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Update []: Eyepatch Entertainment has given us the following statement regarding AI use in their Super Mario 64 ports:
"Yes, absolutely, I'm using AI to assist since I'm probably the world's worst Assembly coder. I have to test by hand, and to create my harnesses by hand since nothing can really automate it, yet. I have been using AI-assisted upscaling for video for six years now. I just finished a 2-year-long process of manually shooting 20,000 photos across 150+ cameras to feed to a tool to create a vintage camera emulator app.
Now, what I'm building is much bigger than Mario ports. The Mario ports are 3D training data for a universal porting tool. A few months ago watching all the "slop," as it's fairly called, I started thinking why that was happening, and came to the conclusion that both the AI tools and the prompters were lazy.
I have a tool now for 2D that will take apart your webapp or source code + assets and run it the best it can on real hardware for the PS1, 3DO, Genesis, Vita, Raspberry Pi Pico, GBC and GB and then you can port it yourself with an offline model like Qwen and get back something that runs on real hardware with real testing and again, not give you back slopped up assets and gameplay.
Finally, I'm doing this for fun. I didn't post it anywhere but youtube, I didn't pay for any advertising or post on X or forums. I'm zero drama and thought it was pretty cool.
I also have nothing but the utmost respect for the coders out there like Elias' amazing work. What I'm doing is not that. Specifically with Malucart's PS1 Mario port I spent two weeks trying to get that to run on an actual PS1 with 2MB of RAM. I've spent weeks since then trying to get the renderer to work more like spyro with variable LOD zones. I wanted to see what Mario could look like on a 3DO, If I didn't do that, I don't think anyone else ever would try.
Next week, I have a video that will come out showing the actual source code port of the Duke Nukem 3D build engine that is fully running on the 3DO (grossly at 2-7fps). Again, I'm having fun, don't want to get in any slop arguments, and completely respect the geniuses that feel their work is being devalued.
I'm spending the time to write this myself, not with any artificial assistance, and hopefully it clears up what I'm doing."
Original Story []: Eyepatch Entertainment's 3DO port of Super Mario 64 raised some eyebrows recently, and the developer has now shown off very early footage of the game running on real Sega Saturn hardware.
As with the early 3DO footage, things are still pretty rough. The port uses the assets of the 3DO port, and throws them into the PowerSlave Saturn engine. Enemies are sprites, but the Mario model itself is taken from the recent decomp.
"I hope you guys have liked what you've seen so far, even though it's still pretty cursed," says the developer.
"You can see the potential in the future of how good this could be. It's definitely possible. It's more possible than the 3DO. You can definitely see times where the frame rate is up high enough, and it looks fun and playable enough that you could get the full game working. Mario 64 on the Saturn, that would be insane. It is very hard to get everything working. When something starts working, something else starts breaking."
Eyepatch Entertainment has also ported the game to PlayStation, and that's looking pretty healthy right now – but then again, it has been through 3000 builds, according to the developer.
However, as noted by Elias Daler in response to this news piece, it seems that Eyepatch Entertainment's PS1 Mario port is based on the work of Malucard. Daler – a key figure in the world of PS1 homebrew development – has also expressed the opinion that Eyepatch Entertainment has used AI to create these ports.
We've reached out to Eyepatch Entertainment for a statement, and will update this post if we hear back.
In the meantime, Eyepatch Entertainment plans to keep working on the PS1 version, but also has other irons in the fire – including a port of the first level of Duke Nukem 3D to the 3DO.