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How to run Mario Kart 64 with native Metal rendering, high frame rate, and HD textures on iPhone [Video]
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Love Mario Kart 64 and want to play it on iPhone? You may have tried Delta or another N64 emulator in the past to make that happen. And while that works, it’s now possible to run the classic cart racer with native Metal rendering on iPhone.
As we’ll discuss in this video and post, running Mario Kart 64 with native Metal rendering presents several key advantages over running the same game via an emulator. Combined with a Bluetooth controller like the Mocagen MC1, it’s the best way to play Nintendo’s classic cart racer on iPhone.
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Libultraship is a library that provides a reimplementation of the original N64 SDK on today’s hardware. SpaghettiKart is a PC source port of the original decompiled Mario Kart 64 cartridge that leverages that library. Developer Chris Sotraidis then repackaged SpaghettiCart as a native iPhone app called SpaghettiPad that features native Metal rendering, Bluetooth controller support, enhanced visual capabilities, and more.
While it’s easier to get Mario Kart 64 running on iPhone via an emulator like Delta, running Mario Kart 64 natively on iPhone via SpaghettiPad provides a wide screen aspect ratio, frame rates up to 120 fps, higher resolution textures, better fps performance overall, plus lots of additional settings that aren’t available via emulation. And while SpaghettiPad isn’t devoid of glitches, I’ve noticed way less issues when compared to emulation.
One good example is Luigi Raceway, which features a jumbotron that mirrors your race activity. On the emulated version, the jumbotron is a choppy low frame rate mess, while it runs at a significantly higher locked-in fps on the native version. There a lots of little examples like this that I’ve noticed throughout my hands-on time.
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Disclaimer: I own the original Mario Kart 64 cartridge. If you own the cartridge, you can dump the required ROM file. We will not be covering how to do that or how to download any ROMs.
Although iLoader can be used to sideload an .ipa directly to your iPhone, the primary reason to use iLoader for this tutorial is to use it as a way to facilitate the installation of SideStore.
Step 2: Mount the iloader.dmg and drag the iLoader app to your Applications folder.