The Game Boy Advance is becoming a battleground of impossible ports. Someone is already working on porting Super Mario 64 to the hardware, and now a second developer has taken on the same challenge independently, with a newly published video showing where that project currently stands.
The new port comes from Brendan Tobias Friedly, who goes by Game of Tobi online and has previously turned heads with a GBA rendition of Super Mario Maker. His Super Mario 64 effort cites the earlier work of developer Joshua Barretto as direct inspiration, which gives you a sense of how much one person’s willingness to attempt something ridiculous can ripple outward through a community.
The technical mountain involved here is worth appreciating. The GBA‘s CPU runs at 16MHz, meaning the entire budget for rendering a single frame at one frame per second is 16 million cycles. Friedly describes the process of even reaching that baseline as requiring enormous effort, and the work of squeezing out anything approaching playable performance above that threshold as getting “ridiculously complicated.” The current build runs somewhere between 5 and 15 frames per second, depending on the level being played. Rough, but according to the developer, genuinely playable.
What’s notable is how far Friedly’s ambitions extend from here. He isn’t just aiming to get a few levels functional for a YouTube video. He says the goal is to make the entire game playable on GBA hardware, and has even floated the idea of eventually doing a “3D All-Stars” style collection for the platform, referencing Nintendo’s own Switch compilation of classic 3D Mario titles.
The GBA launched in 2001 with a 32-bit ARM processor and a small, bright screen. It was a significant leap over the original Game Boy hardware it replaced, but nobody in 2001 would have looked at it and thought “yes, this will run Super Mario 64 in about 25 years.” Sometimes fan projects exist mostly to find out where the actual ceiling is, and this one is still climbing.
Source: Time Extension
