Super Mario 64¶

Info Wiki Walkthrough Manual

Super Mario 64 is probably the first "big" recompilation/PC port effort; however, this was before the generational "revolution" of Ship of Harkinian/modern Recompilations, which make the process a lot easier.

Other ports may involve manually building the emulator, or being a less "all-in-one" solution. This is why I default to Ship of Harkinian below, but the port offers a much more limited set of features (the major one being a fully-analog camera). I'll include one of the easier ports below the Ship of Harkinian instructions, just for variety's sake or if you want more features.

In short: use Ship of Harkinian unless you're comfortable tinkering.

Ship of Harkinian Ghostship - Installation¶

This Super Mario 64 port is a Ship of Harkinian project called Ghostship.

Download a release from the Releases page for Ghostship. Extract it somewhere, and keep the folder handy.
Find a ROM of Super Mario 64 online, and make sure it's in a .z64 format
Place the ROM inside the same folder as where you extracted Ghostship.
Run Ghostship.exe; a window should pop up asking about generating an O2R file. Click "Yes." You may need to locate your ROM.
A command prompt should open and a bunch of code should start scrolling. Stay calm, this is okay.
Eventually, the process will finish and the game will open. From now on, Click Ghostship.exe in order to open the game.

Syncing Your Save Data¶

Ghostship saves your save data in a file called default.sav in your Ghostship directory.

To sync using SyncThing:

Create a folder sync that points to your Ghostship folder.
In the Ignore Patterns pane, add:
```
!default.sav
*
```
Before sharing the folder using SyncThing, download and extract Ghostship on your second device.
Share the folder using SyncThing.
On your second device, set the folder's target to be inside your Ghostship directory. Example: D:\Ghostship. The save should be copied over and be usable.

Customizing your Game¶

When the game is open, type ESC on your keyboard to open the menus.

As this release is considerably less developed than other Harkinian ports, there is less to configure, here.

Controls¶

Default controls for the game can be found here.

My usual Nintendo 64 layout may need to be tweaked, especially as there isn't analog camera controls for Ghostship. This is a thread explaining the reasoning.

Enhancements¶

Graphics¶

Use Alternate Assets is only really used by Mods to load alternate assets.
Show Power Meter Always will show your health meter at all times or not.

Gameplay¶

These are mostly self-explanatory.

Disable LOD will avoid having the game change to low-quality assets at a distance (something the original did to save space).
Select Any Star should be disabled if seeking a vanilla experience
Collecting Stars Will Not Exit Level is self-explanatory; this is to your taste.
Skip Intro Peach Cutscene and Skip Intro Lakitu are mostly time-savers if you've played the game before.

Fixes and Cheats¶

Self-explanatory, for the most part. Hover over the option to see an explanation.

Super Mario 64 Plus¶

Download the Super Mario 64 Plus launcher. Extract SM64Plus.exe.
Running it will ask you to install the port to a folder. Choose one and install it.
Go to that folder and run Super Mario 64 Plus.exe.
The Launcher will check your MSYS2 installation. Then it will prompt you to find your .z64 ROM.

The Launcher will then attempt to extract/convert your ROM. However it will fail. This is a known issue¹. To fix it:

After running the Launcher and the build process failing, open the directory you created in Step 2 (example, /Super Mario 64 Plus/).
Open the sm64plus directory. This may only be generated after failing the first build.
Go to the tools folder. Open armips.cpp in Notepad (or like me, Notepad++).
Go to line 221. Create a new line, and then add # include <cstdint> to that line. Then save the file. The section of the file should look like the image below (with the highlighted line being added).

Then, re-open Super Mario 64 Plus.exe. Choose your ROM again. The process should work properly this time, and the Super Mario 64 Plus menu should show up (with music you can't disable, unfortunately).

Syncing Saves¶

Unfortunately, the "make it portable" feature is broken on the game, so your save files will be in your %LOCALAPPDATA%/SM64Plus folder on Windows.

Press WIN + R to open a command prompt, or open the Start menu and type cmd.
Paste %LOCALAPPDATA%/SM64Plus into the command prompt. It should open a folder.
The folder should contain savedata.bin and other files.

To sync using SyncThing:

Create a folder sync that points to the folder that you found above.
In the Ignore Patterns pane, add:
```
!savedata.bin
*
```
Before sharing the folder using SyncThing, install SM64Plus on your second device. Run the game at least once.
Share the folder using SyncThing.
On your second device, repeat the steps above to find your %LOCALAPPDATA%/SM64Plus on that machine. Set the synced folder location to that directory.

Options¶

From the main menu, you can go to Controls and navigate left/right to go to different options screens.

Progression¶

The main tweaks I'd suggest are in the Progression menu.

Always Stay in Course, Skip Mission Select and Auto-Switch to the Next Mission streamline the process of getting a star and getting kicked out of the level. Skip Cutscenes also get you into the game faster (skipping the intro cutscenes). Your mileage may vary.

Controls¶

Near the right end of the settings menus, you can customize your controls (either a controller or a keyboard). The default controller mapping is very similar to my Zelda 64 layout, but removes C-Left and C-Right (changing it to an analog camera control) and mapping Z to both trigger buttons. L and R are mapped to the bumpers.

Camera¶

In the Camera menu, we can enable the analog camera if it's already not enabled.

The Default Camera Mode and Alternate Camera Mode matter; Lakitu Cam only allows you to use horizontal analog control, while Custom Cam replaces the "Mario Cam" from the game, and allows for full analog control. You can see which camera mode you're in while in-game with the below icons. You can change your camera mode with Right Shoulder.

Lakitu Cam (Lakitu Icon):

Custom Cam (Mario Icon):

Source on Reddit. ↩