Having one of the most seminal and influential video games in the palm of your hand was an incredible feeling (even if the lack of proper analogue control was unfortunate), but modder Joshua Barretto is going one better – he's rewriting the N64 classic for the GBA, the DS' predecessor.
"This is not actually Super Mario 64: it's my attempt at rewriting SM64 for the GBA," explains Barretto.
"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."
As you can see from the footage, it's looking very impressive indeed; sure, it doesn't look as nice as the original game or the aforementioned DS version, but we're talking about much humbler hardware here.
The good news is that Barretto plans to release the code in the future – just don't expect to see Mario and his chums in it. "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."
Thanks to Ali Torrington for the tip!
