Instead, it was motivated primarily by speedrunners who wanted 'to understand the game's code better in order to help find those exploits,' according to Kenix, who's currently helping to head the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET) that spun off from that effort.įortunately, N64 games arrange their files in 16-byte chunks, which can make it easier to see the empty 'padding' marking the end of a file. The two-year effort to decompile Super Mario 64 wasn't started with a Windows executable in mind. This kind of reverse-engineering from raw binary to easy-to-read code isn't a simple process, but it's an effort that a growing community of hobbyist decompilers is undertaking to unlock the secrets behind some of their favorite games. Instead, the port seems to be a direct result of a years-long effort to decompile the Super Mario 64 ROM into parsable C code. And its release has nothing to do with a recent leak of internal Nintendo files dating back to the Gamecube days. The PC port-which was released with little buildup and almost no promotion-wasn't built from scratch in a modern game engine, in the manner of some other now-defunct Super Mario 64 porting projects.

Far from being just a usual emulated ROM, this self-contained program enables features like automatic scaling to any screen resolution, and players are already experimenting with adding simple graphics-card-level reshaders, including ray-tracing, as well.

Early this week, with little warning, the Internet was graced with a Windows executable containing a fully playable PC port of Super Mario 64.

Super mario 64 hacking tools