Porting Super Mario 64 To the Original Nintendo DS

Considering that the Nintendo DS already has its own remake of Super Mario 64, one might be tempted to think that porting the original Nintendo 64 version would be a snap. Why you’d want to do this is left as an exercise to the reader, but whether due to nostalgia or out of sheer spite, the question of how easy this would be remains. Correspondingly, [Tobi] figured that he’d give it a shake, with interesting results.

Of note that is someone else already ported SM64 to the DSi, which is a later version of the DS with more processing power, more RAM and other changes. The reason why the 16 MB of RAM of the DSi is required, is because it needs to load the entire game into RAM, rather than do on-demand reads from the cartridge. This is why the N64 made do with just 4 MB of RAM, which is as much RAM as the ND has. Ergo it can be made to work.

The key here is NitroFS, which allows you to implement a similar kind of segmented loading as the N64 uses. Using this the [Hydr8gon] DSi port could be taken as the basis and crammed into NitroFS, enabling the game to mostly run smoothly on the original DS.

There are still some ongoing issues before the project will be released, mostly related to sound support and general stability. If you have a flash cartridge for the DS this means that soon you too should be able to play the original SM64 on real hardware as though it’s a quaint portable N64.