Show HN: Native Port of Super Smash Bros. Melee

A Rust port of Super Smash Bros. Melee (NTSC-U 1.02), written function by function from the doldecomp/melee decompilation and checked against the original game running in Dolphin. A match is meant to produce the same bits as the console, tick for tick.

It is two things:

• a headless, deterministic simulator with a small API (crates/melee-lib ) for AI and game research: create a match, step it with controller inputs, inspect or clone its state;
• a playable app on macOS and in the browser (WebGPU), with menus, a HUD and replays.

This repository contains no game data. You need your own copy of the game.

Play in the browser: https://nikhilunni.github.io/melee/ (Chrome, Edge or Safari with WebGPU). Drop in your disc image; it is read locally and never uploaded.

• 25 of 26 characters (all but Kirby) and the six tournament stages (Battlefield, Final Destination, Dream Land, Yoshi's Story, Fountain of Dreams, Pokémon Stadium) match the original game on every recorded test scenario.
• 106 of 108 public Slippi replays in the test corpus replay to the end without a single divergence from the recorded game, including the random number stream.
• Not implemented: Kirby, CPU opponents, random item spawns, single-player modes. Unported branches fail loudly (unimplemented! ) rather than diverging silently.
• The renderer is a display approximation; only the simulation is exact.

TRACKER.md has the current state in detail.

The simulator runs the game logic only (no rendering or audio), so it is much faster than emulating the console. Measured on an Apple M2 Max (8 performance and 4 efficiency cores), release build, random controller inputs over full matches:

Independent matches scale across cores: 12 Fox vs Marth matches on 12 threads run 142,000 ticks/s together, about 2,400× real time.

Against Dolphin on the same machine (headless, Null video, no audio, unlimited speed, the same Fox vs Marth match from a savestate), the simulator is about 20× faster per core:

Sizes and costs:

| Minimal headless simulator binary, stripped | 4.5 MB (1.8 MB gzipped) | | Simulator compiled to WebAssembly | 4.0 MB (1.2 MB gzipped) | | Browser app, renderer included | 5.0 MB (1.6 MB gzipped) | | Disc files read for one match | 16–21 MB of the 1.4 GB image | | Memory per match | 96 MB | | Create, reset or clone a match | 8–10 ms |

A match's state is large (it mirrors the game's memory pools), so cloning costs about as much as 180 ticks; plan tree search around that. The numbers were taken with other applications running and vary by about 3%. To reproduce: cargo run --release -p melee-lib --example sim_bench -- throughput <disc files dir> (also parallel and lifecycle).

• A disc image of Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube, NTSC-U version 1.02 (game ID GALE01 , revision 2), as an uncompressed.iso or.gcm dumped from a disc you own. Other versions and compressed formats (RVZ, CISO, NKit) are rejected with a message saying what was found.docs/ISO.md lists the checksums to verify your dump against.
• To build: Rust (stable), and Xcode command line tools for the macOS app.

git submodule update --init        # the decompilation, used as reference
tools/run-macos.sh                 # build and launch the macOS app
tools/run-web.sh                   # build the web app and serve it on :8080
cargo run --release -p melee-lib --example headless   # the simulator alone

The apps ask for the disc image on first launch and read everything they need from it at runtime: character models, stages, portraits, menu art.

Scenarios (scripted inputs, recorded human matches, random-input "explorer" matches, Slippi replays) are played on the original game in a headless build of Dolphin with a scripting fork, which records the game's memory every tick. The port plays the same inputs and the two traces are compared field by field, floats by bit pattern. Floating-point code follows the original PowerPC instruction sequence, including fused multiply-adds, through crates/gekko-math. docs/ORACLE.md describes the setup and CLAUDE.md the working rules.

This is an unofficial, non-commercial project for research and educational purposes. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Nintendo, HAL Laboratory or any of the companies whose characters appear in the game. Super Smash Bros. Melee and all related names, characters and marks are trademarks of their respective owners.

The repository does not contain, and the apps do not download, any of the game's code, data, graphics, models, audio or other assets. Everything the apps show from the game is read at runtime from a disc image the user provides. Please do not ask for or share disc images here; dump your own.

There is deliberately no license file, following doldecomp: the port is written from a decompilation of copyrighted software, and no rights to that software are granted or implied. Third-party material in this repository keeps its own license: the Barlow fonts (SIL Open Font License, assets/fonts/OFL.txt) and Slippi replay test files from peppi (MIT, crates/slp/tests/data/NOTICE). The decompilation is included as a git submodule, not copied.

If you are a rights holder with a concern, please open an issue.