The Dreamcast homebrew community continues to wow the retro gaming sphere with yet another port of a 1990s classic to Sega’s sixth-generation hardware.
Falco Girgis, a developer with credits including the ElysianVMU emulator and DCA3: Vice City, took to X (formerly Twitter) to provide a progress report on a Super Mario 64 Dreamcast port:
Last August, a team of Dreamcast homebrew developers chose to revisit a 2020 Dreamcast port of Super Mario 64 with the aim of testing the performance impacts of the recently improved GCC 14.1.0 toolchain, GLdc (OpenGL 1.2 driver), and various other advances made by the community over the past half decade.
Footage of a recent, but not yet publically available, Super Mario 64 build was shown on June 21 during an interview of Falco Girgis by youtuber Pixel Cherry Ninja — see above. The graphical glitches of the widely available 2020 iteration, which includes the so-called “iconic biker mustache” — image below — have been fixed.
The port appears to be a visual upgrade when compared to the N64 original, and Falco Girgis said that the most recent update runs at a rocksteady 30 fps, improving upon the fluctuating 20 to 30 fps of the 1996 retail release.
While Sega’s Dreamcast is certainly capable of running the game at even higher framerates, Falco Girgis insists that the 30-fps cap is baked into the game logic and is present in this port to preserve the physics and hit detection — see for yourself what happens when you uncap the framerate here.
Super Mario 64 was first ported to the Sega Dreamcast during the summer of 2020 by mrneo240. This effort used the decompiled game code made available by the N64 Decompilation Project. Mrneo240 has returned to the port to work on audio fixes for the current effort.
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