Super Mario 64 on Game Boy Advance: a second developer wants to port the entire game
A few months ago, Joshua Barretto impressed the community by showing levels of Super Mario 64 running on Game Boy Advance. A bluffing technical feat, but limited to a few sections of the game. A second developer, independent of the first, has just taken up the challenge with an even greater ambition: to port the entire of Super Mario 64 to GBA. /p> Where Joshua Barretto focused on technical feasibility in demonstrating that the GBA could run SM64's 3D engine, this new developer is aiming for something more complete. Its stated goal: all the levels, all the objects, all the progression of the original game, playable from end to end on real Game Boy Advance hardware. The targeted framerate is 5 to 15 FPS depending on the scenes. This is not smooth in the modern sense, but it is consistent with the capabilities of the GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU, which was not designed for polygonal 3D. For comparison, games like Asterix and Star Wars Episode II on GBA were already running in pseudo-3D at similar framerates. The GBA has 256 KB of internal RAM and a CPU clocked at 16 MHz with no floating compute unit. Super Mario 64 on N64 runs on a 93 MHz MIPS R4300i processor with 4 MB of RAM. The gap is considerable.
>The solution goes through an almost complete rewriting of the rendering: no real polygonal 3D but a system of raycasting and simplified projectionwhich gives the illusion of 3D on the 240x160 screen of the GBA. The physics and game logic are preserved, only the rendering is radically adapted. The ROM requires assets extracted from a legal copy of Super Mario 64. The project is available on GitHub with a downloadable demo ROM. Playable on GBA emulator (mGBA recommended) and on real hardware via flashcart (EZ-Flash Omega, EverDrive GBA...). The developer specifies that the project is still in active development, with compatibility and performance improvements planned regularly. Sources: Time Extension - Retro Handhelds - Retro Dodo🎮 A different objective from the first port
🔧 How is this technically possible?
📥 Availability