Super Mario 64 for the PS1

https://github.com/malucard/sm64-psx

by LaserDiscMan • 7 months ago

300 115 7 months ago

github.com

BugsJustFindMe• 7 months ago

No screenshots :(

Larrikin• 7 months ago

Are there any pictures or video of it running? I understand why they are not on the GitHub page

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f92hKbz5Eo

zamadatix5• 7 months ago

For those that prefer pure gameplay to skip through https://youtu.be/kkJWZlAjZp0

platevoltage• 7 months ago

here's another video that showed good gameplay shots that I happened to see last night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kscCFfXecTI

ginko3• 7 months ago

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.

zoeysmithe• 7 months ago

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.

eru14• 7 months ago

Thanks for the link!

The first comment is pretty funny:

Finally, Super Mario 32.

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

They just finished a Star Fox 64 port as well

zamadatix5• 7 months ago

If you like this port, you may also enjoy this ground-up effort to clone SM64 on the GBA https://youtu.be/nS5rj80L-pk

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

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.

maximilianburke• 7 months ago

Probably. There's Tomb Raider for the GBA via OpenLara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVSLcqGP7g

lbrito• 7 months ago

this guy builds a very similar engine https://www.youtube.com/@3DSage/videos

takantri• 7 months ago

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/).

kibwen• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

That sound more like a demake than a port. Very cool anyway.

no_wizard2• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

it is really hard to look at for me.

What were you expecting?

ddtaylor2• 7 months ago

Does anyone know where the source to this is? It seems to have been nuked.

zesterer• 7 months ago

I'm slowly preparing it to be released, I just have a lot of IRL stuff going on!

amlib• 7 months ago

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.

wk_end6• 7 months ago

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.

mewse-hn• 7 months ago

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

wk_end6• 7 months ago

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.

spicyjpeg3• 7 months ago

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.

[2] https://fabiensanglard.net/doom_psx/index.html

malucart5• 7 months ago

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.

malucart5• 7 months ago

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

mywittyname• 7 months ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

eru14• 7 months ago

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.)

extraduder_ire• 7 months ago

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

malucart5• 7 months ago

I've been working on it since mid 2024, so that video was a funny coincidence :)

itomato• 7 months ago

“Finally, Super Mario 32”

aussieguy1234• 7 months ago

And they said it could never be done

SpaceManNabs• 7 months ago

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.

schlauerfox• 7 months ago

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.

coro_1• 7 months ago

arcanemachiner• 7 months ago

AI what?

DrewADesign• 7 months ago

Aye, AI.

barbs• 7 months ago

Perhaps AI has made it easier?

spicyjpeg3• 7 months ago

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.

userbinator• 7 months ago

More people have discovered Ghidra.

wodenokoto• 7 months ago

Lots of people complaining that this has warped textures and whatnot - but come on! This is amazing!

musha68k• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

peterbozso• 7 months ago

Cool stuff! Make sure to also check: https://sm64coopdx.com Recently we are having tons of fun with this with a couple of friends.

Super Mario 64 for the PS1

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