What you need to know
- Someone has successfully ported Super Mario 64 to the Apple TV.
- It runs natively at 60fps and at full screen.
The Apple TV 4K (2021) is a great home entertainment hub for gaming and viewing alike, and now someone has successfully ported Nintendo's classic Super Mario 64, running in 60fps and at full screen.
ckosmic over on Reddit announced:
Hey everyone. A couple of months ago I ported Super Mario 64 to iOS (https://www.reddit.com/r/SM64PC/comments/q3nm9f/sm64_has_been_ported_to_ios/) and since then I've been making improvements to it here and there. This past week I got it up and running on the Apple TV which, as shown here, runs it perfectly with the 60fps patch and full screen. Note that this is running natively on the Apple TV and uses no emulation whatsoever thanks to the sm64 decompilation project and sm64ex.
To run this yourself, you'd need to build it from source on a Mac using Xcode, so this isn't quite the plug and play convenience of Apple Arcade, but it still looks cool nonetheless, there's even a video!
Ckosmic told commenters that the original decompilation/pc port for Super Mario 64 likely took "years" to create. They were able to make an iOS port in about a week, with a couple more weeks needed to get touch controls and the menu working. Thanks to the similarities between tvOS and iOS this Apple TV version only took a couple of days.
Of all the Mario Games on Nintendo Switch. Super Mario is one of the coolest, available in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars bundle that features Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario 64, and Super Mario Galaxy.
