Super Mario 64 is running on a 1982 Vectrex in wireframe

Hardware modder Jason Kopp, known online as Arcade Jason, has demonstrated a playable prototype of Super Mario 64 running in real-time wireframe vector graphics on an original 1982 Vectrex console. This port is amazing, and watching Mario triple-jump through a glowing skeleton of Peach's Castle on a 44-year-old monochrome CRT is one of the wildest pieces of homebrew work to show up this year.

In the five-minute demonstration posted on October 12, the console boots an SM64.BIN file paired with a standard US Super Mario 64 ROM (.Z64). It runs straight through the opening title screen, Princess Peach's voiceover letter, the castle grounds, the interior foyer, and right into Bob-omb Battlefield with the original music and Charles Martinet's voice samples playing alongside the vector line work.

An RP2350 is doing the heavy lifting

Before anyone assumes the Vectrex's stock 1.5 MHz Motorola 68A09 processor suddenly learned how to calculate 1996-era 3D polygon matrices, there's a hardware catch. The demo relies on the Ultimate Vectrex Multicart 2 (UVMC2), a custom flash cartridge Kopp designed around a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller. The Vectrex's native CPU and AY-3-8912 sound chip could never process a Nintendo 64 game on their own, so the UVMC2 acts as a heavy-duty coprocessor inside the cartridge slot.

Using a custom Vectrex software development kit built by homebrew programmer Dani Ferrer Guerrero, the cartridge runs the decompiled Super Mario 64 code, converts the 3D polygonal geometry into 2D vector coordinates in real time, and feeds those drawing instructions to the console's monitor. Audio is also handled directly by the cartridge hardware rather than the console's internal sound chip. Some purists might consider cartridge coprocessors cheating, though Nintendo itself stuffed Super FX chips into SNES carts to make Star Fox happen, so Kopp is in good company.

Kopp recently used the same UVMC2 setup and Ferrer's SDK to get id Software's 1993 shooter DOOM running in vector form on the system. Moving from a 2.5D raycaster to a true 3D space with a free-roaming camera is a massive jump, and the geometry holds together surprisingly well even when the screen fills up with lines in Bob-omb Battlefield. I'm curious whether the vector refresh rate starts to flicker fiercely once you enter denser stages like Lethal Lava Land or Wet-Dry World, where the line count could easily overwhelm the beam.

From 1996 polygons to a 1982 electron beam

Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and launched alongside the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Super Mario 64 sold nearly 12 million copies and wrote the rulebook for analog 3D movement. Over the past several years, Nintendo has re-released it on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, packed it into the limited-run Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection on Switch in 2020, and added it to the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack library. None of those official ports mean nearly as much to the modding scene as the 2019 community decompilation project, which reverse-engineered the game into clean C code and opened the floodgates for native ports to everything from the Sega Dreamcast to the PlayStation 2.

Putting it on the Vectrex bridges two completely different philosophies of display tech. Developed by Smith Engineering and released in November 1982 for $199 by General Consumer Electronics (later acquired by Milton Bradley), the Vectrex remains the only commercial vector-based home console ever made. Instead of scanning horizontal raster lines across a television like an Atari 2600 or NES, its built-in 9-inch CRT uses electromagnets to steer an electron beam directly from point to point, tracing razor-sharp glowing paths just like Asteroids or Battlezone in the arcades. The North American market crash killed the system by early 1984, yet that self-contained CRT has kept hardware tinkerers busy for four decades.

Don't clear space next to your Vectrex just yet

Right now, the Super Mario 64 conversion isn't available to download. Kopp has framed the project as an experimental proof of concept that he might not finish himself, rather than a full commercial or homebrew release.