A native PS3 port of Mario Kart Wii, made with static recompilation.
Warning
This project is discontinued and the repo is archived. I've stopped working on it, and issues and pull requests are closed. Everything below still works as described, but nothing will be fixed or updated. If you want to carry it on, fork it; it's GPL-3.0. Why it stopped has the details, and docs/LESSONS.md has everything we learned.
It's built on WiiCompiled, the recompiler behind the PC port, with everything the game expects from a Wii rebuilt around the PS3's hardware: the RSX does the drawing, the SPUs take the vertex work and the audio mix, and the recompiler has picked up a few tricks for the Cell along the way.
Important
There's no Nintendo code, no game files and nothing from the disc in this repo,
and there never will be. You need your own clean dump of the PAL version of
the game (RMCP01). The build runs on your machine, against your disc, and the
package it makes has your copy of the game inside it, so please don't share it.
Straight off a real PS3 with the app's own screenshot command. The game renders at 720x480; these are shown at 16:9, same as on a widescreen TV.
This is where it stood when work stopped.
| ✅ Boots, intro movie, menus | All there, and they look right |
| ✅ Grand Prix | 12-kart races, the most tested part |
| ✅ Sound and music | Mixed on the console in real time |
| ✅ Saves and licences | Kept on the PS3's hard drive |
| ✅ DualShock 3 | Presented to the game as a GameCube controller |
| About 40fps in a full race, so the race runs at roughly two-thirds speed. It never reached full speed | |
| ✅ Karts and characters | Properly lit and coloured now (they used to be dark silhouettes) |
| Mii heads come out as black squares, so the crowd looks a bit odd. There'll be other bits that aren't quite right yet too | |
| ❓ VS, Time Trials, Battle | Should work, but they've had a lot less testing |
| ❓ Split-screen | Up to four pads are wired up, but it hasn't really been tested |
| ❌ Online | Not hooked up |
| ❌ Wii Remote, wheel, nunchuk | DualShock 3 only for now |
| ❌ NTSC and other regions | PAL only, for now |
Here's a race as it looks today:
- A PS3 that runs homebrew. I've been testing on CFW (Evilnat 4.93 PEX). HEN should work in theory but nobody's tried it yet, so let me know if you do.
- Your own Mario Kart Wii disc image, PAL (
RMCP01), unmodified. ISO, WBFS, RVZ, WIA, CISO and GCZ are all fine. - A computer with Docker Desktop (Windows, macOS or Linux). Give Docker at least 8 GB of RAM if you can, and have about 25 GB of disk free.
- A bit of patience the first time. The first build takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half depending on your machine. After that it's much quicker.
git clone https://github.com/rooklz/mkwps3.git
cd mkwps3Or hit the green Code button above, then Download ZIP, and unzip it somewhere.
Windows (in PowerShell, from the mkwps3 folder):
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build.ps1 "D:\Games\Mario Kart Wii.wbfs"macOS or Linux:
./build.sh ~/Games/MarioKartWii.wbfsThat's it. It checks your disc, pulls the game apart, translates it, compiles it for the
PS3 and packs it all into out/MKWP00001.pkg. If something goes wrong it'll tell you
what, and docs/BUILDING.md has more detail.
- Copy
out/MKWP00001.pkgto the root of a USB stick (FAT32). - Plug it into the PS3 and go to Game → Package Manager → Install Package Files → Standard (the wording varies a bit between CFWs).
- Pick
MKWP00001.pkgand let it install. It's about 2.7 GB, so it takes a few minutes.
If you've got webMAN MOD or multiMAN you can install it from there too, or drop it in
/dev_hdd0/packages/ over FTP.
Mario Kart Wii shows up in the Game column. Off you go.
The game sees your DualShock 3 as a GameCube controller, so it uses Mario Kart Wii's GameCube layout.
| DualShock 3 | GameCube | In game |
|---|---|---|
| Cross | A | Accelerate, confirm |
| Square | B | Brake and reverse, back |
| R1 or R2 | R | Drift and hop |
| L1 or L2 | L | Use item |
| D-pad | D-pad | Tricks and wheelies |
| Left stick | Control stick | Steer |
| Right stick | C-stick | |
| Circle | X | |
| Triangle | Y | |
| Select | Z | |
| Start | Start | Pause |
Grab the latest code (git pull, or download the ZIP again) and run the build command
again. It only redoes what changed. Install the new package over the old one; your
saves stay put.
Is this an emulator? No, the game's code is compiled for the PS3 before it runs. How it works has the details.
Can't I just download a ready-made .pkg? No, and please don't share yours. Anything that runs would have Nintendo's game inside it. That's the whole reason the build runs on your machine with your disc.
Why only PAL?
The translation is pinned to the exact PAL executable, same as WiiCompiled. Other regions
would need their own work, and a wrong-version disc gives you a subtly broken game,
so the build refuses anything that isn't a clean RMCP01.
Why not 60fps? The PS3's main CPU core has to get through about eight million of the Wii's instructions every frame, plus everything the Wii's other chips did for free. In a full race that's about 21ms a frame, and it needs to be under 16.7ms for 60. Because the game counts time in frames, it runs slower than on a Wii rather than dropping frames.
Does it work on a Slim or Super Slim? It should. They've all got the same Cell and RSX inside. If yours can run homebrew, give it a go and let me know.
Online play? No.
Retro Rewind and other mods? WiiCompiled can build Retro Rewind on PC, but that's not wired up on the PS3 yet.
It crashed / froze / looks wrong.
The repo is archived, so there's nowhere to report it any more. The log is at
/dev_hdd0/tmp/mkwii-ps3.log if you want to dig in yourself.
The short version: the translator reads the game's PowerPC code and writes it out as C++, about thirty thousand functions of it. That gets compiled for the PS3's Cell, and runs against a runtime that stands in for the Wii's operating system and hardware. Graphics go to the RSX, vertex work goes to the SPUs, and the audio is mixed on the console the way the Wii's DSP would have.
There's a longer, still fairly readable version in docs/HOW-IT-WORKS.md.
Full speed turned out to be out of reach. Even with the renderer switched off entirely, the game's own code takes about 18.7ms a frame on the PS3's main core, against a 16.7ms budget, and the profile is flat: no single hot spot left to fix. Every big idea got measured. A native PowerPC-to-Cell backend came out 2.5 times slower than the C++ translation. Passing arguments in registers, moving audio to the SPUs and porting hot functions each gained 0.1ms or less. A 30fps mode that draws every other frame got the race to 0.93× speed, but some effects then ran at half rate. It also still wouldn't have covered three- and four-player split-screen, which the Wii itself only runs at 30fps.
Fork it. docs/BUILDING.md covers the developer setup: building without Docker, pushing builds straight to the console over the network, and the debugging tools. CONTRIBUTING.md has the ground rules the project ran on, and AGENTS.md lists where everything lives.
Help is very welcome, especially from anyone who knows their way around the RSX or the SPUs.
- WiiCompiled, the static recompiler and runtime this is all built on. None of this exists without it.
- Dolphin, an endless reference for how the Wii actually behaves, and the source of the free DSP coefficient ROM and the WiiConnect24 defaults the build pulls in.
- PSL1GHT and ps3toolchain, the open-source PS3 SDK and compilers.
- nod, which reads the disc images.
- RPCS3 and the PS3 Developer Wiki, for documenting the console better than Sony ever did.
- webMAN MOD, which made testing on a real console from across the room bearable.
Third-party code in the repo and its licences are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
GPL-3.0, like WiiCompiled. See LICENSE.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with Nintendo or Sony. Mario Kart Wii is a trademark of Nintendo; PlayStation and PS3 are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment. No Nintendo or Sony code or assets are contained in or distributed with this project.