Power Moon Recomp Delivers a Fully Playable Native PC Version of Super Mario Odyssey

Photo credit: B_Mark
Super Mario Odyssey has reached Windows and Linux computers through Power Moon Recomp, an unofficial project that runs the 2017 Nintendo Switch game as ordinary PC software. Zarathustra Dev released the port on GitLab, and players who own a legitimate copy of the original 1.0.0 version can download the necessary files and begin a complete playthrough without launching any emulator.⁠

Power Moon Recomp works by translating the game’s original AArch64 machine code into C code first. From there, it is compiled into a native PC executable that can be run directly on the computer. During play, the computer simply runs the application using a proprietary runtime that handles graphics, sounds, input, and file access. There is no special Switch firmware involved, and no instruction interpreter or just-in-time compiler is operating during gameplay. When you first run it, it points the program to your copied exefs and romfs directories, checks that the version is correct, copies around six gigabytes of critical data, and performs a one-time build in a few minutes. All that needs to be done once.

Players can go all out and complete the entire adventure from beginning to end, including every kingdom, every boss, the 2D and 8bit sections, the ending, and all subsequent stuff; on a competent desktop PC, you can even hit 60 frames per second steady, which isn’t awful at all. However, the original game was built up to attach all its timing to the frame rate, so cranking up the speed will merely end up fouling up the timing, so this port retains the pace as intended but may add some frame interpolation as a possible later patch.

You have some interesting graphics options to experiment with, as you can render the game at your monitor’s native resolution, scale it up to four times its original size, or choose something in between. On a 1080p screen, employing twice the internal resolution produces a 4k image that appears sharper than the Switch output. A sophisticated subpixel morphological anti-aliasing technique sorts out the edges for you. If things get too heavy for your machine to handle at full quality, you can reduce the render scale to 25%, while some nifty AMD trickery keeps things going quickly. The Windows and Linux versions use Vulkan 1.3, whereas the macOS build, still tagged as experimental at this moment, uses Metal on Apple Silicon machines running the latest version of macOS.

Players can also access a menu by pressing the F1, Escape, or Home buttons on their controller, which will provide options for visual, audio, controls, language, and mods. The keyboard and mouse bindings are fully remappable, and controllers allow you to manipulate the camera using the right stick. Full screen mode can easily toggled on and off with F11 or Alt+Enter. In terms of mods, you can use RomFS mods to replace costumes, models, textures, audio, text, and levels by placing them in the appropriate folder, and there is a Mods tab that allows you to enable or disable each one at any time. Mods that only change the text and models are supported, but those that change the game’s actual code are not since the executable is rebuilt from the original binary on your PC.However, mods built for version 1.0.0 appear to be the most stable.

At the very least, you’ll need a 64-bit version of Windows 10 or 11. A processor that supports the AVX2 instructions is also required (this means an Intel fourth-generation or better processor, or any AMD Ryzen processor that is not too old), as well as a graphics card with Vulkan 1.3 compatibility and up-to-date drivers installed. Don’t forget to include 8 gigabytes of system RAM (but 16 is highly suggested) and at least 7 gigabytes of free storage space. Linux users on Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora, Arch, and even SteamOS can pretty much follow the same rules, as long as they’re using a recent enough version of glibc.

Anyone interested can download the newest Windows zip or Linux AppImage from the project’s GitLab releases page (Power Moon Recomp) and begin playing. After you’ve extracted everything into a location where you can write, the application will handle the rest of the installation for you. By the way, when you upgrade to a newer build and unpack it directly over the previous directory, everything of your saves, settings, and loaded mods will remain intact. The project continues to receive incremental fixes while remaining strictly dependent on each player supplying their own dumped game files.
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