Modder Spends Weeks To Fix Entire Super Mario 64 Source Code

Considerable development goes behind the popular video games that are etched into our memories as nostalgia. Sometimes the technology and accessibility limit the developers from fully realizing the potential of a title. Nonetheless, it’s a marvelous feat that developers have been able to mold titles that were ahead of their time and technology. However, modders can take a game shelved away by the developers and improve upon the titles in every conceivable way. Super Mario 64 has now received such treatment.

Kaze Emanuar, a modder, exclaims that they have spent hundreds of hours on Super Mario 64 and tinkered with thousands of lines of code to shine the rustic gem into something unimaginable. The modder has seemingly fixed the entire source code by adding a significant overhaul over the source code. Emanuar cites they have “read, optimized and bug fixed the entire Super Mario 64 source code, the game you see in the background runs at 30FPS on the Nintendo 64 hardware.”

The modding project took several weeks to conclude, with over 100,000 lines of code read and over 100 hours of work done. According to the video, the source code work is only completed midway, with more videos planned for the future to reveal how the modder further polishes the original Super Mario 64. The improvement in the source code helps run the game up to six times faster on its actual console, and the modder has accomplished this in an endeavor to enhance Super Mario 64’s frame rate and make the game feel less “janky” for his own mods. Kaze Emanuar turned this mod nearly into a re-make with his dedication to evolving the game to his personal needs.

The recently posted video by the modder helps understand the improvements to the less technical community. To help unearth the improvements to the community, the modder simply compared the gameplay of his own modded Super Mario 64 with the original version. The first exhibits early-level builds without enhancement, and the second shows the levels with refined textures and the source code improvements. Each of the levels approximately doubled in frames per second.

On the contrary, he also specified the technical details to his fellow modders and enthusiasts. The modifications to the source code allow sound to execute 24.4 percent faster, rendering has improved up to 70-90 percent, texture memory is sped up to 87.7 percent, and total frame renders time is 22.5 percent quicker, which gains a sum of 12 FPS.

It is worth stating that developers in the past could not enhance the game like Kaze Emanuar has done. Indeed he has made significant improvements, but he also benefits from the RAM expansion pack, so when he says it runs at a stable 30 FPS on N64 hardware, he does mean with the RAM expansion. Nintendo games and consoles alike have been a plaything of many modders in the past, but this optimization is to a whole new level.