Using Claude to write a decoder, gamer cracks Mario 64's 30-year-unreadable signs
decorator · reddit · 2026-10-21
Super Mario 64's wooden signposts are 32×32 textures with letters only 3 pixels high—unreadable for 30 years. The author's approach: render guesses in 90s-style fonts, shrinking them the way an artist of the era would, print them on the wooden board and score against the actual pixels—no AI upscaling involved.
Best fit: "I'm here. See me as you go. Hold on!" The clincher is Japanese: the game was made in Japan, and the lines read like word-for-word translations of Japanese sign phrases—がんばってね is often rendered "hold on" in Japanese school English, fitting a sign before dangerous jumps. Caveats: high confidence on the first line only; runner-up "Find me!" scores 616 vs 661 (random wrong sentences 1050). Code is on GitHub. The author credits Claude as the only reason this was feasible in reasonable time—while noting it confidently gave wrong answers, so everything was double-checked.
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