Mario Kart 64 got finally decompiled!
(github.com)
from MazonnaCara89@lemmy.ml to games@lemmy.world on 13 May 18:15
https://lemmy.ml/post/30052626
from MazonnaCara89@lemmy.ml to games@lemmy.world on 13 May 18:15
https://lemmy.ml/post/30052626
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Amazing!
It’s not a stretch to say that n64 romhacks are often of similar gameplay quality to modern titles, albeit with far lower graphical fidelity. With a racer like Mario kart, I’m curious how they’ll go about modernizing it. It seems too fundamentally janky with its controls and visuals to compete with anything within the last 20 years, but I’ve been nothing if not surprised by the ingenuity of romhackers.
This is not a romhack or a tool for romhacking. This lets the game run natively, on current PC hardware.
Decomp projects accelerate the rate that romhacks come out through new or improved tools and fresh information about the inner workings of the game. Particularly when there was little experimentation previous to the decomp, as is the case here, to allow romhackers find the game’s kinks. It absolutely is not a romhack or romhacking tool, you are correct. It’s better!
Doesn’t look like this is quite that, yet. The decomp is just the first step towards native porting. Banjo-Kazooie’s been fully decompiled for somewhere around a year at this point, and there’s still no ports afaik.
Some say this is for the better
Mario Kart 2^6^
So we don't know who it is. All we know is, he's the ToadStig.
Good. Leave them nameless
Kid… you’re killing me.
Hey I nominate this guys new moniker to be Private Slow.
Good. Maybe now someone can mod it so it isn’t the worst Mario Kart in the series
comforts you
Hey, it’s ok buddy. It’s alright to have bad opinions sometimes…doesn’t make you a bad person.
You should play MK7 if you think 64 is bad.
They can both be bad
True, but 7 is worse.
7 is one of the best wdym
What? The best are Wii, DD and 8DX. Even for a handheld game, 7 is terrible. It’s nowhere near as good as DS and has less content than SC. 64 and SMK aren’t much better but at least are not significantly worse than what came before.
Obviously they are all bad compared to CTR or Sega Racing Transformed but that’s another discussion.
You take that back.
no
Wii, Super Circuit, and 7 exist, so your argument doesn’t hold water.
Sure it isn’t Double Dash, but it’s definitely not the worst.
Wii is one of the best.
Super Circuit is still better.
I’ll give you 7. It’s down there
But the driving is terrible and so is the AI and so are the tracks
No co-op championship made it DOA for me. Maybe someone can mod that in at some point.
That’s my opinion of Wii, but Wii also introduced bikes which have also stained each subsequent entry so it gets my vote for the worst in the series.
I know the driving is bad, the ai is bad, and it’s full of glitches but worse than Super Mario Kart and Mario Super Circuit?
I think so
Never played super circuit
OG Super Mario Kart is a banger all day long and you know it
Super Circuit is basically SMK but better. It even includes all tracks from SMK.
I’m probably gonna get flack for this, but, based take, no clue what everyone else is on about. Must just be nostalgia bias, I remember the whole internet singing the praises of MK64 a decade ago, but like, it is really ass compared to any other game in the franchise.
For anyone who thinks 64 is better than SMK and SC, check out this video and then come back to me. (granted, video doesn’t talk about SC, but like, SC is just an improved version of SMK)
For anyone who thinks 64 is better than Tour… fair point, but like, the only reason Tour is so bad is cause Mobile. Outside of that, it’s not that bad.
For anyone who thinks 64 is better than 7… why? The only thing bad with 7 is it’s lack of a single player VS mode. Outside of that, 7 is a pretty good game, although outshined by 8 in every way.
For anyone who thinks 64 is better than World, chill out, World ain’t even out yet, ok.
For anyone who thinks 64 is better than DD, DS, Wii, 8, or 8DX, I know you’re trolling at that point.
Even still, 64 is still not that bad, and I can probably come up with at least half a dozen worse racing games off the top of my head. I’m really excited to see how people use this decomp to actually make 64 a good game.
It’s def nostalgia bias. It is truly terrible.
I hated on it for so long, but i eventually came around and i kinda like it now.
It is still the worst In the Series lol
Now that the code is available, anybody who wants to can mod it and create new version of Mario Kart. Without paying whoever produced Mario Kart. But playing devil’s advocate, isn’t that what people are calling AI evil for doing? So why am I not seeing outrage?
I guess because its not for profit.
That was already possible. This lets the game run natively on a modern PC, as long as you supply your legally backed up rom image of your N64 cartridge of the game.
Also, if they trained AI on programming books which they licensed in perpetuity and free college courses and it became better than people at programming, then maybe vibe coding would be questionably good. But they didnt. In a system designed to exploit labor, they took the fruit of that labor without compensating those who deserved it (a crime that, as you elude to in your comment, is not socially acceptable), then they sold their snake oil which is NOT as good at the job it proposes to eliminate as the human worker, to a company which will pay for the privilege of exploiting that technology at the expense of the humans they will replace with it, while it does a worse job and generally makes life shitter for everyone in that entire supply chain, except for the Sam Altmans. Who, as we’ve seen in recent times, want to build tech bro kingdoms where they can exploit people further.
The problem isn’t the neural network, it’s the exploitation.
Oh I see. I only took a brief glance at the code on github but it looks like the full game is there - did the devs add the cartridge check to avoid IP trouble? Because if you know what you’re doing you could always disable that.
Enough with the AI moralizing. As a software developer I spent my whole career looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating their coding techniques into my own work without ever hunting any of them down and paying them. Possibly other people have done the same with my code. Bottom line, I don’t care, it’s always been common practice. And I don’t see anything wrong with a human being writing code to automate that process - that’s the whole idea of coding.
You can’t do what you say, because the original ROM is required to get the assets. Just this repo gets you nowhere w. running the game.
The assets folder in the github repository seems to contain the assets - unless you’re talking about different assets.
Those are the references to where the assets are located in the original ROM (that’s the data inside those json files). There’s no actual asset in there.
Oh I see. So to play the game using this code do you need hardware to physically connect the cartridge so the PC can read the assets, or does it read a dump of the ROM?
It will read a dump from the ROM. The project obviously can’t be held responsible for how you may have obtained that ROM.
It was alright, MK64, but my only real gripe is the handling. When you start your turn in, the kart strafes opposite of the direction you are turning, which makes small adjustments difficult at best.
Skill issue
And in this one, if you move the stick back and forth wrong, you can spin out.
It’s pretty janky, but you can get used to it.
How did you get it to run? I got it to compile, but I cant find a file that I can actually run.
I haven’t even looked at it, but don’t you need an emulator to run it?
Usually these decompiled projects run natively as an exe. I haven’t tried this one yet though.
I was under the impression it would run nativly.
This is the same thing I already had, but with extra steps lol
Are you trying to run it on PC?
This is only the decompilation of the original for N64, the binaries it produces are for the N64 or an emulator. Making a PC port is the next step.
Yeah, I thought this was able to be built for PC. If that explains why there was just N64 roms in the build folder.
I’m not sure what good this is. It takes a mk64 rom and turns it into a mk64 rom?
Does the new rom run better or something?
Idk what we’ve gained here
There is now source code for the ROM, which makes creating ports and mods significantly easier.
The initial goal of most decompilations is to produce a 1:1 match of the original ROM. That’s how they know they’ve got a perfect representation of the original code.
The end goal is probably a native PC version of the game.
Imagine if someone handed you a burnt cake and said “make this exact cake, but not burnt.”
If you can perfectly recreate the burnt cake, you’ve at least verified your ingredient list. The next step is to just bake it right.
Eat shell Nintendo.
I won’t say if that project is legal or not, but expect it (and many others) to be taken down by Nintendo soon. Make a local copy if you want to preserve it.
Decomps are legal because no copyrighted material is being distributed. They typically require the original ROM to run (eg for assets).
The code itself is also copyrighted. Decompiled code is a derivative work.
Yeah, that’s why all the IBM clones had to write their BIOS firmware in clean room implementations of new software that implemented the same functionality as IBM’s own documentation described.
Functionality can’t be copyrighted, but code can be. So the easiest way to prove that you made something without the copyrighted code is to mimic the functionality through your own implementation, not by transforming the existing copyrighted code, through decompilation or anything like that.
Exactly. But somehow I got downvoted heavily for saying the obvious.
Some people struggle with the difference between arguing about descriptive statements, about what things are, and arguing about normative statements, about what things should be. And these topics are nuanced.
Decompiling to learn functionality is fair use (because like I said in my previous comment, functionality can’t be copyrighted), but actually using and redistributing code (whether the original source code, the compiled binary derived from the source code, or decompiled code derived from the binary) is pretty risky from a legal standpoint. I’d advise against trying to build a business around the practice.
Decompiling doesn’t give you the code like you’d expect.
It gives you the instructions the code generates.
There’s a Lego island decomp documentary on YouTube that is recomend for more details.
But the actual source code used doesn’t get piped out. Instead you get the machine instructions and you make code that generates the same instructions.
Meaning your still writing the game yourself, meaning you own the copyright
No one says that the actual source code (C or whatever) is “piped out”. The machine instructions (in form of a binary) you have before decompiling is the code that is executed by the machine/emulator is copyrighted like any other data on the disc/cartridge. You are not writing the game yourself if you are decompiling it. And it’s logically a derivative work. The fact that the resulting “instructions” is not the source code that developers wrote is as expected. It won’t create it from thin air.
I don’t understand what kind of mental gymnastics you need to do to think that you are doing something original here.
I’m wrong about why,
But it’s been ruled as fair use
That says reverse engineering is ok – not sharing RE’d code.
AFAIK fair use means you can redistribute.
Fair use means legally using a copyrighted material without requiring permission of the copyright holder. It does not mean you can redistribute in general, though some forms of redistribution are fair use, such as using an excerpt from a book in your essay.
Reverse engineering code is also fair use, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair use to share the code you’ve reversed.
Yeah but Nintendo doesn’t always seem to give a shit just because something is legal. They’ll still play the “but our legal department has more money than YOU” card
Why expect this to be taken down if other decomps haven’t been taken down already? Why expect other decomps to be taken down?
They will eventually be all taken down. That’s the point. They have no legal framework to exist, and Nintendo could strike any time they want, like Rockstar did with the re3 project.
They also have valid reasons to think that these projects are causing them to lose money, since they give alternative (and technically better) solutions to play their old games, without buying any Nintendo hardware or software (unless you dump your games, but let’s be honest. You don’t).
You could say that about Pokemon MMOs too, and yet I’m playing PokeMMO in 2025 on my PokeMMO account I created back in 2013.
There are some things Nintendo don’t go after, and there are other things that they do go after. Decomps don’t appear to be something they go after, which is good because then we can get cool ports of older games too.
Pokemon MMO’s are the entire different thing. I am not 100% sure how they developed them, but they seem to be just reimplementations of original game mechanics, but while reusing original assets.
And yet I don’t understand why you say they are not taken down by Nintendo. Couple of them were already closed down because of copyright infringement, and they made big news about that.
Pokemon MMOs literally use Pokemon assets as well as trademarked data too, and they’re literally using Nintendo’s intellectual property. It’s not too different from decomps.
I say Pokemon MMOs haven’t been taken down, because, I’m playing PokeMMO in 2025 on my PokeMMO account I created back in 2013. PokeMMO has been around for over a decade, Pokemon World Online has been around since like 2007, Pokemon Revolution Online has also been around for a decade, etc.
Do you have any proof of any Pokemon MMOs that have been taken down by Nintendo? I’m looking for Pokemon MMOs that have been shut down and I’m not finding any, I’m just finding Pokemon MMOs that have been around for years without being shut down.
I’m seeing more of these decompilations lately but never for playstation titles. some things just never emulate quite right with the playstation titles and they are still fun to play. Is anyone working on decompiling original playstation games?
Not claiming to be an expert, but I watched this video a while back. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmKjVpVdHDQ
The impression I got is that PS1 emulation is actually pretty good, and N64 emulation is more like that Homer Simpson meme with all the clothespins on his back.
Ps1 is great because it’s a mips core, a funky 3d engine and the main weirdness is the spu.
The n64 is all weird (albeit with a similar but 64bit mips core).
Don’t forget the rdram in the N64 that Sony didn’t use until PS2/3
The PlayStation hardware is barely capable of 3D at all.
Sure, it can accelerate some polygon math, but that’s about it. No texture mapping, no Z depth, no floating point precision, no anti-aliasing, no shading.
It does texture mapping, it’s just not perspective correct. And floating point isn’t a precision
Floating point precision does not mean I’m saying “floating point is a precision”, whatever that sentence means.
The PlayStation can’t use anything but integers to place points in 3D space.
It does texture mapping but that’s all. I think it does very limited, basically gouraud shading.
You have to clip your triangles, basically clip everything.
Yes there is some work for ps1 games for example the crash team racing demp
github.com/CTR-tools/CTR-ModSDK This is the link, tho the repo is being used for ctr mod tools too.
CTR?! YESSSSS!
Activision is sitting on free money by not porting Nitro Fueled to PC.
There’s an entire community for PS1 and PS2 discord.gg/TzRYk7X3zw
so, custom tracks and racers when?
There’s already ROM hacks for MK64.
MarioKart Vs Diddy Kong Racing
Wow that took a while…
had to look it up, 1996, damn that’s an old game xd
Man, i hope this results in a PC port like with SoH. I’d kill for a native PC version of 64 with a bunch of fancy features. It’s my favorite Mario Kart