Libsm64: Mario 64 as a library for use in external game engines

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Summary

Libsm64 provides a shared library interface to Super Mario 64's movement and rendering code, allowing developers to integrate Mario into other game engines. It requires an official SM64 ROM for asset extraction.

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Cached at: 07/27/26, 01:44 PM

libsm64/libsm64

Source: https://github.com/libsm64/libsm64

libsm64 - Super Mario 64 as a library

The purpose of this project is to provide a clean interface to the movement and rendering code which was reversed from SM64 by the SM64 decompilation project, so that Mario can be dropped in to existing game engines or other systems with minimal effort. This project produces a shared library file containing mostly code from the decompilation project, and loads an official SM64 ROM at runtime to get Mario’s texture and animation data, so any project which makes use of this library must ask the user to provide a ROM for asset extraction.

The entire external-facing API of the shared library can be found in libsm64.h. Any client project making use of the library must only include that header and load the library. There’s a minimal example project under the test directory as well, demonstrating usage of the library.

Bindings and plugins

Building on Mac and Linux

  • Ensure python3 is installed.
  • Ensure the SDL2 and GLEW libraries are installed if you’re building the test program (on Ubuntu: libsdl2-dev, libglew-dev).
  • Run make to build. If you want to link musl libc instead of glibc run LIBSM64_MUSL=1 make instead.
  • To run the test program you’ll need a SM64 US ROM in the root of the repository with the name baserom.us.z64.

Building on Windows

  • Follow steps 1-4 for setting up MSYS2 MinGW 64 here, but replace the repository URL with https://github.com/libsm64/libsm64.git
  • Ensure the SDL2 and GLEW libraries are installed if you’re building the test program.
    • 64 bits: pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-glew.
    • 32 bits: pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-SDL2 mingw-w64-i686-glew.
  • Run make to build
  • To run the test program you’ll need a SM64 US ROM in the root of the repository with the name baserom.us.z64.

Building for Emscripten (Web) (WIP)

Run emmake make CC=emcc.

If you want libsm64 standalone to call from JS (may not be that useful?), then run emcc dist/libsm64.so -o libsm64.js afterward to emit libsm64.wasm and libsm64.js.

Otherwise, dist/libsm64.so should be a compiled WebAssembly object that you can link into your own C project.

Make targets (all platforms)

  • make lib: (Default) Build the dist directory, containing the shared object or DLL and public-facing header.
  • make test: Builds the library dist directory as well as the test program.
  • make run: Build and run the SDL+OpenGL test program.

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