Super Mario Galaxy ported to the Game Boy Advance

Difficulty

Expert

AI-buildability

3/5

Porting a large game engine to GBA hardware is mostly code work, but it requires a deep understanding of the original game and the GBA's constraints.

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Tobias Friedly, known as Tobi, has ported Super Mario Galaxy from the Wii to the Game Boy Advance. He released the engine and all of the game's code in a GitHub project, announced in a recent video. The original Wii game's assets are not provided, so anyone building the ROM has to supply their own game image to fill them in.

The port is described as mostly complete. It includes the star pointer, even though the GBA has far fewer controls than the Wii. To work around the missing input, some star bits are collected automatically. The game logic borrows heavily from a recently decompiled version of the original game, which saved a lot of development time. The GBA hardware is far weaker than the Wii, but the video shows a playable frame rate.