Microsoft · Nvidia · Apple · ARM · Tom's Hardware
Programmer ports Super Mario 64 to Microsoft’s Zune HD media player
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◌ Single Source
The Nintendo 64 game Super Mario 64 has come to the Microsoft Zune HD, Hackaday reports, through a project that runs natively on the device’s hardware through the unofficial OpenZDK kit, per the repo’s README.
Key facts
- The unit was originally priced between $219.99 and $289.99, depending on capacity, and uses the Nvidia Tegra APX 2600 chip
- The Nintendo 64 game Super Mario 64 has come to the Microsoft Zune HD, Hackaday reports, through a project that runs natively on the device’s hardware through the unofficial OpenZDK kit, per
- The Zune HD, a 2009-era media player that rivaled Apple’s iPod, has Nvidia Tegra hardware inside, and the project is built on sm64ex, a fork of the unofficial, decompiled Super Mario 64 PC port
- The project itself relies on a Super Mario 64 decompilation effort completed by fans in 2019, with a C source that rebuilds a matching ROM
Summary
The Zune HD, part of their 2009 gift guide, was marketed as having a “3.3-inch glass screen” using OLED and touchscreen technology, from Microsoft’s media alert at the time, with Tegra providing the “multimedia muscle,” according to an Nvidia release. The implementation depends on native ARM code on top of the Zune HD’s OS, using OpenZDK. It leverages an OpenGL ES 2 renderer derived from Fast3D with prebuilt shader variants, using Nvidia’s cgc and shaderfix tools, because the Zune’s graphics driver can’t compile OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders. The game’s logic runs at 30 ticks a second, but some lag is present when the Zune is unable to keep up. The game renders at 480x272 in landscape, with the device rotated to match.