Second Fan Port Brings Super Mario 64 To GBA

Another Wild GBA Experiment

Super Mario 64 on Game Boy Advance still sounds like something from a playground rumour, but fan developers keep finding ways to make the idea real. After Joshua Barretto's earlier attempt to recreate the N64 classic on Nintendo's small handheld, a second project has now stepped into view.

This new version comes from Brendan Tobias Friedly, better known as Game of Tobi. He has shared a video showing his port in motion, with the project leaning hard on careful optimisation and memory management to make the 3D platformer run on GBA hardware.

A Tiny Machine, A Huge Job

The main challenge is the Game Boy Advance CPU. Game of Tobi points out that it runs at 16 MHz, so the project has very little room to waste. If a single frame used 16 million cycles, the result would be only one frame per second.

That means the port needs to cut down the CPU work needed for every frame as much as possible. Even getting close to the limits of the machine becomes a careful balancing act, which explains why the work quickly became complicated.

Playable, But Still Rough

Right now, the frame rate sits somewhere between 5 and 15 frames per second, depending on the level. That is far from smooth by modern standards, but Game of Tobi says the game is still playable in its current state.

The footage also makes it clear that this is not finished yet. It looks rough in places, as you would expect from a project trying to bend a handheld this far. Still, development is set to continue, and its creator sounds confident that the entire game can eventually be brought across.

So the retro scene may end up with not one but two solid ways to play Super Mario 64 on the Game Boy Advance. For a handheld built for a very different kind of game, that is a wonderfully strange bit of preservation-minded tinkering.