Mario 64 on GBA

[Creamu]

We have seen tomb raider on the GBA. Amazing work, wow.

Is it possible with magic and the star aligning to port mario 64 on the gba and if yes should we dare to do so or is it a better idea to keep pandoras box closed.

 

[Shadow#1]

We have seen tomb raider on the GBA. Amazing work, wow.

Is it possible with magic and the star aligning to port mario 64 on the gba and if yes should we dare to do so or is it a better idea to keep pandoras box closed.

Never happening

 

[Creamu]

Never happening

Did you see tomb raider coming though?

 

[hippy dave]

Nah, someone on the GBA discord had some success getting a viewer for Mario 64 levels running on GBA, but it was enough of a struggle to view the empty level, without running any gameplay on top.

 

[Creamu]

Nah, someone on the GBA discord had some success getting a viewer for Mario 64 levels running on GBA, but it was enough of a struggle to view the empty level, without running any gameplay on top.

Interesting. The GBA seems to be quite underutilized hardware looking at the commercial releases. That a homebrew developer was able to boot into empty level is impressive on its own. I think a dumbed down version maybe theoretically possible but that would be an extreme amount of work and the gba does not have the buttons for it anyway. No 4 facebuttons? Come on...



It... It is beautiful

 

[lone_wolf323]

Interesting. The GBA seems to be quite underutilized hardware looking at the commercial releases. That a homebrew developer was able to boot into empty level is impressive on its own. I think a dumbed down version maybe theoretically possible but that would be an extreme amount of work and the gba does not have the buttons for it anyway. No 4 facebuttons? Come on...



It... It is beautiful

is, what atrocity i am looking at, go any further than just the outside lobby?

 

[Creamu]

is, what atrocity i am looking at, go any further than just the outside lobby?

I dont know. I doubt this is the level viewer. But it shows that the dream is real, will it become reality?

 

[Shadow#1]

I dont know. I doubt this is the level viewer. But it shows that the dream is real, will it become reality?

Nope

 

[Creamu]

Nope

Yes, even with 4 facebuttons, like on one of the prototypes this would not be playable control wise i think.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

We have seen tomb raider on the GBA. Amazing work, wow.

Is it possible with magic and the star aligning to port mario 64 on the gba and if yes should we dare to do so or is it a better idea to keep pandoras box closed.

It could be done. Mario 64 is not a very well optimized game so there is plenty of headroom for optimizations to be done that could get it to a playable speed (depending on what your definition of playable is) - if you've seen Kaze Emanuar's videos, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, but sadly, the optimizations he made are very N64 specific, the GBA hardware would need its own set of optimizations, so they aren't very useful here.
It would not control very well. Mario 64 DS controlled pretty badly and it would be worse on the GBA with no touchscreen. But it would be playable.
The GBA has no 3D hardware, but fully 3D rendered games have been done on the GBA even commercially, such as Payback:
You might notice that the framerate of that game is pretty low. Which might be less than ideal for a platformer which requires faster reaction times. But it probably isn't perfectly optimized, so there might be additional performance to be gained.
Some things like the Mario and enemy models could be changed to 2D sprites (Doom style) to gain more performance and might be necessary in order to have playable performance. But I'm almost sure it could be done by a talented enough coder.
I'd question if it wouldn't be a waste of their talent for a subpar end result that would no doubt be the worst way to play Mario 64 though. If I was that talented, I know I'd have better things to spend my time on.

I dont know. I doubt this is the level viewer. But it shows that the dream is real, will it become reality?

I think that's someone trying to recreate Mario 64 from scratch and not doing a very good job at it. They've modeled a (not very convincing) facsimile of the outside of the castle and created a basic walking simulator to allow you to walk around in it. That's a very long way away from a full recreation of the game and they probably never intended it to be a full recreation (Edit: Reading the description of the video, they indeed didn't)
I doubt they used the reverse engineered source code in any way, they probably just looked at screenshots or gameplay and tried to recreate it.

 

[Creamu]

Very informative post. How much more difficult would a mario 64 port be compared to open lara?

 

[MikaDubbz]

Interesting. The GBA seems to be quite underutilized hardware looking at the commercial releases. That a homebrew developer was able to boot into empty level is impressive on its own. I think a dumbed down version maybe theoretically possible but that would be an extreme amount of work and the gba does not have the buttons for it anyway. No 4 facebuttons? Come on...



It... It is beautiful

Haha that's terrible, but I love it. It's certainly fun to see how much a game like this can push the limits of a far less powerful device it was never supposed to run on. While I can't imagine we'll ever see the full game on the GBA, I could see this getting refined to the point of being a fun little tech demo with maybe a star mission or two.

 

[Deleted member 591971]

porting into the ds is already bad but that is just making it worse.

 

[Deleted member 323844]

It would not control very well. Mario 64 DS controlled pretty badly and it would be worse on the GBA with no touchscreen. But it would be playable.
The GBA has no 3D hardware, but fully 3D rendered games have been done on the GBA even commercially, such as Payback:

Payback was an Amiga 1200 port, which is even more surprising. It had a GP2X port as well, that I have been searching for years. Not even the original studio guys want to sell me their copies

Here's a photo I took with the GP2X demo, the GBA version and the iOS version, which is of course the most playable version of the bunch.

 

[CeeDee]

Immediately dismissing stuff like this as 'not possible. ever. at all.' is a bit silly, don't you think?
I remember the 3DS scene pretty consistently, unequivocally said stuff like "An N64 emulator will never run on a 3DS. It's impossible."
And guess what? There's an N64 emulator for 3DS now.

That said, I don't exactly see it happening either. It'd be very tough work, and I don't know if the GBA scene has anyone dedicated enough to really try.
That primitive tech demo up there is neat as shit, though.

 

[Creamu]

Immediately dismissing stuff like this as 'not possible. ever. at all.' is a bit silly, don't you think?
I remember the 3DS scene pretty consistently, unequivocally said stuff like "An N64 emulator will never run on a 3DS. It's impossible."
And guess what? There's an N64 emulator for 3DS now.

That said, I don't exactly see it happening either. It'd be very tough work, and I don't know if the GBA scene has anyone dedicated enough to really try.
That primitive tech demo up there is neat as shit, though.

Maybe John Carmack can do it?

 

[harpr]

Maybe John Carmack can do it?

its definitely is possible, you can strip down the mario 64 decomp code so much without breaking the game, probably use that mario that the game uses when the camera is far away enough to make the game run better at all times, that tower leading up to king bobomb is so needlessly long so cutting some of it would be an improvement, you can remove koopa the quick levels (they would be the hardest the port and they're the most forgettable) maybe cut the first bowser (it's too easy anyway lets just give you the first key after getting 8 stars) maybe every level only has 4 red coins instead of 8, you see there is potential, just dont give the task to a god in 3d gaming.

 

[koffieleut]

I think it's not going to happen, it won't even run good on the Dreamcast and that console has great 3d capabilities, more RAM and ofcourse a much faster CPU than the GBA.

 

[godreborn]

They did make sm64 for dos, and that's about as low as it gets. Dosbox says it's running cpu at 100 percent while running the game. The game is more a curiosity than something that's playable. It when has sound disabled in settings to improve fps. Lol