Super Mario Bros. Wonder Natively Ported to PC Without Emulation

Ever dreamed of playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder on your PC without fiddling with emulators? Well, a fan project just made that a reality. Developer Belmante has successfully ported the 2023 Switch exclusive to PC using native recompilation—no emulator required.

The magic here is something called static recompilation. Instead of translating code on the fly like a traditional emulator, it takes the Switch's ARM64 machine code and converts it offline into cross-platform C++ native code. That means no runtime translation lag and no system overhead. For graphics, the team built their own NVN-to-Vulkan translation layer, mapping all 12,717 in-game shaders to the SPIR-V standard and talking directly to NVIDIA drivers—skipping the usual middleman. They also solved ASTC texture compatibility on NVIDIA cards with CPU software decoding, and used disk pipeline caching plus multithreaded texture processing to cut down on stutters.

In real-world testing on a Windows laptop with an RTX 3050, the game runs fully at a steady 60 FPS, with only minor graphical glitches and the occasional frame drop. Belmante had previously shown off a macOS version on an M1 Mac, though it had more issues at the time. An Android version is reportedly in the works, and Linux is described as "not yet ported, but close."

Next up, Belmante plans to test on an Intel UHD 770 integrated GPU to see if the port can stay smooth on hardware roughly comparable to the Switch's Tegra X1. That's a key benchmark—if it holds up there, it bodes well for lower-end PCs.

It's an impressive piece of homebrew engineering, and a promising sign of what dedicated fans can achieve. Of course, it's still a fan project, so expect some rough edges.

What do you think—would you try this native PC port of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, or do you prefer keeping Mario on Nintendo hardware? Let us know in the comments!