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Mario and Other NES Games Made Playable on Hololens

Of course the classic platformer would come to the AR headset.

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At this point, Super Mario Bros. has been ported to almost every computing platform, and now Microsoft's Hololens headset has joined the club. Recently, one developer decided to see if he could port the classic platformer to the headset, and succeeded in getting the game up and running in augmented reality.

Developer Andrew Peterson took a lot of time and care to port a NES emulator to the headset, and the results are really cool. His emulator is called N3S, and it renders the 2D sprites of old games as 3D objects in augmented reality. You can watch the emulator in action below.

The video also shows off several other games like Donkey Kong running in AR. It looks awesome, but it definitely wasn't easy. As Peterson wrote in the video description, "The Hololens won't run most games full speed, especially when the editor is built-in and people make more complicated 3D meshes for the sprites. I've also had to hand-tune and optimize the app for HoloLens in a way that won't work with many games to get a consistent enough FPS."

If you're interested in reading about how this emulator operates, Peterson posted a very in-depth description on his website here. Also, if you happen to own a Hololens, you can download the source code on Peterson's Github.

Would you play Nintendo games in AR? Let us know in the comments below.

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