Paper Mario Fully Decompiled, Opening Possibilities For A Native PC Port

Nintendo’s role-playing game, Paper Mario, has been fully decompiled, opening up the possibility of a native PC port.

Twitter user Ethan Roseman and his team had been working on a decompilation project for Paper Mario for over 3 years, and they have now reached fully decompiled the US version of the game, opening up the possibility of a native PC version. He added that every compiled function has now been matched with the original code.

The Github page for the project can be found here. The developer states, although its progress graph shows 100%, this is only one way of measuring the progress of the project. They further state that it still has more work planned to make the project the best that it can be.

Other areas cited by the developer that still need some work include assets, codebase modernization, documentation, and matching other versions of the game. Although many assets are properly handled and are moddable, there are still a few assets that are not properly being extracted and rebuilt in a way that would allow for porting or modding efforts. The development team plans to add Quality of Life features to the codebase so the code is as nice as it can be while still compiling to match the original assembly. With regards to improving documentation, the developer mentions that many variables, functions, enum values etc. are not yet named or documented. The team eventually plans on supporting all releases of the game.

Regarding an eventual PC port, the development team has stated that there is still work to be done before work can be started on a PC port. According to the developer, the primary blocker is that some assets are still packaged as raw binary data, rather than being properly extracted and rebuilt. Now that the development team has reached 100% for the US version of the game, it will be focusing on support for the remaining assets.