That Mario 64 PC port has mods now

While Nintendo have been sending copyright notices to sites hosting the really rather good Mario 64 port that has been doing the rounds, that hasn't stopped either its spread or the modders who've begun tinkering with it.

First of all, there's Armando Arredondo's HD Mario mod, which takes a tweaked version of the character's model from Super Mario Galaxy, then drops him directly into the 1996 game. It looks pretty good, and while the HD character being placed in a low-poly world might seem jarring, it's certainly no weirder than him being surrounded by humans with normal proportions in Mario Odyssey.

And if you want the textures to match him, CrashCrew are currently working on an AI upscaling. Right now you can see how Peach's Castle looks with HD textures, and it'll be fascinating to see the rest of the game given the same treatment.

There are also mods to enable cheats, disable draw distance, and remove the Nintendo 64's distinctive linear filtering, which leaves it looking like a port for the original PlayStation.

All of these videos come from UnrealYouTube and no, that's not an official Unreal Engine channel.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.