Considering that the Nintendo DS already has its own remake of Super Mario 64, one might be tempted to think that porting the original Nintendo 64 version would be a snap. Why you’d want to do this is left as an exercise to the reader, but whether due to nostalgia or out of sheer spite, the question of how easy this would be remains. Correspondingly, [Tobi] figured that he’d give it a shake, with interesting results.
Of note is that someone else already ported SM64 to the DSi, which is a later version of the DS with more processing power, more RAM and other changes. The reason why the 16 MB of RAM of the DSi is required, is because it needs to load the entire game into RAM, rather than do on-demand reads from the cartridge. This is why the N64 made do with just 4 MB of RAM, which is as much RAM as the NDS has. Ergo it can be made to work.
The key here is NitroFS, which allows you to implement a similar kind of segmented loading as the N64 uses. Using this the [Hydr8gon] DSi port could be taken as the basis and crammed into NitroFS, enabling the game to mostly run smoothly on the original DS.
There are still some ongoing issues before the project will be released, mostly related to sound support and general stability. If you have a flash cartridge for the DS this means that soon you too should be able to play the original SM64 on real hardware as though it’s a quaint portable N64.
So porting super mario 64 to the DS when the DS had a version of super mario 64 where you play as mario, Luigi, Yoshi and mario? I can smell the unemployment from the person who ported this game
Hi. It’s same thing as with Doom ports, I think. It’s a challenge.
Mario 64 had recently been ported to DOS platform, even.
In case there is any confusion. I’m the Sky from SkyEmu, the above Sky is not me. And, I think this project is awesome, and hope to see more things in the future from Tobi.
That’s a DS lite, not the original.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the first generation of Nintendo DS. I think the intent was to differentiate it from the DSi and 3DS. Much like you would call a PSP 2000 or 3000 something distinct from the Vita. Obviously speaking from a memory size and CPU power perspective when running software, not how different the actual hardware may be if modifying the hardware.
I look forward to this as the official port was quite lacking. Models, colors, shading left much to be desired. My only hope is they can make it compatible with a top screen removed hack. It only takes a resistor to trick the circuit into believing the backlight is still connected, and a lot of DS can be had with a broken top screen. Although now that I think of it I have an old DSi I should check into the SM64 port.
What’s the point of the same flashcard can actually just load the super Mario 64 ds rom
Exact same game, but with upgrades that make use of the nds hardware imho
Just like n64 you can use the da memory expansion pak for 8MB
Or a 3rd party slot 2 cartridge get 64+ MB of ram