Tobi conjures Super Mario 64 onto a real SNES — without an emulator

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents Tobi conjures Super Mario 64 onto a real SNES — without an emulator.

If you follow Tobi on YouTube, you know the pattern: the supposedly impossible ends up on old hardware with him anyway. First Minecraft on the Game Boy Color, now Super Mario 64 on a real Super Nintendo. What sounds like an April Fools' joke is the result of genuine tinkering — and no emulation trick.

The trick behind the trick: Tobi, who runs the YouTube channel "Game of Tobi," has written his own engine called SMFX that makes Mario 64 run on the 16-bit console in the first place. The foundation is the Super FX chip — the coprocessor developed for rudimentary 3D graphics on the SNES. The port is loaded, according to Korben, via a flash cartridge compatible with the chip.

Important if you want to get hands-on with the SNES yourself: there's nothing to try out yet. Multiple sources consistently report that only a few levels run, not the complete Mario 64. Proxitek writes that each level has to fit in 2 MB and there's no official version to download. The project is clearly marked as "work in progress."

What makes the port special

Here's what makes the project special. According to Gamekult, this is explicitly not a decompilation — where existing game code is merely translated into a new form. Tobi rebuilt the N64 game from the ground up for the SNES hardware, accepting the tangible limits of the Super FX. Each level has to fit into the tight memory the chip provides together with the SNES.

The retrogaming scene has already picked up the port. In the Gamopat forum, there's lively discussion about what's already working and what's next. Korigans and iXtr see the project as proof of how much untapped potential still sits in the SNES hardware.

Tobi isn't a newcomer to the scene

If you don't have Tobi on your radar yet: he's long been one of the exceptional tinkerers in the retrogaming community. As MSN recalls, he's already released an engine that runs Super Mario 64 on an Apple Watch. The fact that he's now setting his sights on the SNES fits the picture.

Proxitek also offers an interesting naming detail: "Super Mario FX" was originally, according to Dylan Cuthbert, the internal codename of the Super FX chip. So Tobi didn't name his engine that by accident — the name sounds like a deliberate homage to a piece of SNES history.

What's left

If you want to try the project yourself, you'll need, according to Korben, an SNES with a flash cartridge compatible with the Super FX — and above all, patience. When the WIP becomes a complete game anyone can play remains open. The only certainty: that Super Mario 64 runs on a real SNES at all still seems unthinkable today — Gamekult nails it in its article.