‘Super Mario 64’ modder spends weeks fixing the game’s source code

A modder says they have spent hundreds of hours and edited thousands of lines of code in an effort to fix the source code of Super Mario 64.

The claim comes from Kaze Emanuar, who uploaded a video to their YouTube channel on April 9, which can be watched below. Emanuar says they have “read, optimised and bug fixed the entire Super Mario 64 source code, the game you see in the background runs at 30FPS on the Nintendo 64 hardware.”

New code can run the game up to six times faster on its original console, and Emanuar has done this in an effort to improve Super Mario 64’s frame rate and make the game less “janky” for his own mods.

To help showcase the improvements, Emanuar put footage of their own modded Super Mario 64 side-by-side, with the first showcasing early level builds without optimisations, and the second showing the levels with improved textures and the source code improvements. Each of the levels roughly doubled its frames per second.

According to Emanuar, their improvements to the source code allow sound to run 24.4 per cent faster, rendering is 70-90 per cent faster, texture memory is 87.7 per cent faster, and total frame render time is 22.5 per cent faster, which gains a grand total of 12FPS.

The project took weeks to finish, with over 100,000 lines of code read and over 100 hours of work done. According to the video, the source code work is around halfway done, with more videos coming in the future to show how Emanuar is developing the mod work.

Emanuar is a programmer and game designer from Germany, who makes these types of modding videos with the help of Patreon support. Kaze Emanuar’s YouTube channel can also be found here.

In other news, Nintendo appears to have accidentally granted one player early access to the Advance Wars remake, before revoking the player’s pre-order.