Mario Kart 64 races onto PC with unofficial port, no emulation necessary

The big picture: Emulating the Nintendo 64 has always been a contentious topic. The release of UltraHLE was a landmark moment, offering a way to run commercial N64 games at playable frame rates on Windows 9x when the console was barely three years old. Today, the situation has improved dramatically, with more accurate emulation options and alternative ways to faithfully recreate Nintendo’s gameplay magic on the PC.

The Harbour Masters collective has once again achieved the impossible. The team of developers that brought The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64 to PC has now unveiled its latest effort in code decompilation and reverse engineering: SpaghettiKart, an unofficial PC port of Mario Kart 64.

As with the other titles, HM decompiled the original game code and recompiled it to run natively on modern computing platforms. SpaghettiKart supports Windows, Linux (Ubuntu 22), and even the Switch. Notably, the port doesn’t include any of Nintendo’s copyrighted assets. Players must provide their own copy of the Mario Kart 64 ROM, convert it into the proper format, and run the “Spaghettify.exe” program to load the data on their PC.

For now, SpaghettiKart can only load the US version of the game. The port supports three rendering APIs to minimize graphics issues: DirectX 11 for Windows, Metal for macOS, and OpenGL for other platforms. There’s also support for custom assets and mods, as demonstrated in an official clip recently shared by HM on YouTube.

SpaghettiKart is still a work in progress, the developers warned, with a small minority of users experiencing rare crashes. Custom track imports already work, although not all Mario Kart 64 features are supported yet. And yes, the “SpaghettiKart” name is likely a nod to the massive amount of spaghetti code used by Nintendo’s developers back in the 90s.

Still, running Mario Kart 64 on PC without emulation, complete with custom graphics settings, is probably the best way we have today to enjoy Nintendo’s masterpiece in a new light. The game was originally conceived as a showcase of what the new console could do with 3D graphics, even though its gameplay didn’t significantly advance beyond the original Super Nintendo title, Super Mario Kart.

Mario Kart 64 was a complex, messy project, and developers had to contend with the Nintendo 64’s limited processing power. Yet the game went on to become the second-best-selling title for the platform, with 9.87 million copies sold worldwide.

SpaghettiKart is powered by Libultraship, a library designed to reimplement the Nintendo 64 SDK functions (libultra) on modern machines. The HM collective is using it as a common framework to develop native PC ports of Nintendo 64 games, so we’ll just have to wait and see what their next decompilation and recompilation project will be.