Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro

Super Mario 64 is reimagined on Apple Vision Pro as a set of living dioramas that sit on your real table: each level is rendered at room scale and you physically move around the miniature world while playing with a controller. The headset makes the player the camera - lean in for detail, step around for different angles, or scale up until you’re standing inside a level. Examples shown include the castle flyover, interior rooms that reveal themselves as you explore, Bob-omb Battlefield’s mountain path, Princess’s Secret Slide in full view, the Wing Cap tower, Bowser’s lava lake, and Big Boo’s Haunt both outside and inside the house, plus interactive touches like pulling Mario’s face on the title screen.

The experience is a community-built port that runs on the Super Mario 64 decompilation and sm64coopdx, augmented with HD texture packs (SM64 Reloaded and Render96) and updated 3D models (Render96 and SwagSkeleton95). The project is hosted on GitHub (mist64/diorama64) and showcases how decompiled games can be adapted to new hardware. That work sits inside a broader debate: Microsoft’s Xbox CEO praised rapid decompilation and rebuilding as good for players, while Nintendo has repeatedly responded to similar PC ports with DMCA takedowns in 2020 and litigation tied to Yuzu in 2024.