June 22, 2026

Emulating Super Mario Kart SNES Developers Notes

Dev Notes on emulating Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo: 


Clean graphics, but we have a remaining issue visually: other racers are too small compared to how it actually looks on a real SNES.


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Issue: When the player presses start, the start menu defaults to "2P GAME".


Fixed. What was the bug?

Super Mario Kart defaulted to 2P GAME because the emulator zero-fills WRAM at power-on, but a real SNES powers up with non-zero garbage in RAM.

WRAM now fills WRAM with the 0x55 pattern that emulators conventionally use to approximate the power-on state


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Issue:

Super Mario Kart graphics are garbled during a race.

Fixed. What was the bug?

If there is a incorrect CPU instruction, it will cause the visual rendering to mess up. Make sure you have enough CPU accuracy before you expect the graphics to be cleared up.

Symptom of incorrect CPU opcodes running is the game running at normal speed then jumping to a fast speed with messed up graphics displaying for everything: the racers, the UI text, and the track.


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You'll be able to extract the clean track graphics once everything is correct enough:



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