NSMBW 0.2.2: V-Sync on Android, smoother scene changes, PC stutter fixed

Smoother on every device. 0.2.2 removes the stutter some of you felt on PC since 0.2.0, brings V-Sync to Android, and cuts the hitches when the game changes scene (entering a level, the world map, the course intro). Your saves, settings and imported game carry over.

• Fixed: stutter on Windows and Linux. 0.2.0 changed the order in which a frame is prepared and shown, to speed up slow phones, and on PC that made motion less even than 0.1.1. PCs are back to 0.1.1's order; phones keep the speed-up.
• Android: V-Sync (on by default; Settings > Display, or the game's Video tab). Frames now go out in step with the screen, and the game's clock follows the phone's own refresh. Before, the game kept its own clock and once in a while a frame landed a refresh early or late, which showed as yellow spikes in the frametime graph.
• Smoother scene changes. On a Galaxy S26 Ultra, a loop through World 1-1, the world map and back now holds every frame for at most two refreshes (33 ms); before, some transitions held one frame for 50 to 86 ms. On a Pixel 3 XL the longest load frames are about a third shorter. What changed:
  • Android phones with 3 GB of memory or more keep the game files in memory, read once in the background (under a second on the S26, 4 s on the Pixel), as the PC version already did. Reads from the phone's storage were up to 107 ms of a scene change.
  • Loading a scene's effects, which looks up thousands of names, runs natively and no longer takes most of the course intro's slowest frame.
  • Textures the new scene shares with the last one are reused instead of rebuilt, and big ones (like a course's tile set) are decoded on several cores.
  • Game files are copied into the game's memory in one go instead of byte by byte.
• Frametime graph: with V-Sync on, it shows how many screen refreshes each frame was up for (16.7 ms, or 33.3 ms for a frame shown twice), so it matches what you see.
• Android: new start menu. Rounded buttons, a big Play button, the options grouped into cards, On/Off switches for Auto Update and Skip Start Menu, and a status line with a green or amber dot. In landscape, Play sits beside the rest.

The game itself is unchanged: a scripted run through World 1-1 leaves the game's memory identical to 0.2.1 at every one of 104 checkpoints, so LAN play works between 0.2.2 devices as before (all players need the same version).

Tested on a Galaxy S26 Ultra and a Google Pixel 3 XL, and on Windows and Linux.

Important

No game files are included. You need your own New Super Mario Bros. Wii (USA, SMNE01, revision 1), extracted with Dolphin. See Getting the game files.

Downloads

• Android (arm64, Android 11+): NSMBW-0.2.2-android-arm64.apk. On 0.2.1, Check for Updates on the start menu installs it.
• Windows (10/11, x64): NSMBW-0.2.2-windows-x64.zip
• Linux (x86-64, glibc 2.35+: Fedora 36+, Ubuntu 22.04+): NSMBW-0.2.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Updating keeps your saves, settings and imported game. Untested on Mali GPUs (most MediaTek, Exynos and Tensor phones).

SHA-256

1d7a17ac19fa95e9446f0a78cd4ccfa87cc7ef058b5d9ad3e53aa6b1c21e0b28  NSMBW-0.2.2-android-arm64.apk
63589bbb6116a1a15a825244fba183bc6913643607f1d720026d098f1ba52dab  NSMBW-0.2.2-windows-x64.zip
9deeba089d203f124f2b05643b37f5e39f20f7cb72d61ab8b441a823f6c606d1  NSMBW-0.2.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Source: this repository at v0.2.2, GPLv3. Not affiliated with Nintendo.