Discover the largest mod for Super Mario Sunshine, enhancing gameplay for gaming enthusiasts. Download it today for an enriched experience!
Super Mario Eclipse is an ambitious fan-made mod of Super Mario Sunshine, designed to expand and enhance the original game with a wealth of new content and features.
It's a patch that requires a "legitimately" acquired ROM to work. This is how sites like SMW World avoid C&D's, they host patches and mods and don't have the actual ROMs on site. Nintendo can't take it down because none of their code is there.
Yup, this is where these projects usually fail. The creators get too excited not to share the work in progress and it gets killed before a proper release. A release is available forever.
These things being taken down is an eventuality no one can avoid, however if no one but Nintendo sees it, and takes it down, not many people will know about it.
By spreading these things when they are good it encourages a lot of things. It encourages backups, communities dedicated to preservation of files or at least discussion of them (through piracy of course, though still counts). Making more people aware of them also makes some talented individuals realise that they have the capability to get into these things themselves. Etc.
I for one had no idea about this prior to this post, and Super Mario: Sunshine is one of my favourite games, so I'm excited to try this mod out later.
Nintendo really only has a history of taking down fan remakes of existing Nintendo games or games that are charging money. They've never to my knowledge had a free fan game or romhack taken down nor do I think they'd have any sort of legal grounds to do so even if they wanted to. And this essentially boils down to a ROM hack. Which is almost certainly completely safe from Nintendo's lawyers since it doesn't contain any Nintendo made assets.
Without me putting in all that much effort to confirm, I believe the patching software is an .exe - it probably does run on wine, but without you'd have to pirate an already patched copy of eclipse (which is usually pretty frowned upon)