They said it couldn't happen. They said it was impossible. They said Nintendo would never put one of its games on PC. And they were right; Nintendo has not.
But who cares? Because someone else has—the legends known as The Harbour Masters have managed to natively port Mario Kart 64 to PC, no emulator necessary. It's called Spaghetti Kart, you have to provide your own (legally acquired, ya filthy animals) ROM, and it'll run on your desktop like Miyamoto himself put it there. Well, with one or two bugs and the odd crash, maybe. This is still a work-in-progress, technically.
How is this possible without a Nintendo Copyright Compliance Squadron razing everything in a 5-mile radius of the devs' houses? The same way it was doable for the PC port of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Starfox 64, all of which were themselves ported to PC by Harbour Masters contributors.
In essence, they're all thanks to the sweat and elbow grease of the devs who painstakingly reverse-engineer the games, and don't use any of Nintendo's own code at all. Combine that with the fact that players have to provide their own ROMs which, at least in theory, they have to obtain from their own legal copies of the original games, and even Nintendo's lawyers don't (yet) have a leg to stand on.
As you can see in the video above, it looks slick as hell in action, and is probably the best way to actually play Mario Kart 64 in 2025? Harbour Masters warn that "this project is still a work-in-progress and has a rare crash for a small minority of users," and not every feature is implemented yet, but still, this is the method I'd choose if I had a sudden hankering for MK64. I suppose you might prefer the version you can get with a Nintendo Online sub on the Switch, but Spaghetti Kart mercifully doesn't ask you to pay a subscription price to anyone, so it wins in my book.
You can find the project on the Spaghetti Kart GitHub. Remember to follow the quick start instructions and ensure your ROM is the correct regional version to work with Harbour Masters' black magic.
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