Mario Strikers Charged gets a byte-matching Wii decomp, and a PC port is in the works

A new matching decompilation of Mario Strikers Charged for Wii is up on GitHub, and its author says a native PC port is already in development. Let’s be clear about what this is: a decomp, not a recomp, and not a way to play the game right now.

The repo, yannicksuter/mscharged-decomp, targets only the USA release, R4QE01, disc revision 1. The goal is a 100% match. The rebuilt source has to compile into a main.dol that is byte-for-byte identical to the retail Wii build. Next Level Games made the game and Nintendo published it. It shipped with no debug info, so every function has to be matched by hand and checked against the original.

For hobbyists, the PC port matters most. The author says it will use the decompiled source directly, not recompilation, and that this will allow bug fixes and mods. The repo gives no timeline, so keep your expectations in check.

The AI part is the other reason I’m writing this. The author had already finished the Super Mario Strikers decomp (the GameCube game from November 2005) and figured a lot of its code carried into the sequel. AI was used to match this game’s translation units with likely donor classes from the predecessor, and to review those matches. My opinion: that’s a sane use. The AI proposes, the diff decides. The project says it gave them a big head start. At the time I checked, the repo had 1,179 commits and 23 stars. Progress is tracked on decomp.dev, but the repo page doesn’t say what percentage is done, so I can’t tell you how far along it is.

If you own a legal copy and want to try the build:

1. Put a supported disc image in orig/R4QE01. ISO, RVZ, WIA, WBFS, CISO, NFS, GCZ and TGC all work. Other regions and revisions aren’t configured.
2. Install Python 3 and Ninja. The build downloads pinned versions of decomp-toolkit, the compiler, binutils, objdiff-cli and wibo.
3. Run python3 configure.py, then ninja.
4. A good build ends with build/R4QE01/main.dol: OK. Open the project folder in objdiff to check matches.

And don’t ask for a recomp or a port in the decomp Discord. The maintainer asked for that explicitly, and fair enough.

My take: this is how preservation should look, source first with the binary as the judge. Whether the PC port actually lands is a separate question, and that’s the one to watch.