A DX12, 4K-ready PC port of Super Mario 64 is currently available for download. It’s not a fan-made project, but it is a fan-ported project. In other words, this is the real deal made available to play on PC via a native executable. This is not emulation. This is not a drill.

Download links are already being nuked from the interwebs, likely from host providers unwilling to deal with Nintendo’s lawyers, or Nintendo’s lawyers sniffing out the urls like addicts sniffing out milligrams of danger-sugar around a crack house.

According to Hard Forum, the project is complete. This isn’t just a single level or a test demo, it’s the full Super Mario 64 from the N64 made available on PC.

Etresevo, a developer who was commenting about the leaks on YouTube, did a breakdown of exactly what happened, writing…

“For everyone wondering how and why this happened:

“In 2019, Mario 64 was completely decompiled. Normally in decompilation, the resulting source code has generic function,variable,and structure names. So it was cleaned up so that everything could be easily mapped out and now we have a 1 to 1 recreation of the original source code that builds the ROM just fine. You can find the repo on Github.

“Using this, another team took the decompiled source code and ported it to Windows. This was basically a matter of replacing libultra (the library many n64 games use) with DirectX.

“When the N64 leaks started a couple days ago, the Windows port wasn’t officially out yet but it happened to leak eitherway right around the same time as the rest of the N64 leaks (the internal SDKs and documentation, verilog files, prototypes/demos, etc). They are still seperate leaks though.

“Most of this came out of the “N64 Leaks” thread on the /vr/ board on 4chan.”

Typically, YouTubers forbade their commenters from posting links to downloads of the game, and instead just want to rack in ad revenue and Patreon bucks while having done zero work other than playing someone else’s hard work and uploading it for e-fame and cash.

That kind of pretension is almost as bad as Neil Druckmann’s hubris… but not quite.

Some people tried sharing the link from Gofile.io, but it’s no longer available.

Alternatively, if you have a compiler you can download the decompiled source code from over on Github.com and attempt to recompile it yourself.

There’s also the old torrent or P2P route.

(Thanks for the news tip Bitterbear and Minuteworld)