Super Mario 64 Is Running on SNES in a Work-in-Progress Project Called Super Mario FX

YouTuber Tobias Friedly, who runs the Game of Tobi channel, has shown off a work-in-progress SNES version of Super Mario 64 called Super Mario FX.

Rather than directly porting Nintendo’s 1996 Nintendo 64 game to much weaker hardware, Friedly reportedly built a custom engine and used it to run rebuilt Super Mario 64 levels with the original game’s assets. That distinction matters on a machine like the Super Nintendo, which was not designed for the kind of 3D game Super Mario 64 became famous for.

Why the SNES can do this at all

The project relies on the SNES’s Super FX enhancement chip, a coprocessor Nintendo used in some cartridges to expand what the console could do. Reports describe the chip as what makes it possible to render the rudimentary polygon-based 3D graphics needed for a game in this style without dumping all of that work onto the SNES CPU alone.