Before the Japan-only Nintendo 64 Disk Drive was quietly discontinued and forgotten, Nintendo was working on a port of Super Mario 64 to the new disk technology. Presumably a tech demo, it never saw the light of day, however, an early development disk was found and dumped online, preserving it. This version of Super Mario 64 doesn't change much from the original release, though it does feature improved textures and music changes.

A romhacker by the name of Zoinkity decided to take those slight changes, patch a major bug, and release it as a romhack of the original N64 version of the game, available as an xdelta patch on Romhacking.net.

The disk build of Super Mario 64 was a hastily-made promotional piece that was little more than a sliced up cartridge ROM (see readme). This patch reassembles the original ROM and switches disk read requests with cart requests. Disk saves are replaced with EEPROM saves, thereby eliminating the two things that made this version at all interesting.

As a bonus, the Wiggler health bug was also corrected so it should be possible to collect all 120 stars.

To distinguish the patched file from other cartridge versions, the internal name reads “SUPER MARIO 64DD”, the version is -1, and a timestamp was applied.

Source

 

[JuanMena]

Nice!

Will patch my legally dumped rom later

 

[Noctosphere]

Nice!

Will patch my legally dunped rom later

You forgot the " " around the word legally

 

[Kioku]

Outside of "because I can" there's no reason to be excited about this then?

 

[lokomelo]

Outside of "because I can" there's no reason to be excited about this then?

if all you want is to play the game, then no, no reason.

 

[Aserl]

inb4 someone adds this hack to https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/Wii_VC_Injections_Compatibility_List

 

[Lostbhoy]

I'd rather see the improved textures added to the wii u port if possible or vc.

 

[Asia81]

Are there screenshots to see the difference between old textures and the new improved ones?

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Did people suddenly forget about super mario 64 decompilation?

 

[JuanMena]

Did people suddenly forget about super mario 64 decompilation?

Has it been completed yet?

 

[KimKong]

Awesome news! Thanks for sharing!

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Has it been completed yet?

I'm sure it has, but my point was why aren't stuff like this being produced for that decompilation? Instead of making rom hacks that only work on nintendo 64.

 

[pedro702]

Has it been completed yet?

long time ago lol and you can put whatever better textures you want in there.

 

[SylverReZ]

Nice!

Will patch my legally dumped rom later

*legally dumped*

 

[HarveyHouston]

This is quite interesting! I love it when more gaming history is recovered; they lead to incredible restoration projects like this one.

 

[wolf-snake]

long time ago lol and you can put whatever better textures you want in there.

Including the 3D All Stars textures.

 

[krakenx]

Has it been completed yet?

Yes, the decompilation and most major enhancements are done too. For example you can play in 4k native widescreen, 60fps, analog camera, redone high-polygon character models, and new textures. It really does make Mario64 look and play extremely modern.

After that, it's hard to go back to a vanilla rom, so are the 64DD items enough to warrant another playthrough at original quality?

 

[Naster]

Just an another reason I hoped for to complete SM64 once again, thanks!

 

[Chrisssj2]

Hypocritical site where everyone is pirating but just can't come out to say it cuz they are scared for repercussions. Spineless.

 

[Aserl]

Hypocritical site where everyone is pirating but just can't come out to say it cuz they are scared for repercussions. Spineless.

You mean [REDACTED].net?