There's something that still gets me excited about seeing Mario appear on different systems. A game as nostalgic and inherently Nintendo as Mario Kart 64 arriving on the Sega Dreamcast was something that I never thought would happen in a million years; it's not that it just wasn't done, but it just couldn't be done. I mean, how could you play a cartridge on a console that took discs?
I've been following the progress of jnmartin84, a Dreamcast developer who has single-handedly been working to get Mario's seminal 3D racer onto the Dreamcast. In under a month, he's managed to get the game running smoothly with some incredible improvements. Notably, the fact that the huge jumpotron monitor screens that show your progress to all of the excited Toads who are undoubtedly in the crowds are now running at 30FPS. That's 6 times the framerate of the original version on the N64 - it's witchcraft!
Jesus Christ, jnmartin has officially implemented his first big improvement over the N64 original for the Sega Dreamcast port of Mario Kart 64! Now the jumpotron monitor screens in Wario Stadium and and Luigi Raceway are updating at a full 30FPS, or 6x the framerate of the N64!… pic.twitter.com/OhMZGUVsg1
— Falco Girgis (@falco_girgis) June 17, 2025
I've also been keeping up to date with Dreamcast developer Falco Girgis' commentary on the build, discovering that jnmartin84 is making these jumpotron changes 'entirely in software with the Dreamcast's SH4 CPU performing slow, direct VRAM reads from the framebuffer into a temporary buffer in system RAM'. It's then ferried through to OpenGL before being shipped back into VRAM, all without dropping a single frame.
Even without seeing the characters racing along in 30 FPS up on the big screens, the game is looking beautiful. Considering the game has only been recently decompiled, jnmartin84 has hit the ground running with the speed of a Blue Shell when it comes to getting this project ready. Check out the video below to see how far he's already come!
FINALLY time for the big announcement everyone has been begging and waiting for... Here's a VERY EARLY direct hardware capture of Mario Kart 64... RUNNING ON THE SEGA DREAMCAST, of course!
— Falco Girgis (@falco_girgis) June 7, 2025
This game was literally just BARELY decompiled the other day, with a codebase that is… pic.twitter.com/h76glP2QGu
This isn't the first title I've covered heading to the Dreamcast recently, either. Back in September, I wrote about GTA III heading back to Sega's swansong console, the machine on which it was originally developed on. It's nice to see the Dreamcast finally getting its place in the spotlight almost a quarter of a century after it was discontinued, with developers keeping it alive and discovering just how far they can push it. Keep an eye on jnmartin84's YouTube channel for more updates!
