According to OatmealDome on Twitter, who is a "Switch, iOS, and macOS tinkerer", Super Mario 3D All-Stars has leaked onto the internet. Apparently, all of the games are being emulated and not running natively on the Nintendo Switch.
It appears that Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Sunshine are running on an emulator possibly called "hagi". It's an emulator that might be made by NERD (Nintendo of Europe Division). Super Mario 64 is running on an emulator, but OatmealDome doesn't know which emulator it's running on:
Information on the N64 emulator: https://t.co/nqZy7iIPOz
— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) September 15, 2020
In what OatmealDome calls "weird" the Wii and GameCube emulator for Galaxy and Sunshine utilizes the standard Vulkan API over NVN, which is the way 3D games are usually developed on the Switch. This confusion is cleared up a little by ModernVintageGamer, who chimes in to say that Vulkan has been in use for a while now, and that he assumes that "the developers were familiar with it over NVN which has a bit of learning curve."
For Super Mario Galaxy, apparently the developers have recompiled the original code to natively run on the Nintendo Switch's CPU, but the GPU and Audio portions of the game run via the emulator. This makes it essentially half a port, and half-emulated. Hey, if it works it works, I guess.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars releases on September 18, 2020 for the Nintendo Switch at $59.99.
What do you think of this news? Do you think this is a lazy effort by Nintendo? What would you have wanted out of a Nintendo re-release of their classic titles? Let us know in the comments