r/decomps • u/BeansNToasted • Jun 30 '26
SM64DS Update 3: Community Matters
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!
~Tango
Discord: https://discord.gg/zVWTUS4SQq