Fan attempting remake of Super Mario 64 on the Game Boy Advance

As the years march on it’s always impressive to see how much technology improves and changes. We have computers thousands of times more powerful than the ones used on the moon landing in our pockets, journeys across the country that used to take weeks now just take a few hours, and the most important 3D platformers of all time is being remade for the Game Boy Advance.

A fan by the name of Joshua Barretto has posted a video of a work in progress remake of the acclaimed N64 title running on the Game Boy Advance. As you can see in the above video, while the game is in a rough state, it is still undoubtedly recognizable as the N64 legend. Honestly, the fact that the 3D camera is working at all is imprressive.

In the description for the YouTube upload Joshua gave some insight into the development of the project, you can read it down below.

This is not actually Super Mario 64: it’s my attempt at rewriting SM64 for the GBA.

I initially considered attempting a port, but the GBA is an order of magnitude slower than the N64 and has no GPU or native support for floating-point numbers.

So far, I’ve implemented a basic physics and collision system, along with a fully 3D camera, rasterization, texture-mapping, transparency support, etc.

Because the code is written from-scratch, I should be in a position to release the code into the public domain in the future: although I can’t distribute it with Nintendo’s assets, obviously.

[Joshua Barretto]

While there was an attempt at a port of Mario 64 to GBA a few years back that project fell by the wayside due to technical limitations so hopefully this project will bare more fruit.

Super Mario 64 is no stranger to fan made projects but it’s always fascinating to see the lengths fans will go to reshape this classic title. It’s works like these that showcase the impact of Mario 64 and we wish Joshua all the luck in remaking the game.