The Game Boy Advance wasn't made to play 3D games. Nearly all of the titles are 2D sidescrollers or games with top-down isometric viewpoints, all bar Asterix and Obelix XXL which brings 3D gaming to the handheld and does it really well! The fact that the GBA wasn't made to play 3D games hasn't stopped the likes of Tobias Friedly from trying to put one of the most iconic N64 games ever made onto it.
I've already covered Joshua Barretto's work on making a demake of the game for the GBA, and it all looks incredible. Tobias, however, has been working to get the original N64 source code working on the Game Boy Advance, citing Joshua's work as his inspiration. It might be slow, but it works!
Tobias says that he wanted to try out different things with the Mario 64 source code, and after using it for a few different projects, he became curious about what it would look like if he could get it running on the GBA. The challenge was, as you can imagine, pretty daunting - getting a console with much less power than the N64 running such a demanding game was always going to be tricky, especially when you consider that Tobias was working with 16 million cycles for a single frame, one frame per second, to render images.
Tobias now has some levels running at 5 to 15 frames per second. He's been working on reducing float movement and adapting the physics of Mario's character movement to make things work, doing lots of crazy maths the likes of which make my head feel like it's going to explode.
Ok, there might be a bit of work to go before this is fully playable without needing the patience of a monk. Still, it's exciting to see how far Tobias has come with this journey, and it's also just exciting to be a part of Tobias' excitement for the project too. Check out his video above to find out more!
