(See project status for disclaimer on video)

A VB port of Super Mario 64

This is a port of Super Mario 64 to the Virtual Boy that utilizes the Overdrive Cart’s “Overdrive” mode to handle the game rendering and logic.

This is mostly a curiosity and a way of testing out the abilities of the Overdrive Cart. I have no plans to release this, although I may provide access to it via the Cloud VB project at some point.

Motivation

In 1997, I (PizzaRollsRoyce) was 10 and had just played Super Mario 64 at a friends house. I wondered to myself why Nintendo hadn’t released it on the Virtual Boy, which was the console I owned. After all (I reasoned), it was 32-bit, and so was the PlayStation, and it could run polygonal games. Maybe cutting out colors would bring that budget down from 64 to 32 bits, and I could enjoy the game at home.

So, I wrote Nintendo a letter to release “Super Mario 32” on the Virtual Boy, and included a helpful button mapping that I drew up in MS paint (just in case that was the missing piece that Nintendo would need to pull this off).

A few weeks later, I received this devastating response:

Response from Nintendo

Of note:

  • They weren’t going to port this game for me
  • Worse, there won’t be any new Virtual Boy games coming out!

25 years later, I’ve set out to do what Nintendo refused to do for me back in 1997.

Features

  • Full parallax support for 3D effect
  • 50fps
  • Widescreen support to fit the VB’s aspect ratio

Project Status

  • Runs well while the OD Cart’s kernel driver is disabled. However, there isn’t enough CPU power to run both the game and the driver at the same time.
  • The video above was a test that first ran the game on the pi and dumped the commands to be sent to the driver to a file. Then the file was fed to the driver later to prove that it works in theory, if we can improve performance enough.
  • Project is sort of on hold for now given other priorities.
   

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