Golden Balloon
A native source port of the 1997 N64 kart racer — the game compiled for your CPU, drawn through WebGPU, running entirely in this tab. Not an emulator.
- No install
- No server
- No game data shipped
Checking your browser…
Bring your own ROM
Qualified browser path: WebGPU with Restored presentation. Remastered is opt-in work in progress and is not visually qualified until its remaining gates close.
Advanced / experimental motion
A frame rate above
Original creates additional presentation opportunities. Interpolated
motion smoothing fills them with unique images blended from adjacent authored
game states; Off holds the latest authored image. Motion smoothing never
changes physics, AI, input, timers, audio, or saves; fresh configurations
use the original fixed gameplay cadence.
Browser presentation cannot exceed the display's
requestAnimationFrame cadence.
Supersampling renders above your window size and filters back down, which is what removes the stair-stepping on edges. Restored and Remastered use 2×. Set it to Off and back to 4× while watching the balloons and palm trees — that is the difference. It costs fill rate, so drop back if performance suffers.
Play here supports solo, ordinary split-screen, keyboard, touch controls and mixed gamepads.
Other revisions (US 1.0, EU 1.0, Japan) are recognised and named back to you, but not supported yet — this build is compiled for the 1.1 data and nothing bounds-checks an index into a section that shrank.
Your ROM is read locally, in this browser. It is never uploaded — there is no server here to receive it. No game data is distributed with this page; you supply your own copy.
How to play
Controls
- ←→ / AD
- Steer
- ↑↓ / WS
- Menus · plane pitch
- X
- Accelerate (A)
- Z
- Brake / reverse (B)
- Space
- Hop / power-slide (R)
- Shift
- Fire item (Z)
- Q
- L
- IJKL
- C-buttons · rear view
- Enter
- Start / pause
- F
- Fullscreen
Space is worth learning. Tapping hop into a corner power-slides, which is how you actually go fast in this game.
A gamepad is genuinely better here — keyboard steering is digital (full lock or nothing) where the original is analog. Plug one in and press a button; it is picked up automatically.
On a phone or tablet, analog touch controls appear automatically when play starts. They respect screen cutouts, support simultaneous steering and action buttons, and can be hidden from the in-game Controls button.
Good to know
- Saves persist in your browser, so lap records survive a reload. Stored data (step 04) erases them if you want a clean slate.
- Needs WebGPU. Current Chrome or Edge is the qualified path; a WebGPU-enabled Firefox or Safari can also work. Every browser is capability-detected and receives an explicit failure instead of a black screen; there is no WebGL fallback.
- Adventure, Tracks, Time Trial, bosses, trophy series, and challenge modes are playable.
- Two-, three-, and four-player split-screen work with additional controllers.
- The mouse is not used in-game; play with a keyboard, gamepad, or the automatic phone/tablet touch controls.
Known issues
- Controller Pak backup uses mdkr64's versioned
.mdkr-paksbundle. Import of raw emulator.mpkimages is not available yet. - Rumble support depends on the browser and controller. Devices without a Web Gamepad vibration actuator play normally without feedback.
- Video Options are available from the in-game Options menu. Aspect, FOV, and supersampling apply immediately; cache-wide presentation changes clearly request a restart.
- Found something? A browser console trace is genuinely useful — the wasm offsets in it map straight back to function names. Open an issue.
Stored data
Browser storage can be cleared by browser settings, private mode, storage eviction, or a site reset. Download a backup if the progress matters to you. Save files and ROMs stay on this device and are never uploaded.
Adventure progress and Controller Pak ghosts are stored separately; use both backup buttons if both matter. Import and editing use a rollback transaction: the candidate is staged, persisted, reloaded, and checked byte-for-byte before it becomes live. The game also retains three checksum-safe automatic snapshots. Corrupt blocks are never repaired silently.