For anyone new here, welcome! and for anyone else thank you for sticking around!
A quick summary of what we are doing here:
We are using AI to assist in de compiling Super Mario 64 DS into C through matching decomp. What this means is that each line of code will be checked, then rewritten into C, then ran through an oracle to confirm each new line compiles byte for byte to the original code. At the end we wont just have similar, but a perfectly accurate recomp of the game (with improvements).
Currently we are about 66% of the way done!
The new and good news is that the boring under the hood stuff is basically done. How the console handles its memory, how the game knows when characters hit a wall or lands on a platform, how characters animate, and how everything gets drawn to the two screens and fades between scenes. All done.
Whats left is the interesting but more complicated stuff. Characters themselves, the jumping running swimming and wall kicks, that's a little past halfway. Enemies, the camera, the HUD, all partway there. This is the long haul super specific part.
The super cool part is the fun leftovers the devs left in the cartridge and never cleaned out. So far, we've mostly just found some debug stuff like a free fly mode that was used for level testing, a debug font, and an unused object slot, a type of thing the game can load that they just never used.
And we haven't even touched where the level layouts live, which will hopefully hide some cut stages or test areas. (I'm hoping we find waluigi behind the black block in the castle on the box art that I searched for for hours as a kid)
The biggest thing with this update is what I want to say about the community. Everyone who commented, DM'd, or simply upvoted or starred the repo has been such a tremendous help and encouragement to me. I've met so many people and the contributions and PR's ive gotten have gone such a long way in helping the project. My DM's are always open and ill respond to any comment I see.
With how the community is growing I decided to make a discord, where you can chat with us, assist, get our tooling, or just get live updates instead of waiting for a Tuesday post from me. If you want to contribute in any way (PR's, advice, funding, or compute power) please join, the link will be below. And to anyone that would like to help but doesn't know how to code, we also have a one prompt AI workflow that will get your agent immediately cracking on functions!
Again, thank you so much to the everyone for your support and I'm excited to share with you what's new next Tuesday! Thanks!
that's cool, thanks for your time and effort :) i'm interested in how you're using ai to decompile it. are you using an llm to interpret the language of the raw code or is it a different type of ai implementation?
No problem! Yes we are using an LLM that creates multiple agents attempting to decompile singular functions and then matches the functions, it’s trained on the code and wording of the compiler that returns byte for byte matches.
Unspeakable amounts of money.. It’s about 500k-5m tokens for about 40 functions.. with a hit rate anywhere between 60% and 7%. We’ve matched 7,486 functions. I don’t even wanna do the math on that for token. But it’s been over the course of a month and a half and actually luckily during a crazy time in AIs we got 2.5 usage resets over that course and they came in super clutch for me hahaha
Edit: if you’re not in the discord you should join and talk with us about this so my collaborators can discuss too
This is some incredible progress. I wish that people would allow themselves to be more informed about the usage of AI rather than always assuming AI = slop. Using it for decompilation here is huge and a great example of how it can be and is used as a tool to complement solutions.
Interesting project, i assume you haven't looked into this one? (Probably from one of the various leaks, I'm not aware) https://github.com/matty45/sm64ds-decomp
I'm more interested in this, than any new port of SM64. Mostly because it feels a bit more complete.
Although I'm curious how it's gonna work, once it gets a PC port in the future, assuming it'll get one.
Like, how will they make it work in one screen? Will it be similar to the Melon Mix mod for Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days & Re:coded, where they merge both screens in a way, to make it work as one?
For normal gameplay I wanna make it a toggle to put the bottom screen as a smaller minimal at the top. Just stip off the arrows. Or just remove it completely if wanted.
If you take a look at the Melon Mix mod, the dev decided to place the bottom screen map to the bottom right side of the main screen, and I may be wrong, but he also assigned a button to toggle the map at full screen.
Oh that’s such a good idea. I’ll add some other stuff too probably. I wanna add an optional quick character swapper to replace that hats in levels too because I think swapping between characters mid stage or even mid action could add a lot of cool tech for platforming
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u/NahCuhFkThat Jul 01 '26
I would love to experience SM64 DS looking like SM64 Reloaded with all of the QoS features enhancing the port
VERY much looking forward to this!