Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro

I love that we've reached a point where you can put an entire N64 level on your dining table and physically walk around it.

It is cool. And I admit I am getting into decompiling and rebuilding for funzies ( just this weekend: few old 3.1 educational games, ff11( one zone only ) and vf4( ps2, mostly failure on first attempt ). But as a side note, I was under impression apple is not big on letting emulators run on its hardware? I am mildly worried that a big hammer is gonna come down on it all pretty soon.

• daveidol · 9 hours ago

  That is outdated now. You can run emulators on iOS and you’ll find plenty in the App Store. The only limitation right now is no JIT, which is a problem for more modern console emulation.

Oh man, the memories that music brings back. N64 was magical when it first came out. We used to rent it from Blockbuster Video for parties with friends.

• tombert · 8 hours ago

  Mario 64 is probably the game I have spent the most amount of time playing. I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge . As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay). Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.

  • hylaride · 8 hours ago

    Goldeneye for me. My friends and I spent HOURS every Friday night into dawn playing that, shit-talking each other. The licence to kill setting (where one hit no matter what killed you) with no-Oddjob slap fights. I often nostalgically wish I was young and immature again thinking about it.

    • The-Bus · 7 hours ago

      I was excited to hear it was being rereleased on the Switch's online service. I tried to play it and couldn't get past the first level. Console FPSs have since developed pretty unified controls (with axis inversion really being the main option) that don't cleanly map onto the port. I couldn't get a familiar control scheme in GoldenEye and gave up after about 20 minutes of trying.

      • sleepybrett · 5 hours ago

        the control scheme only makes some sense if you use the 'triwing' n64 controller IMO. Even though you have access to enough buttons and sticks etc to make it 'work' on a more modern controller design, it's still not the same.

        • mrguyorama · 2 hours ago

          No, the control scheme is just bad. Tank controls just don't work for shooters, especially with how they were developing at the time. Similarly, old shooting games before doom sometimes had no dedicated control for strafing. They didn't seem to realize how important it was. But it's bad. If you boot up Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in an emulator, you can set them up with the control scheme that uses the C buttons as the second "stick" and remap things to give yourself near real dual stick controls like in modern shooters, and it's night and day. The games stop feeling clunky. The autoaim becomes actively harmful. I did this once to my brother in multiplayer and there was absolutely nothing he could do to combat my fluidity of movement. It was trivial to just circle strafe him. Having the two axis of a control stick do radically different things (turn vs move) is terrible. It's like playing a racing game where pushing up on the stick is your accelerator. It's just hard to use that input in a controlled way while also trying to deal with the other axis.

          • sleepybrett · 1 hour ago

            I mean GE was probably one of the very first FPS on a console so of course they didn't get it right the first time. Even Metroid Prime suffers similarly as things developed. If I remember right MP had a shoulder button you would hold to go into a strafing mode.

      • RunSet · 1 hour ago

        The XBLA port (that was never released) was leaked and runs well in Xenia. https://archive.org/details/GoldenEyeXBLA It is also one of the few "remasters" that let you toggle the original graphics on the fly. (Mapped to R1 on the gamepad.)

Fantastic! It's been a very cool week for technology.

What's the current best device for VR/AR? Have there been any advancements in this field lately? Or any upcoming device that has been announced?

• ycombinete · 10 hours ago

  There's a new steam set coming out that looks excellent: https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe

  • sleepybrett · 5 hours ago

    it's out and shipping if you are the reservation list.

• LoganDark · 10 hours ago

  It varies for each person. Would need to know what you prefer in a device. Valve's Steam Frame runs Linux that you own, but is not generally available yet if you didn't reserve one already. It suffers from LCD, low pixel density, and awful passthrough, but the software is some of the best and only getting better. In a few years Valve may offer an OLED upgrade (or a new model, but fuck that)

  • Grombobulous · 9 hours ago

    It should also be noted that there is a passthrough accessory if you want better passthrough. The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device where passthrough is less important.

    • LoganDark · 9 hours ago

      I've been pissed that using up the expansion port for passthrough means you don't have an expansion port anymore. It's such a missed opportunity. Seems nobody has realized this or nobody cares. I haven't seen anyone else notice or mention it. > The Steam Frame is squarely targeted as a pure gaming device It's technically also supposed to be a Linux PC, and there are some (not many) productivity features. In any case, I'd prefer to be able to at least read notifications instead of having to take the headset off every time I get a message or an e-mail or whatever.

      • wlesieutre · 8 hours ago

        For Android devices you can mirror them into the frame without much fuss https://github.com/bangfireball/Phonecast_VR

        • LoganDark · 7 hours ago

          I view my notifications on my Mac... My phone won't even unlock with the headset on (one reason I hate face ID)

      • voidUpdate · 8 hours ago

        The expansion port docs seem to imply you can have two passthrough cameras and a pcie gen4 lane at the same time, so a designer could probably allow a passthrough https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamHardware/SteamFrame/-/blob... (page 9, "supported configurations")

• xqcgrek2 · 10 hours ago

  They're all still pretty bad at around 25-40 pixels per degree, with the the higher FoV ones lower PPD.

• utopiah · 3 hours ago

  Depends on your needs obviously : - cheap Android that can potentially be rooted : Quest 3 - deep into the Apple ecosystem and not a hardcore gamer : Vision Pro - gamer and Linux tinkerer or just want an open device : Steam Frame The upcoming Meta headset is also quite nice possibly for remote work but again it's Android and from Meta.

  • sleepybrett · 1 hour ago

    I picked up a steam frame because I'm sucker for headsets that don't smell like zuckerberg. (and it's at least 2x cheaper than the vision pro) While I enjoy some of the VR games I've played, mostly simulator types (star wars squadrons, elite dangerous), as well as the 'exercise style' (beat saber, pistol whip), and this kind of 'board game style' (moss, ... there is a d&d one i don't recall the name of). I'm actually very keen on attempting productivity in the glasses. The frame is easily the lightest, or at least, the most manageable headset I've tried and the most comfortable long term. Coming from the Index the screen resolution is much better and in my testing last night (It just showed up on my doorstep monday) it was working out pretty well in just the packed in 'desktop' mode (just one 'virtual monitor'). Paired a BT keyboard, installed goland and several other tools and was able to comfortably read all the windows without even tweaking things like themes, font-sizes, etc. All running directly on the headset. I've seen some addon's that tweak the desktop environment, noteably frametop ( https://github.com/Frametop/frametop ) which i'm keen on trying out. Apparently it also allows you to set up remote 'monitors' as additional 'screens' in environment, it seems like it should support pulling my macbook screen into it via VNC. I guess all to say I'm excited to explore what a 'vr native' productivity environment could look like beyond what i'm getting now, which is essentially virtual monitors.

Looks amazing! Apple headset has lots of potential but the price is insane.

• Grombobulous · 9 hours ago

  Because it’s such a failure, the used pricing on eBay almost looks attractive. The depreciation is very real. Although it’s possible that the original M2 processor variant isn’t something to invest in.

  • haunter · 8 hours ago

    Sadly most of them are listed in the US so shipping and customs would kill these deals for everyone not there

  • AlexITC · 8 hours ago

    A while ago I checked the 2nd hand market where I live but this headset is barely listed. The few ones are expensive-enough that I'd rather purchase a new one.

    • Grombobulous · 7 hours ago

      I am seeing about $1800 with free shipping, that’s basically half the price of a new one.

  • chorsestudios · 8 hours ago

    Not a failure to me. It is the most exciting piece of computer hardware to program apps for that I've purchased in the last decade. I understand why others consider it a failure though, and wonder how it would have performed if it weren't so expensive. My hope was that it was going to pave the way for apple to release a pair of glasses that had some of the functionality of the Vision Pro. I'm guessing this is still one of their goals, however Meta and even SnapChat beat them to it.

    • Grombobulous · 7 hours ago

      To clarify, when I say “failure” I mean sales volume and adoption. I’m sure it’s a competent device.

    • bitwize · 5 hours ago

      The Vision Pro was the Mac 128K of its class of device. The original 1984 Macintosh was, at its release, anemically underpowered due to its low and unexpandable RAM, not to mention comically expensive for what you got; but it showed the potential of where such a system could go. I think that the Vision Pro hasn't found product-market fit on its own but it points the way to a brighter future for VR and for Apple's role in that space.

> Way to Play I knew this was going to be another case of HN title filtering!

• barbazoo · 7 hours ago

  One must not say something is "best"?

  • peesem · 7 hours ago

    too clickbaity. this title should have just been "Super Mario 64 on Apple Vision Pro"

• axus · 5 hours ago

  It's obviously not "the best" way to play; seems like even a bad filtering rule is right twice a day.

  • QuantumNomad_ · 53 minutes ago

    My guess before clicking through was that the title was going to be “A New” way to play. Definitely agree that “The Best” is clickbaity to put in headlines almost every time.

Diorama-style VR works very well to reduce or even eliminate kinetosis (motion sickness) for games. I've seen this in Moss and Moss 2 and it works very well. Too bad many blockbuster games nowadays have a camera-over-the-shoulder approach rather and focus on aiming on stuff rather than fixed camera (understandable since so many of them are open world); this would have given a nice accessibility option for fan-made mods. That said, for character action game with melee combat (the likes of Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, etc), maybe a god-game view centered on the character with a limited field of view could work ?

• jerf · 7 hours ago

  Since getting my Frame I think I've spent more time playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 in 3D than I have doing anything else. 3D in a window is much easier to deal with then full VR from a motion sickness perspective. I think the VR space made an unforced error by focusing a bit too much on VR and not enough on just plain 3D. VR is cool and it has a lot of interesting applications. But I've enjoyed my time with SMG2 in a 3D window quite a bit. I've enjoyed Triangle Strategy on my Quest 3S, which is a tactics game played on a diorama. There are some other applications based on the idea like shared dungeon crawlers modeled on table-top layouts rather than first person perspective. There's a lot of games that need only minimal tweaking or fiddling that could add a bit more visual interest by being displayed in full, true 3D. The space of games that could be improved by just being playable in 3D is much larger than the space of games that can be improved by VR specifically, since the former is a superset of the latter. Subconsciously it may feel like if you're developing for a "VR" headset, it ought to be "VR", but that's not the case. It's a well-known trap in gaming in general that when some new tech comes out there's a rush of things that feel obligated to "exploit" the tech so as not to be perceived as being behind the times, but it always becomes clear that is not necessarily. Most famously, the numerous Wii games that had to integrate "motion controls" and turned a nice, easy, concrete button press into a vague, nondeterministic "waggle" until just saying "motion controls" with a certain inflection has become a meme. There's no problem using the VR headset to enhance a game... or indeed any application... without it having to be "VR". My Steam Frame was cheaper than this 57" curved "gaming" monitor: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQM55C9 If gamers are willing to drop that on nice monitors just to play games, it would make sense to drop that much on a VR headset to play them in 3D too... if there was anything to do with that.

  • Forgeties79 · 7 hours ago

    I personally don’t like being so closed off to play video games. I like having a screen and awareness of my surroundings. Plus I’m often in voice chat with friends. Also, I don’t have to worry about things like sweat and grease on it. I have the original PSVR and it’s been fun at times but the whole process of wearing the headset, getting it adjusted over your eyes, etc. Just always dissuades me from busting it out. I know things have gotten smaller, lighter, and easier, but nothing is as easy as simply turning on a monitor.

    • jerf · 7 hours ago

      I don't expect every person to instantly fall in love. I expect that it could be a more popular option than it is now if the industry hadn't been quite as monomaniacal about VR being "VR". It doesn't help that the headset hardware space has been closed off even worse than cell phones. One of the things I hope the Steam Frame will do is crack open the space of possibilities more by virtue of being a headset that is open, and force even the closed headsets to expand their thinking. More possibilities won't hurt you, even if you are personally uninterested in them.

      • Forgeties79 · 2 hours ago

        Not saying it’ll hurt me. I like VR here and there. Just voicing some issues as I see them.

• polyterative · 7 hours ago

  Not fully relevant to the comment, but I've noticed that most motion sickness issues derive from an FOV which is too low.Big companies set it lower for performance reasons I guess, but on PC I always loved to crank it. And it's not about sitting closer or about the distance in itself, it's about the ratio of the size of the screen to the vision field it occupies

  • soylentcola · 4 hours ago

    For me it was more about the mismatch between what my eyes saw and what my inner ear felt. Running around in first person while sitting or standing in a room took some real getting used to. But cockpit games or mostly stationary (in a reasonably small volume) standing-perspective games were fine.

• bni · 7 hours ago

  Agreed. Back when I used my Oculus a lot, a RTS game called Brass Tactics was my favorite. Brass Tactics is forgotten today, but it represents a way of playing games that was totally unique and might some day be rediscovered.

  • onetrickwolf · 6 hours ago

    Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss (same people who made Moss and Moss 2) based a lot of their design on Brass Tactics. I would say check it out but unfortunately the studio (Polyarc) went under shortly after publishing it so probably won't be seeing many updates and I'm not sure if it is even playable anymore. It did suffer from player base problems you were basically always against bots or very high level players, but I never felt a VR UX (or any UX almost) feel so good and intuitive. It's a bit sad I feel like there is some alternate reality where a game like this would have been huge but there just doesn't seem to be the market there anymore.

  • schaefer · 6 hours ago

    I just looked up a video for this game, and looks like a really interesting take on user interface in VR. Thanks for the head's up!

• mrtz · 4 hours ago

  Diorama style games in VR/AR are awesome. I remember Moss fondly. You could even high five the little mouse.

apple, here is your killer app for this awkward thing ;)

People when playing with LEGO or board games: "I wonder what it would look like from the perspective of the figures" People when playing game consoles: "I wonder what it would look like from a distance"

Well, that’s the first thing I’ve ever seen that made me want a Vision Pro (or VR/AR in general), so hats off for that. (Edit: Mario 64 pun not intended)

• ChicagoBoy11 · 3 hours ago

  Curious: You a baseball, or racing fan at all? For those two groups, I do think there are some killer apps for the vision pro.

• stets · 1 hour ago

  Have you demo'd one? I use mine a few hours a day...great for pairing with a macbook and working from and awesome for movies too. Bit too expensive though

I made something similar for the NES and Hololens, though much less functional as the Hololens didn't support the Xbox controller at the time, and the FOV was very narrow. Some MS employees added controller support during a hackathon, which was cool to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEWcc-cF3g0 I've been thinking about how to port and remaster retro games for a decade now and AI RE/decomp has blown all of my ideas out of the water. Exciting times for gamers (or anyone else who has used published binaries ie Photoshop), despite my other misgivings about generative AI.

Very cool. Doesn't seem like the best way to play Mario but it would be awesome for games like Fire Emblem or Civilization.

• deadbabe · 4 hours ago

  yea you should be able to just map out a table surface and play a game of Civilization on it, seems like a no brainer.

  • mihaaly · 2 hours ago

    In civ it is part of the game not knowing which part of the big map are you in. If you provide space for the eventual map and it is respected, then you will instantly know which corner of the world is yours. Or, if you pick your start location in your room, some distant leaders may end up in the cupboard or the pavement outside. Panning and zooming the growing map as you advance sounds necessary.

    • deadbabe · 43 minutes ago

      Easy option is to make it a globe then that you could spin around.

• Sir_Twist · 3 hours ago

  Civilization done in this way would be really, really cool. So cool I'm surprised it isn't already a thing. Imagine a City Skylines-style game done like this! I wonder if there is some technical reason this isn't done more, I would be way more into a board-game style approach than the motion-sickness inducing first person perspective most VR games take. I know the Vision Pro's primary MO is this "spatial computing" AR approach, but surely there are ways of accomplishing this without requiring an almost $4000 device, right?

  • sleepybrett · 1 hour ago

    It's just not cost effective to add VR to your games for a small handful of users.

• jerf · 2 hours ago

  Exclusive to Meta (unfortunately), there is Triangle Strategy: https://www.meta.com/experiences/triangle-strategy/534013047... Control is a bit dodgy, I kind of feel like it didn't quite commit to either the VR or the controller-like controls, but it's perfectly playable and is an interesting angle on things.

"Wouldn’t it be nice if Nintendo were more like Microsoft?" That's... completely unhinged. But, putting aside the mention of the biggest rent seeker in tech world as a role model. What's everyone's take on the gamers cheering against the Nintendo? Who's going to create this generation's own franchises like Nintendo did? What will be their incentives to invest time and effort in any new IP?

• mahboi · 6 hours ago

  Some Nintendo fans think they know better than Nintendo and deserve ownership of the IP.

• well_ackshually · 6 hours ago

  >What's everyone's take on the gamers cheering against the Nintendo? Nintendo is a scourge on the gaming industry. Gary Bowser is going to spend the rest of his life paying them, they illegally send DMCA takedowns on emulators, threaten developers by sending goons directly to their homes, takes away your ownership of games with their game code carts, tries to control and destroy the second hand market. Nintendo can burn. >Who's going to create this generation's own franchises like Nintendo did? Nintendo created zero franchises in this generation. Splatoon, maybe ? They're already creatively dry. > What will be their incentives to invest time and effort in any new IP? Piracy and emulation have been present for the past twenty years. Does it look like no new IPs came out in those twenty years ? Hell, for the recent recomp projects, it has been people _begging_ to be able to play games on another platform, they would have paid for it. Bloodborne has gotten a decomp that people have been screaming for for years. Companies that believe they can get you stuck on their platforms are going to crash and burn, and we'll all be better off for it. (Also intellectual property as a whole is a farce and has made the world worse)

  • jmiskovic · 5 hours ago

    Nintendo remains a treasured memory of many 90s childhoods. They took great risks to innovate both on hardware and software side for ~2 decades, I'm not defending what they did since. I'm also not arguing for intellectual property or copyright enforcement. I'm asking what comes next, I'm genuinely curious here.

  • MYEUHD · 3 hours ago

    > takes away your ownership of games with their game code carts, tries to control and destroy the second hand market. That's wrong. The game key-cards are just a proof of ownership. You can sell the key-cards or buy used ones without any problem. The only difference between a key-card and regular game cartridge is that key-cards will require you to download the game. Nintendo is much better than their competition (Sony) in this aspect

    • well_ackshually · 3 hours ago

      The Nintendo Store goes down in ten years, and you're shit out of luck. People on this thread are talking about playing Super Mario 64 because they own their game. Nintendo has been ensuring you will not pass down your games to your children.

      • mahboi · 2 hours ago

        The entire video game industry does this now, and Nintendo didn't start it, in fact they're one of the last hold-outs

        • eddieroger · 1 hour ago

          Two wrongs don't make a right, but three wrongs also don't make it right, it just makes Nintendo last. If anything, it proves the market will bear it, and the only people who really care about actually owning a game are those who have done it before.

          • mahboi · 1 hour ago

            I know it doesn't make it right, was a response to calling Nintendo a scourge on the video game industry

Never played super Mario 64 but wondering if folks would recommend it? Between that and paper Mario is there a better “first” one to play? My only console is an n64 and am playing through golden eye right now. The article is cool to have the “first 3D game” being played in VR.

• well_ackshually · 5 hours ago

  SM64 is an absolute masterpiece. It controls right, movement is simple and smooth, environments are varied. It's a totally ageless game. Paper Mario is different and suffers more from being the first of its kind. If you're more into RPGs would be a better pick, but overall still a great game.

  • eddieroger · 1 hour ago

    You have happier memories of the camera system than I do. The game is amazing, but "masterpiece" is a bridge too far for me given how many times the camera caused me to mess up.

• banubis · 5 hours ago

  Would highly recommend it! The developers spent a ton of time on the movement, making Mario feel snappy and incredibly satisfying to navigate the worlds and maps. The levels might feel a little easy at first, but it gets increasingly complicated and more difficult as the game progresses (I still as an adult have a hard time with Tick Tock Clock). Given the focus on mechanics, the game holds up super well. I'm genuinely impressed they were able to build such a good first ever 3d platformer!

• dgunay · 3 hours ago

  They're very different games. I'd play 64 first simply because it's a landmark in gaming history, but Paper Mario is one of my favorite games ever.

• eddieroger · 43 minutes ago

  Absolutely recommend Mario 64. I am of the age and fortunate enough to have the means to have played the flagship Mario game on nearly all of the Nintendos (starting with the NES), and my mind was blown regularly with the leap to SM64 easily being the biggest.

Tangentially related, I managed to have super mario from Mario 64 help me out while developing a renderer by using wonderful libsm64 https://x.com/Keyframe/status/2111909018595676245 and I put more details here https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1x7r2x... Note well libsm64 was made before LLM era, it's wonderfully absurd but also highly useful (to me at least).

• codessta · 5 hours ago

  Are you Italian? I'm just curious, since I never heard "Note well" in English, but it kinda sounds like "nota bene"

  • Keyframe · 4 hours ago

    Only by heritage, but I do use nota bene quite a lot. That's where it came from. Good catch!

  • I-M-S · 2 hours ago

    N.B. is a legit English abbreviation

Is anyone porting it to other VR standalone headsets?

I would bet playing battle mode in Mario Kart 64 with a view like this would be epic.