Mario Party: Recompiled

Made with AI. Almost all of the code, documentation and tests in this repo were written by AI agents (Claude), directed and play-tested by a person. None of it is offered to the upstream projects it builds on, which don't take AI-written code.

A native PC port of the N64 Mario Party (USA), made by static recompilation (N64Recomp + N64ModernRuntime + RT64, with RecompFrontend's launcher and menus): the game's own MIPS code translated to C and run natively, with RT64 drawing it. The symbols come from the mariopartyrd/marioparty decompilation. It is not an emulator.

The repo holds no ROM, no asset from the game and no data extracted from it: you supply your own ROM, and nothing in git or CI is made from one except the symbol names and addresses in syms/.

Status: plays its boards and minigames in widescreen (RT64's Aspect Ratio Expand, with each board's view and background taken to the window's edges and the players' panels to its corners), interpolated to the display's rate. The game's process scheduler, which switches between dozens of small processes with its own setjmp and longjmp, runs each process on a thread of its own, one at a time, on the desktop and in a browser alike (docs/processes.md), from the code the Mario Party recomps share (mario-party-engine). The game also plays in a browser, built from your ROM as a web page with a prebuilt shader list (docs/web.md).

The ROM

Mario Party (USA), as a big-endian .z64 of 32 MiB with SHA-1 1159bd56730094bfc71be30113e1cfc8bacf34f3. Other regions are not supported.

Getting it

Releases for Windows (a zip: unzip it and run MarioPartyRecompiled.exe from that folder) and Linux on x86-64 (a .tar.gz: extract it and run MarioPartyRecompiled in that folder) are on the Releases page, without the ROM: pick yours with Load ROM. The Linux build needs glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or later), a Vulkan driver, and GTK 3 and FreeType, which desktop distributions have; it brings its own SDL2. Or build it as below.

Building

You need that ROM at roms/marioparty.us.z64. On Windows: LLVM's clang-cl, CMake 3.31 and Ninja, and a clang with a MIPS backend plus ld.lld for patches/. On Linux: clang lld libsdl2-dev libgtk-3-dev libfreetype-dev, CMake 3.31 and Ninja.

From the repo's root in a bash shell:

git submodule update --init --recursive
bash tools/recompile.sh -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl   # the game's code as C
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \
      -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl \
      -DPATCHES_C_COMPILER=<MIPS clang> -DPATCHES_LD=<ld.lld>
ninja -C build MarioPartyRecompiled

tools/recompile.sh builds N64Recomp from the submodule the first time, then translates the game. Run build/MarioPartyRecompiled.exe from the repo's root, pick the ROM with Load ROM, then Start Game.

The symbols in syms/ are made from the decomp's own build of the game (tools/build_decomp.sh, which needs the ROM and Docker, then tools/gen_syms.sh). They only change when lib/marioparty moves.

A release is built by tools/release.sh: windows (Git Bash) and linux (Linux with Docker) build and pack its two archives into out/ from the same commit of main, and publish publishes them as the GitHub release v<version_string> (src/main/main.cpp) with releases/v<version>.md as its notes, --prerelease marking it a prerelease (the script's header says more).

Controls

A gamepad, or the keyboard: WASD the stick, Space A, Left Shift B, Q Z, R R, E L, Enter Start, the arrows the C buttons. The minigames that spin the stick take WASD pressed round in turn (W, A, S, D, about ten keys a second): that turned Pedal Power's pedal about 2.2 times a second, near the 70 turns in 30 seconds it asks for. A gamepad's stick is easier.

Up to four people play four players, each with a pad of their own or the keyboard: each pad plays a player of its own with no setup, in the order the pads were plugged in, and the keyboard plays player 1 beside the first pad. To choose who plays which, open the menu (Esc), and on Controls press Assign players, then a button on each player's pad (or a key) in the players' order, and Confirm; after, the keyboard stays player 1's unless a player was given it. As on a console, a player without a pad is the computer's, and who else the computer plays is the game's own setting.

Options

The menu (Esc) holds the settings, and its General tab ends with two for the boards, the same in each of the Mario Party recomps. Each is Original by default, which plays as the console does:

• Board Movement, Fast: the players walk from space to space in half the time, as Mario Party 3's own Fast walking speed does, whatever the walking speed in a game's pause menu says.
• Map Scrolling, Fast: the view moves twice as fast when you look around a board's map.

Mods

The desktop build loads N64Recomp mods (.nrm) made for it (game_id = "marioparty"): in the launcher, before Start Game, open Mods and press Install Mods, or drop the file onto the window, or put it in the mods folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\MarioPartyRecompiled\mods on Windows, ~/.config/MarioPartyRecompiled/mods on Linux), and turn it on in the Mods list. The page in a browser loads no mods. How to make one, and what a mod can change: mario-party-engine's docs/mods.md.

License

GPL-3.0 (LICENSE), as the recompilations it follows. The decomp in lib/marioparty is its own project.