Yesterday, I wrote about my first impressions overall with the new Super Mario 64 PC port. It's certainly impressive with what the community has done with it, but I decided to try my hand with some of the mods that's out for it that improve things such as the visuals and camera.
It turns out that the version that I'd tried yesterday was a precompiled vanilla version that wasn't able to have mods added to it. Something like that is great for those who are less tech savvy and just want to get up and running as quickly possible, but it's not great for those looking to add mods to improve the overall experience with the game.
Thanks to this tutorial and the super helpful people over on the Super Mario 64 PC Port Discord, I was able to finally install the game with the mods that I wanted. Without them, I'd still be playing the precompiled vanilla version. It wasn't the easiest thing to set up, but the community has worked very hard to make it as easy as possible to get up and running by creating a helpful shell script that will pretty much walk you through every step in the process.
Some of the mods that are available currently include: 60fps, HD Mario model (shown above), HD coin models (also shown above), an analog camera, and a few others.
With upsides though come downsides.
For the time being, if you're just wanting to play the game, I'd say to stick to the vanilla version. While the mods are great, they're far from perfect. In fact, for the time being, they're a bit buggy and if you just happen to install one of the mods that's known to have issues then you'll have to rebuild the game again which even on my gaming PC with an i5 CPU, SSD, and decently fast internet, it still takes around 10 minutes each time you want to add or remove mods. There's probably an easier and faster way to do it, but I haven't found that out yet.
This game is still super early in development as far as the PC port goes. It'll get better with time though. The community that's working on it and the fanbase behind it is much bigger than I thought it would be. Over the coming months, I'm sure we'll see big improvements in the existing mods as well as some new ones. Yesterday in the Discord, I even heard that there's a multiplayer mod in the works, but so far it's not included in the shell script that most people use and goes beyond the scope of this article and my knowledge about it.
I want to touch on this question as a final note as I'm sure someone will ask. I'm not a lawyer, but I'll answer this to the best of my own personal knowledge.
Is it illegal to download and play the Super Mario 64 PC Port?
Well, it depends.
If you download and play the precompiled vanilla version then it's probably illegal. Why? Because it includes Nintendo's own assets as it doesn't require you to have a Super Mario 64 ROM to play it.
If you however set up the game via the shell script that I mentioned in this article using your own backup ROM of Super Mario 64 (which is required) and don't install any mods, then it should be perfectly legal.
Yet again, I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
If you have any further questions, I'm sure the article that I provided as well as the Super Mario 64 PC Port Discord should be more than enough to get you started and to answer any further questions that you may have.