Emulation isn’t new, and neither is running Nintendo games on smartphone hardware. Nintendo’s portable-first console experiences translate beautifully to smartphone hardware, making its platform a prime target for emulation. However, as good as emulation is, a native port always hits differently due to the performance improvements and reduced latency that it brings.
Earlier this week, I came across a project dubbed Galaxy Android that brings Super Mario Galaxy, widely considered one of the greatest 3D platformers ever created, to Android as a native experience. Released as part of the OpenPort Labs project, the Android build makes copious use of AI to get it up and running, but it’s important to acknowledge the seven and a half years of effort by the Petari decompilation project to write the code by hand. With that in mind, the only real question was to see how well it performed.
