Apparently All Games in Mario 3D All-Stars Are Just Emulated

[neorichieb1971]

I have a feeling the Switch will be the N64 mini replacement.

[orange808]

Obviously, you can't just write a new game engine to support the entire project and try to get "close enough". Yes, it's written in C dialect. So? Object oriented C dialects aren't a magic bullet. The differences in hardware require almost entire rewrites! These programs are huge and each one will need special attention. You're not just porting from one machine to another. The original sources are based on multiple different original platforms!

Considering that Mario 64 was decompiled back to C by a small team and then ported to Windows and DirectX 12 by one person (running at 60 FPS at widescreen resolutions) in their spare time, it was absolutely feasible for Nintendo, having the original C code, to have ported the game to another platform (which they control) with their team of people doing it full-time. It's not a large codebase and it wasn't a big port.

How much spare time was involved? Linux was also coded largely in people's spare time. Same thing with MAME. Same thing with lots of GTA mods.

Their team is pretty expensive. How many sales you gonna get? I guess they could have subbed it out, but Nintendo isn't a company that shares their source with third parties, are they?

Would their time and effort be better invested in making new software for their next gen machine? How much will this really make?

It's just one piece of the product. How will you implement improvements to the models and textures?

Seems like each game would need to be it's own individual release to get the right amount of care.

I don't think they should have done this one at all. It spreads the devs too thin.

[bigbadboaz]

I have a feeling the Switch will be the N64 mini replacement.

Considering they already debunked that there was ever going to be a mini-64..

[Guspaz]

How much spare time was involved? Linux was also coded largely in people's spare time. Same thing with MAME. Same thing with lots of GTA mods.

Those are all much larger projects than Mario 64, and those are also from-scratch developments. Porting Mario 64 didn't require a rewrite, it just required replacement of the stuff that interacted with the hardware directly.

The PC port was released on May 2nd, 2020. I believe it was forked from the decompile project in August of 2019. Nintendo could have acquired the project; they basically owned the ported code anyway. Other companies have done similar things in the past. It would also have given Nintendo a base for future releases of the game.

I guess they could have subbed it out, but Nintendo isn't a company that shares their source with third parties, are they?

Nintendo has shared their source extensively with third parties. Many of their console hardware/operating systems were designed by third parties. That's where all the recent Nintendo leaks have come from. They also often outsource ports and emulator development. Other companies have even ported N64 games to the Switch before, so Nintendo could have outsourced Mario 64 to somebody like Nightdive, who has ported at least four N64 games to Switch already. They've done at least Turok, Turok 2, Doom 64, and Shadow Man.

Would their time and effort be better invested in making new software for their next gen machine? How much will this really make?

With 12.79 million sales between the SNES and Wii releases, the previous Mario All-Stars game sold more copies than Mario 64 did in the first place, sold more copies than every Mario Party game too. There's no reason to believe that a new Mario All-Stars game couldn't have reached similar lofty heights had it been a more comprehensive collection with more effort put into each game. Considering it took one person around nine months to do the port, even if it only sells 10% as many copies as the previous game, that's still ~$77 million in revenue. I think they could have afforded the cost of one developer for 9 months.

It's just one piece of the product. How will you implement improvements to the models and textures?

If you're not emulating it, that's actually easier, because you can just swap out assets instead of using LUA scripts to swap them out on-the-fly as they did. You don't necessarily need to do that, though. They already did make improvements in various textures, widescreen 60fps 1080p with antialiasing would have been a pretty nice upgrade. There have been N64 games ported to Switch before with far more extensive improvements, such as Turok, and in that case the developer implemented custom texture interpolation to better match the N64's tri-point filtering, which also looks nicer. To reach back to the previous point, if it was commercially viable to do a modern Turok port (not to mention those other N64 games they ported), surely it was commercially viable to put more effort into Mario 64, which was many times more popular than Turok.

Seems like each game would need to be it's own individual release to get the right amount of care.

I don't see why. The further along they went, the less additional changes were needed. Galaxy already did get a partial port, and it seems like they only things wrong with it are a colour banding issue on gradients, and that the dynamic resolution scaler thresholds need to be tweaked a bit to avoid frame drops.

[bobrocks95]

Uh, have you all not seen the amount of interest Nintendo has drummed up with this "just emulated" collection? It will sell out, partially due to their artificial delisting date. Why do any more (and I would argue whipping up 3 emulators is quite a lot actually) when this is enough to sell millions of copies?

[orange808]

Given the audience and ridiculous standards that every Mario game attracts, I am not sure what these small and forgettable cult game franchises have to do with porting Mario.

@Guspaz
All the Acclaim titles were released on the PC with D3D support. Why would they have gone with the N64 code instead of starting from D3D/OpenGL/Glide?

Doom 64 obviously was an N64 port, but how much of that one was based on Doom's source? Is that porting a port (or a partial one)?

[Guspaz]

The point was that those were games that were ported from N64 to Switch at much higher quality than Mario 64 was despite those games having had a fraction as many sales.

I believe the Nightdive ports used new in-house engines, though they used the N64 versions for their assets/base (IIRC the original PC port of Turok had a lot of issues). Obviously that wasn't required, since Mario 64 was ported to Windows directly without issue.

[darcagn]

How much spare time was involved? Linux was also coded largely in people's spare time. Same thing with MAME. Same thing with lots of GTA mods.

Those are all much larger projects than Mario 64, and those are also from-scratch developments. Porting Mario 64 didn't require a rewrite, it just required replacement of the stuff that interacted with the hardware directly.

I know the guy who did the PSP port, who is now doing a DC port (here's a video of a build from today running).
He started with the decomp source, and Nintendo already had the source. When I asked how long he spent on the port, he said "August"... so I think this is easily within Nintendo's realm.

[orange808]

I won't personally pay for any Mario 64 that doesn't include an all new camera, reimagined modern level design tweaks, new assets, no slowdown, and zero clipping. Other players will want the ability to play the original game.

For clarity, I'm not saying I want to buy a collection of emulated roms. I don't.
That's not appealing to me for multiple reasons.

I haven't played the PC port, so I don't know what it does. I won't be downloading it either, it's in a grey area I prefer to avoid.

To really give it the love it deserves and satisfy the ridiculous high standards, I still think Mario 64 needed it's own release.

I dislike most ports and remasters of games I am very familiar with. I felt burned when I bought Super Mario All Stars years ago when I realized the Lost Levels SMB2JP port was unplayable (the same day I bought it). It tooks decades before I got a patch--and I had to buy a flash cart to play it. The SMBAS cart has been collecting dust for years, because SMB2USA is the only game on there I like.

Better off leaving it be.

----

I also avoided the Turok ports because they changed the levels. Yep. I want modern game design in Mario and the old clunky backtracking in Turok 2. I really just wanted a port that runs properly on my PC again, because the N64 was a chuggy unplayable mess. Hard to satisfy everyone.

[Guspaz]

The Lost Levels wasn't unplayable. I don't even remember there being anything wrong with it. It was just really really hard.

[bobrocks95]

Checked places like tcrf out of curiosity and don't see any info on rom revisions affecting the Lost Levels content...

[orange808]

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/167/

Here's the fix and a short explanation.

Although, I'm discussing an issue that's very well known in the community. It's odd that you couldn't find the info quickly.

[orange808]

The Lost Levels wasn't unplayable. I don't even remember there being anything wrong with it. It was just really really hard.

Actually, it's pleasantly nerfed. I really enjoy the nerfed version in the fixed SMBAS rom better than playing an import on the Famicom.

It just depends how enthusiastic you have been about SMB.

I imagine my lack of excitement for SMB2USA is why I like the remaster. I didn't buy the game when it came out and it took me a while to warm up to it. It was such a disappointment. It's fun to play, but I never cared how fast I could finish it or how many times I died. It's empty calories--and it's not a real Mario game to me. I don't notice or care about every detail.

[Guspaz]

"This behaviour isn't quite right" is not the same as "unplayable", and according to that the bug also affected the original SMB in All Stars. It's a subtle thing that I never even noticed despite playing the games for years, so I laugh at the idea that it made it "unplayable".

[orange808]

"This behaviour isn't quite right" is not the same as "unplayable", and according to that the bug also affected the original SMB in All Stars. It's a subtle thing that I never even noticed despite playing the games for years, so I laugh at the idea that it made it "unplayable".

It breaks my rhythm and it has gotten me killed.

Do what makes you happy and enjoy what you like. Milage always varies. I think we've covered everything about this we can discuss.

[strygo]

The Lost Levels wasn't unplayable. I don't even remember there being anything wrong with it. It was just really really hard.

I have the patch from Nintendo Power to prove that it was playable.

More info here: https://www.suppermariobroth.com/post/3 ... patch-from

[RIP-Felix]

That's true for Sunshine, also some issues with Galaxy. The pointer functionality from the Wii is only emulated through a gyro, which of course means it drifts over times and will have to be reset. Again working better on original hardware.

2 words. "Dolphin Bar"

Also. Buyers Remorse (over buying this game, not a dolpin bar)

[Lawfer]

Also. Buyers Remorse (over buying this game, not a dolpin bar)

Well yeah, you just found out that Nintendo only compiled 1 ROM and 2 Trimmed ISOs of very old games into a "new" release that they sold people for 60 bucks.

Uh, have you all not seen the amount of interest Nintendo has drummed up with this "just emulated" collection? It will sell out, partially due to their artificial delisting date. Why do any more (and I would argue whipping up 3 emulators is quite a lot actually) when this is enough to sell millions of copies?

Not surprised, this is the same company who sold literal cardboard and the fanboys still ate it up:

https://www.hypable.com/nintendo-labo-cardboard-box/

https://www.gamesradar.com/nintendo-wan ... dboard-in/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments ... rd_for_70/

Emulated versus native is a completely irrelevant technical detail from the player's perspective. How does it look, how does it play, how well does it run. That's all people care about. It seems like Nintendo has done the absolute bare minimum needed to justify charging a retail price for this. No more, no less. They're better than just straight up virtual console releases, but never really go the extra mile.

If people didn't care about emulation, Analogue wouldn't put such emphasis on "NO EMULATION" for their products, same thing for flashcarts which purpose is to let you play games on the original hardware instead of emulation, same thing for the GBAConsolizer, original hardware instead of emulation.

You can already play emulated games which wouldn't cost what Analogue, or Krikzz or Terraonion etc. are asking you for their products for playing games with no emulation.

[Guspaz]

The people who care about such things (and I include myself in that) are still in an incredibly niche market. Analogue might sell tens of thousands of consoles. Nintendo sells tens of millions of consoles.

[bobrocks95]

Just want to again point out that Analogue is using hardware emulation and being incredibly misleading in their advertising.

[Sumez]

I absolutely prefer the original FDS version of SMB2jp for a few reasons actually, but calling the All-Stars version unplayable due to that specific change is a little absurd.

Especially at the time it was exciting to get an all new game that had never been released outside of Japan until then. It was the only version of the game that I'd get to try until years later.

[spmbx]

At least nintendo cardboard is a lot more affordable than the cardboard boxes i see on the marketplace here.

[xeos]

Considering that Mario 64 was decompiled back to C by a small team and then ported to Windows and DirectX 12 by one person (running at 60 FPS at widescreen resolutions) in their spare time, it was absolutely feasible for Nintendo, having the original C code, to have ported the game to another platform (which they control) with their team of people doing it full-time. It's not a large codebase and it wasn't a big port.

do we know they have the source still? lots of original assets from that era were discarded. IDK if Nintendo was any better at preservation.

[Guspaz]

Considering that Mario 64 was decompiled back to C by a small team and then ported to Windows and DirectX 12 by one person (running at 60 FPS at widescreen resolutions) in their spare time, it was absolutely feasible for Nintendo, having the original C code, to have ported the game to another platform (which they control) with their team of people doing it full-time. It's not a large codebase and it wasn't a big port.

do we know they have the source still? lots of original assets from that era were discarded. IDK if Nintendo was any better at preservation.

We know they have the source still, because the source was included in the 2020 leaks, along with the source of lots of other games going back as far as the SNES and GameBoy.

[xeos]

as somebody who really enjoyed the 3ds release of majora's mask, I'm sad they didn't update the visuals more. Old can be good - SNES games looked awesome because the hardware was powerful enough to do 2D really well. The n64, despite being designed by SGI, wasn't that great at 3D. By the time of the ps2 generation the 3d hardware was good enough to produce compelling content but most n64 and ps1 games look horrid by any standard. Not all though - the original spyro games still look great. i was sad that the HD release completely redid the graphics. I would have been happy with infinite draw distance and fixing the fixed-point vertex wobble errors that plagued the ps1.

[Ikaruga11]

It's nice that this collection exists, but I feel that Nintendo could have put more way effort into this. The biggest complaint being no Super Mario Galaxy 2. Super Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy are all just being emulated (partially in Galaxy's case) instead of running natively on the Switch. Also Super Mario 64 uses the inferior Shindou version instead of the original North American version, doesn't have 16:9 widescreen and is only rendering in 720p instead of 1080p like Sunshine and Galaxy do. Sunshine cut voices lines from FLUDD, doesn't have GameCube controller support and even has debug cubes in the special levels. You can longer use Miis as your save file icon in Super Mario Galaxy either. Also, 64 and Sunshine are still capped at 30FPS instead of using 60FPS.

Also, does anyone know how bad the input lag is in each game? I've heard it's the worst in Super Mario 64, but I'd also like to know how bad it is in Sunshine and Galaxy as well. At least the debug cubes make the special levels in Sunshine easier by serving as visual guides for the set paths of the moving platforms.

[Guspaz]

Galaxy is only partially emulated, and runs at 60FPS.

[Sumez]

Why is the Shindou "inferior"? Because you can't break the game completely with speedrun tricks?

[LukeEvansSimon]

If you want authenticity, then why not just play the original games on original hardware on 15khz CRTs? I used to be deep into emulators and kept searching for better USB controller adapters, etc, to try tk recreate a more accurate experience. Then I realized that the original hardware was sitting in my attic.

[fernan1234]

Why is the Shindou "inferior"? Because you can't break the game completely with speedrun tricks?

Some consider even more significant the loss of Bowser throw line in the original.