You might be able to play a classic Mario game on PC soon
A group of modders is making it possible to natively port a classic Mario game on PC for the first time (thanks, GamesRadar). The team, led by Ethan Roseman, decompiled Paper Mario’s source code, which lets them reverse engineer the game and get it running on PC.
“I'm extremely happy to announce that after 3+ years of working on a decompilation project for Paper Mario, we have reached 100% completion for the US version of the game,” Roseman said on Twitter. “Every compiled function has been matched!”
Roseman said more work lies ahead, including additional asset support for those assets that haven’t been properly rebuilt yet, but the project files are on GitHub. If you know what you’re doing with them – and have a Paper Mario ROM – then you can start tinkering as you see fit.
The group also hopes the project will help speedrunners and game historians understand how the game functions and why certain bugs and glitches occur.
Modders previously did the same for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past. The appeal of a native port instead of just emulation is that it lets players create mods and improvements, including adding widescreen support, changing the visuals, and doing pretty much whatever they can think of to make the game better, weirder, or both.
It’s also entirely legal, assuming you obtained your ROM legitimately from a Nintendo 64 cartridge, so unlike the recent Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod incident, Nintendo usually ignores these projects.
