Mario 64 On PlayStation? Spyro On N64? Modders Advance Impossible Retro Ports

It's an interesting time in the retro gaming world. Thanks to ongoing decompilation efforts, games formerly exclusive to a given platform are being made available on competing, rival platforms, including some that feature signature characters. Super Mario 64 and Spyro The Dragon, for example, are now playable on opposing platforms. That's right; Super Mario 64 has jumped over to the PlayStation 1, and Spyro is gliding on to the Nintendo 64, or at least it will be—the latter is still in a much earlier stage of development.

Progress on the Mario 64 port seems promising. Despite some major graphical bugs, all of Mario's basic movements seem to be working, as do the ported maps. It's an impressive technical feat, too. As noted by @EliasDaler on X/Twitter, the Nintendo 64 pushes a much higher polycount than PlayStation, boasts twice the RAM, and has much faster read speeds. The latter point is the result of cartridges versus discs--enthusiasts of the era will note, there were advantages for both types of media: faster loads on Nintendo cartridges, but much larger game sizes on the PlayStation, including multi-CD epics with pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes like Final Fantasy VII.

The Mario 64 port comes by way of Malucart on GitHub. Curiously, Malucart himself has yet to upload any footage to his YouTube channel, though his work may have flown under the radar had Elias and others not saw fit to spread the word. Considering the ongoing efforts to bring hardware-pushing ROM hacks to Nintendo 64 (like Smash Remix and Return To Yoshi's Island), it's about time PlayStation hardware got some homebrew love, too.


But the Nintendo 64 isn't being left out of the action. There's also a Spyro The Dragon port in development for the N64, though its creator, Frogbull, admits that the current version will likely be scrapped in the face of a new Spyro decompilation being made available. The progress he made so far is impressive though, showing graphics in a far better state than the Mario 64 demo above, albeit with most of Spyro's signature movement mechanics missing. While Spyro 64 certainly looks better than Mario PSX, Mario PSX does seem to play better. At least when Mario's player model isn't glitching.


In any case, it's truly fascinating to see these competing retro consoles receiving ports of their rivals' flagship games. Spyro The Dragon was revolutionary for its time, introducing a system very close to modern LODs and working around the PlayStation's limitations in a way thought impossible at the time. Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot) and Insomniac Games got the most out of the PlayStation during that era, pushing the console to its limits while Nintendo ultimately let third-parties like Rare (Banjo-Kazooie) flex the full capabilities of the Nintendo 64.