Another PC port of a Nintendo 64 game is on the way — but this one arrives with a mission statement. Meet Smash 64 Recompiled, a static recompilation of 1999’s Super Smash Bros. that wants to show the recent wave of AI-assisted ports how it’s done.
The trailer dropped this week, and the promise is a mouthful in the best way: high frame-rate support, low input lag, a properly scaled UI for ultrawide displays, and day-one mod and texture support through N64Recomp, the community tooling that’s been quietly powering these projects. Perhaps the coolest reveal, though, is compatibility with Smash Remix — the beloved fan mod that stuffs new characters, stages, and music into the N64 original — right out of the gate.
The team behind it is two people: SrBananaMan64 and Boopie. And the project has history — back in October 2024, a developer named ZestyDev got the game running through a recomp with no enhancements, then went quiet. SrBananaMan64 picked it up on a fresh repository, and development got serious in mid-September 2026 with Boopie aboard. Since then, the pair have been writing patch after patch and refactoring the whole thing by hand. No release date yet — it’s “coming soon,” with cross-platform testing and more quality-of-life features still to go.
So why the attitude? Because, in SrBananaMan64’s own words, “This port is not AI slop!”
Back in May, an AI-assisted PC port of the same game called Battleship — made by a developer named JRickey — drew heavy criticism for poor accuracy, bugs, and a thin feature set, according to Time Extension. XDA Developers goes further, characterizing many recent AI-built ports — including one called melee-pc — as hastily thrown together with tools like Claude. Fair or not, that’s the backdrop: a scene suddenly crowded with lookalike projects, and a two-person team betting that care still counts for something.
Honestly? I’m rooting for the humans on this one. We’ve covered the human-craft angle a lot lately — from the fan hand-decompiling Beetle Adventure Racing to the translator who rebuilt her work from scratch just to make a GenAI shortcut obsolete — and the pattern holds: hand-built projects ship features the shortcut versions don’t.
One housekeeping note, as always: no Nintendo assets will ship with the release. You’ll need to supply your own legal copy of the game to play it.
Check out the announcement trailer below:
Sources: Time Extension, XDA Developers. Trailer by SrBananaMan64. The “AI slop” characterizations of rival ports come from the outlets’ reporting, not this project’s developers; the team states its own work is human-made.
Would you take a human-built N64 Smash over the AI-built ones? Let me know.