Mario Kart 64 is now unofficially playable natively on your personal computer courtesy of some of the same people who’ve brought us similar Nintendo 64 PC ports. And so far, Nintendo seems unable or unwilling to legally challenge these reverse-engineered ports.
On June 20, as recently spotted by VGC, a group of fan modders and devs known as Harbour Masters released a free PC port of Mario Kart 64. This in’t the N64 game being emulated on a PC, something people have been doing for a long time. Instead, this is a native port of Mario Kart 64 built for modern computers. You’ll need a ROM of the classic N64 kart racer to play this PC version of the game, one which you should, of course, obtain legally via your own backups.
Anyway, once you have that legal copy of a Mario Kart 64 ROM and have set up this new native PC port, you can play this beloved racing game in 4K at 120 FPS with full widescreen support using any controller of your choice.
Not only does this PC port support higher framerates and improved visuals, but you can also change how aggressive the AI racers are and even create custom tracks to share online. It’s truly amazing to see this classic N64 game running so well on a giant widescreen monitor. It’s a thing of beauty to watch in motion.
Are PC ports of N64 games legal, and how do they work?
So, how did Harbour Masters pull this off? Well, similar to their past PC ports of Star Fox and Ocarina of Time, the team has reverse-engineered all of Mario Kart 64's original code and recreated it so it can be played on a PC. All you need to do is plug in the game’s ROM, which provides all the copyrighted assets like music and artwork, and the team’s PC version of Mario Kart 64's code can run the game. We saw something similar happen in 2020 with Super Mario 64.
You might be wondering if this is legal. Well, I’m not a lawyer, but in theory, these sorts of reverse-engineered ports of old games should be able to avoid Nintendo’s lawyers. Case in point, you can still download all of Harbour Masters’ past N64 PC ports freely and easily from the group’s GitHub page. Considering how litigious Nintendo can be, the fact that these ports remain up is a sign that the company can’t do anything. Technically, they aren’t sharing any copyrighted Nintendo code or assets, so the company shouldn’t be able to sue them into oblivion.
Whatever happens to Harbour Masters and the other modders doing great work out there, I’m happy that people are making these games easily playable on modern hardware with wonderful quality-of-life features. This is a great way to preserve these classic games without needing to rely on emulation or keep old consoles alive for decades.
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