Super Mario 3D All-Stars Datamining Reveals Emulation

It seems nothing is sacred on the internet as the highly anticipated Super Mario 3D All-Stars has already leaked online, revealing that the games are running through emulation.

Several dataminers have been going through the info little by little. One dataminer named “OatmealDome” has listed several pieces of info. They have been compiled here.

The dataminer says that the collection may be developed by NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). This makes sense since the European subsidiary developed the emulation technology for the NES & SNES Classic, Nintendo Switch Online, and the DS emulator on Wii U.

NERD seems to have done the code patches through the “Lua” programming language. They also developed the main menu for the collection with the LunchPack engine which was used in Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, and Animal Crossing. Interestingly, the project name for the collection is “stardust” while Galaxy has a sub-codname of “Shigeru.”

All three games run on an emulator. Super Mario 64 seems to be different from the other two games in the collection. It runs on an emulator called “Shindou Pack ROM”. Other interesting details include the first-person camera being inverted as opposed to the original and texture & code being applied on the fly.

Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy both run on a GameCube and Wii emulator named “hagi”. This particular emulator runs on the standard Vulkan API as opposed to the NVN which is commonly used to program 3D graphics on Switch. For Super Mario Galaxy, the development team seems to have recompiled the original code to run natively on the Switch CPU; also, the GPU and audio for Galaxy runs in the emulator. No specific info on Super Mario Sunshine has been found at this time.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars releases on September 18, 2020.