Super Mario Bros. Wonder is now playable on PC without emulation thanks to a native port

Decompilation and recompilation projects are breaking the console exclusivity barrier for PC gamers. Over the past few weeks, many projects have appeared aiming to port classic console, or even modern console, games to the PC platform. Though these projects have had varying degrees of success, those that produced actual results were quite promising. One such project is a native port of the 2023 Nintendo Switch exclusive title Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

The Current Status of the Port

YouTuber Belmante developed the port and posted the latest update on their channel: a native Windows port of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Running on a Windows laptop with an RTX 3050 GPU. From the video, the game seems to run almost flawlessly at around 60 FPS, with minor graphical glitches and background flickering causing slight FPS drops. 

How Does the Port Work?

The recompiled game code is built using C++. A new layer translates the NVN driver into Vulkan, and it talks directly to the NVIDIA driver without intermediaries. The system uses no emulator, JIT, or interpreter.

Belmante also discusses how the game uses ASTC textures, which are incompatible with NVIDIA GPUs. To work around this issue, they developed a new decoder that lets the CPU process ASTC textures. An on-disk pipeline cache, along with multi-threaded ASTC decoding, also cuts down the stuttering that occurs when new objects appear.

Nonetheless, the port is impressive, especially considering it uses no emulation. Belmante previously posted a similar video of the game running on macOS with a Mac M1, though that port had some major issues. As Belmante disclosed, the project's rapid development is thanks to AI assistance. 

What’s the Next Step?

Belmante has revealed their plan to further optimize the port and test it out on an integrated GPU: the Intel UHD 770, to be exact. As per their statement, “it's in the same class as the Switch's own Tegra X1, so it's a good test of how light this can run.” Since the original Switch didn't have particularly powerful hardware, it stands to reason that Belmante wants to test the minimum required GPU for the port.

The port's repository is still private for now, but Belmante plans to make everything related to the project public soon. This project is something other decompilation project developers and gamers should keep an eye on.