Super Mario 64 for the PS1
114 comments
·December 10, 2025zamadatix
kibwen
Given that this is HN, I'm contractually obligated to mention that the GBA port is written in Rust: https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/the-impossible-port-super-mar...
pmarin
That sound more like a demake than a port. Very cool anyway.
deaddodo
A demake would be a reimagining of a modern game into the style and aesthetics of the time. E.g. taking God of War and turning it into a 2D Shinobi-style platformer for Sega Genesis. Or turning Gran Turismo into a Mode7-style racer on SNES.
In this case, the creator wrote a custom 3D renderer and recreated the models/meshes to get as close of an approximation of the N64 experience onto the GBA.
I wouldn't call it a port necessarily ("recreation" seems more apt), but it's closer to that than a demake.
giancarlostoro
Interesting, I'm wondering if the GBA could handle a light version of a Minecraft style game, but the N64 looks like it could be great at it too. I need to get me a SummerCart64 one of these days and experiment with my old N64.
takantri
ClassiCube (https://github.com/ClassiCube/ClassiCube) exists, which is an open-source Minecraft Classic reimplementation with an N64 port among dozens of others. HN discussed it two years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518874).
ClassiCube has a WIP GBA port, but according to commits it only hits 2 FPS as of now and is not listed in its README.
On a related tangent, there's also Fromage, a separate Minecraft Classic clone written for the PS1 (https://chenthread.asie.pl/fromage/).
alexisread
Related to this is the Atari Falcon port of Minecraft using a sparse voxel octree, might work for the GBA seeing as the Quake ports are similar performance-wise:
maximilianburke
Probably. There's Tomb Raider for the GBA via OpenLara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVSLcqGP7g
lbrito
this guy builds a very similar engine https://www.youtube.com/@3DSage/videos
ddtaylor
Does anyone know where the source to this is? It seems to have been nuked.
zesterer
I'm slowly preparing it to be released, I just have a lot of IRL stuff going on!
no_wizard
While this is cool, it is really hard to look at for me.
Still bravo! I know getting it working and complete is the real goal and it is commendable.
throwaway314155
> it is really hard to look at for me.
What were you expecting?
whizzter
Affine texture mapping is kinda jarring to look at, especially in this GBA port since there is no fixup with huge ground polygons drifting around.
One of the listed features in the PS1 port in the OP article is tesselation to reduce the issues of the PS1 HW affine texture mapper, on the GBA you have some base cost of doing manual software texture mapping but also oppurtunities to do some minor perspective correction to lessen the worst effects (such as doing perspective correction during the clipping process).
no_wizard
Nothing. I have zero expectations. Giving an honest take on what I saw is all.
musha68k
Amazing feat. I was a very happy owner of both consoles back in the day, and this port clearly shows how much the N64 brought that "SGI at home" feel in mid‑1996; at least until Voodoo 1 / QuakeGL, maybe even up to Unreal (Glide) or Sonic Adventure on DC?
I still remember gasping when I first saw the basically unattainable (for me) Japanese‑import N64 running Mario 64.
Such an interesting and varied gaming landscape back then; for example, the Wipeout experience on PSX was beyond the N64 port in that particular niche, for its own set of reasons.
masfoobar
Being a teenager, I honestly viewed the N64 (Ultra 64) as being an unstoppable force during the early news. We even had a 486 PC running Doom since the early-to-mid 90s. LOL. I couldn't wait to see what Doom would be like on the N64.
In typical fanboyism, I viewed the main SGI systems are the superior systems to the N64.. but they were for the office.. not the home. The other was Panasonic M2.
Of course.. either the N64 was released in the UK or not far away, I remember walking into PC World (a cool computer shop at the time) with a demo of Tomb Raider. I believe it was running a Voodoo1 card and the realisation kicked in. The N64 is already surpassed.
Wasn't long before we had a Voodoo2 card and the first game we played was a demo of Turok:Dinosaur Hunter. It was much better than the N64 version (which I owned)
Once I started playing GLQuake it was a PC master race.
It was at this point I snapped out being a Nintendo 'fanboy' and accept that hardware gets you so far... its the games that make a console.
I still think the N64 was a great console. Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, etc. Great memories. Also got a Gamecube, Wii, and Switch.
As I got older and snapped out of the fanboyism, I realised the Playstation was a good console. I am on the fence with the Cartridge vs CD argument. There are cases for both. If we look at Mario 64, many aspects worked well on Cartridge. I guess faster load times and transition of music. With CD.. you have CD quality music and more variation of textures and level design (generally speaking)
Putting all the aside, Playstation is just as much capable of doing a good Super Mario 64 port despite the (many like) PS1 jaggy polygons.
amlib
> Tessellation (up to 2x) to reduce issues with large polygons
From the videos I've watched there is still insane amounts of affine transformation texture warping, is that because it's not enable or because 2x is not enough?
I guess they will need to also redo all level geometry to be more amenable to tesselation... I guess that's why many ps1 games had blocky looking levels.
malucart
right now there is basically no preprocessing of level polygons and they are copied as is, but when it is implemented, the largest polygons will be split to solve this
this is also necessary to fix the occasional stretched textures, as texture coordinates are also limited to a smaller range per polygon on PS1
mewse-hn
I see a lot of texture warp like you mentioned but I'm not seeing the geometry popping (wobble?) that was a hallmark of ps1 games, I'm guessing they're using soft floating point for the geometry and doing perspective-correct texture mapping would just be too expensive for decent frame rate
spicyjpeg
The PS1's GPU does not support perspective correction at all; it doesn't even receive homogeneous 3D vertex coordinates, instead operating entirely in 2D screen space and leaving both 3D transformations and Z-sorting to the CPU [1]. While it is possible to perform perspective correct rendering in software, doing so in practice is extremely slow and the few games that pull it off are only able to do so by optimizing for a special case (see for instance the PS1 version of Doom rendering perspective correct walls by abusing polygons as "textured lines" [2]).
[1]: https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal/blob/main/src/08... - bit of a shameless plug, but notice how the Z coordinates are never sent to the GPU in this example.
eru
It's funny that the PS1 got so famous for 3d games, when its 'GPU' was entirely 2d.
I guess the main thing the console brought to the table that made 3d (more) feasible was that the CPU had a multiplication instruction?
LarsDu88
Darn I posted the same thing in another thread
wk_end
The README mentions that it uses both (new) fixed point as well as soft floating point.
Unless I'm mistaken, the PS1 just plain doesn't support perspective correction. All texture mapping is done in hardware using a very not-programmable GPU; there'd be no way to do perspective correction, decent frame rate or not, outside of software rendering the whole thing (which would be beyond intractable).
The common workaround for this was, as suggested, tessellation - smaller polygons are going to suffer less from affine textures. Of course that does up your poly count.
malucart
it's not possible to have either subpixel vertex precision or perspective correct mapping with the PS1 GPU, as it only takes 2D whole-pixel coordinates for triangle vertices. (contrary to popular belief, N64 also uses exclusively fixed point for graphics btw, it just has subpixel units.) better tessellation can mitigate the perspective issues by a lot, but the vertex snapping is unsolvable, and it is indeed present here. look closer and you might see it.
eru
Interesting!
I guess you could pretend to have sub-pixel precision on the PS1, if you did it manually? Eg change the colours around 'between pixels' or something like that?
But that would probably get very expensive very soon.
wk_end
It notes in the Known Issues section that "Tessellation is not good enough to fix all large polygons".
Maybe it just needs more tessellation or something else is going on, because you're right - even as someone who grew up on the PS1 and is accustomed to early 3D jank, it looks painfully janky.
ranger_danger
There was also just recently a Dreamcast port made, as well as Star Fox 64 for Dreamcast and also Mario Kart 64 for multiple platforms.
https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompila...
bena
They just finished a Star Fox 64 port as well
Larrikin
Are there any pictures or video of it running? I understand why they are not on the GitHub page
platevoltage
here's another video that showed good gameplay shots that I happened to see last night.
ginko
The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.
LarsDu88
John carmack complained about this same issue for the Playstation DOOM port: page 337 https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf
Playstation rendered with affine texturing which made it impossible to get perspective correct rendering without hacks. The porting team ultimately did a very interesting hack where they would use polygons to render 1 pixel wide strips effectively simulating how non-hardware (that is CPU-based/integer) acclerated rendering was done on the PC.
bluedino
It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64
anthk
That was an issue in tons of PSX games.
zoeysmithe
Its incredible to how compltely unwatchable modern youtube norms are, to me at least. I feel like youtubers now aim almost exclusively for the 12-18 demographic. I mean, this person is doing some kind of character or affectation instead of using a normal voice. Everything is some kind of grift or character or PR or persona now it seems. I understand they do this to get viewers, but its just depressing how much more content I'd enjoy if the PR gimmicks and lowest-common-denominator tricks were stopped.
I just saw techtips Linus interview Linus Torvalds and the constant manboying and bad jokes was just embarrassing and badly hurt the interview. I really wish people like this would turn it way, way down. I think we all love some levity and whimsy, but now those gimmicks are bigger and louder than the actual content.
viraptor
Torvalds didn't hold back either though, so not sure what the complaint is... If you watch some WAN you'll see you're not getting some weird persona in that video, just the same guy with a bit of extra energy - which is just what you want to do for presentations / shows / whatever. It was a genuine experience.
kanzure
To me this sounds like a computer-generated voice for obvious pro-privacy reasons for this kind of project. If it bothers you, then maybe work on better voice synthesis tech! I assume it sounds not-leading-generation because it was locally rendered but I could be wrong.
brailsafe
> I just saw techtips Linus interview Linus Torvalds and the constant manboying and bad jokes was just embarrassing and badly hurt the interview.
If you've been watching LTT for any amount of time, it wouldn't be surprising that that's just LTT Linus' nervous awkward style, he's just a person. The jokes can be cringe as hell, but I thought the video was great, I don't think most nerds would be any different in front of a camera.
eru
Thanks for the link!
The first comment is pretty funny:
> Finally, Super Mario 32.
ranger_danger
zamadatix
For those that prefer pure gameplay to skip through https://youtu.be/kkJWZlAjZp0
threethirtytwo
This is emulated as I'm sure the other videos are, but the PS1 back in the day had no way of running anything this crisp, so the emulator is `enhancing` it here. It's not an actual representation of what the game would have looked like.
wodenokoto
Lots of people complaining that this has warped textures and whatnot - but come on! This is amazing!
mywittyname
Obligatory mention of Kaze, who has spent the past several years optimizing Mario64 using a variety of interesting methods. Worth a watch if your interests are at the intersection of vintage gaming and programming.
extraduder_ire
I was just about to post his video from August explaining how much excess ram mario 64 uses and where, which was the first serious mention I saw of a ps1 port being possible. He uses the ps1's smaller ram size as a kind of benchmark.
I did not expect it to happen so soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZcbgNdWL7w - Mario 64 wastes SO MUCH MEMORY
malucart
I've been working on it since mid 2024, so that video was a funny coincidence :)
eru
He's great. (And ripped!)
I wonder what someone who has PS1 knowledge equivalent to Kaze's N64 knowledge could do on that console---perhaps using Mario 32 as the benchmark.
(Mario 32 = Mario 64 on PS1.)
schlauerfox
There is an explosion of decompilation projects spawning new ports, but was there something that enabled better decompilations? I see it across many retro games.
spicyjpeg
It has been enabled mainly by the the advent of streamlined tooling to assist with 1:1 byte-by-byte matching decompilations (https://decomp.me/ comes to mind), which allows new projects to get off the ground right away without having to reinvent basic infrastructure for disassembling, recompiling and matching code against the original binary first. The growth of decompilation communities and the introduction of "porting layers" that mimic console SDK APIs but emulate the underlying hardware have also played a role, though porting decompiled code to a modern platform remains very far from trivial.
That said, there is an argument to be made against matching decompilations: while their nature guarantees that they will replicate the exact behavior of the original code, getting them to match often involves fighting the entropy of a 20-to-30-year-old proprietary toolchain, hacks of the "add an empty asm() block exactly here" variety and in some cases fuzzing or even decompiling the compiler itself to better understand how e.g. the linking order is determined. This can be a huge amount of effort that in many cases would be better spent further cleaning up, optimizing and/or documenting the code, particularly if the end goal is to port the game to other platforms.
barbs
Perhaps AI has made it easier?
userbinator
More people have discovered Ghidra.
peterbozso
Cool stuff! Make sure to also check: https://sm64coopdx.com Recently we are having tons of fun with this with a couple of friends.
BugsJustFindMe
No screenshots :(
SpaceManNabs
this is the devil's work. nicely done. what stood out to me is that one of the known issues is the pause menu not working. wonder why that is.
edit: whoever did the gameplay video is really good at mario n64. They were playing to and reacting to stuff that had rendered very late, if at all.
itomato
“Finally, Super Mario 32”
If you like this port, you may also enjoy this ground-up effort to clone SM64 on the GBA https://youtu.be/nS5rj80L-pk