ROM's checksum, the emulator doesn't detect the game correctly and fails to apply the fix automatically.

Luckily, it's easy to apply the fix yourself once you know how: just go into the game-specific settings and set the number of counts per operation to "3". Keep in mind that this setting might be labeled differently depending on your emulator: for instance, it's listed as "CountPerOp" in Mupen64Plus's config files, and as "Counter Factor" in RMG's settings menu.

Anyways, once you DO get the game working, it works great. I don't have any major problems with the translation itself and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to play the definitive version of Wave Race 64. Just don't give up if it doesn't work right away. You might have to jump through a few hoops to get it running, but it's well worth it once you do.