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There are plenty of ways to play classic games in VR thanks to various emulator upgrades on modern platforms, but if you've ever wondered whether you could plug a VR headset into a 28-year-old Nintendo 64 console and get a similar experience, wonder no more - one developer has gotten a VR version of Super Mario 64 running on original hardware.
That developer is James Lambert, who you might know as the person behind the sadly canceled Portal 64 demake. He's not quitting N64 development, though, and on top of the original game he's making, Lambert is also at work on various experiments with attaching an Oculus Rift development kit to the console using a custom USB adapter. And what better way to test it than with a VR-enabled Mario 64 romhack?
The hack works pretty much as you'd expect, splitting the typical Mario 64 camera view into slightly offset positions that can mimic the distance between your eyes and give you a perception of depth. "I was able to get split screen rendering pretty quickly," Lambert explains. "It was just a matter of rerunning the rendering code twice, doing it once on one half the screen and again on the other. But the downside is this is less than optimal because I have to process the whole scene twice which is redundant work."
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I'd recommended watching the full video if you want a full technical breakdown of the troubleshooting Lambert did to make all this work, but in the end he says it "works far better than I was expecting." There are small glitches - like how the sprite-based trees keep standing straight up even as you tilt your head - but by and large it totally works.
Lambert shows off several levels in the video, noting that the castle courtyard "runs pretty smoothly" but finding that the actual levels, even Bob-omb Battlefield, have frame rate issues - an especially big problem in VR. He also didn't find that the added depth perception was very useful in more challenging levels like Tick Tock Clock.
By the end of the test, Lambert says "I was getting very motion sick. The head tracking wasn't very good, the frame rate's not very high, and both of those lead to a really bad motion sickness. It doesn't help that Mario 64 is also a game that has a lot of movement."
But hey, if you don't mind some motion sickness, you've got an Oculus development kit laying around, and you're willing to build your own N64 USB adapter, you can download the romhack for yourself over on GitHub. For me, I'm happy to live the Mario 64 VR life vicariously through YouTube videos and enjoy the knowledge that developers out there are pushing aging video game hardware to its absolute limits.
Many of the best N64 games would be mesmerizing in VR.
