Mario Kart: Super Circuit brought Nintendo’s kart racer to the Game Boy Advance in 2001. Eight drivers, from Mario and Luigi to Bowser and Donkey Kong, race through 20 new tracks across five cups, and every course from the Super NES original, Super Mario Kart, can be unlocked on top. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- The game file of your copy of Mario Kart: Super Circuit in
.gbaformat, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Mario Kart: Super Circuit on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Super Circuit
.gbafile to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone. - Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. You can also share the file straight from the Files app and choose NGR, the name Nagori has on your Home Screen.
- Find Super Circuit on the GBA shelf with its box art and press Play.
Controls
Super Circuit uses A to accelerate, B to brake, R to hop and power-slide through corners, and L to use items. The Standard touch layout has every button, with L and R along the top of the screen.
Racing keeps your right thumb on A for almost the whole lap, so the buttons you press while holding it matter most. Open Edit Layout in the pause menu and drag R and L down next to A, or make them bigger, until you can drift and fire a shell without letting go of the gas. The D-pad follows your thumb, so steering stays reliable even if your thumb drifts off center.
A controller suits this game best: shoulder buttons for hops and items, and the left stick works as the D-pad. Bluetooth controllers that iOS supports work, including DualSense, DualShock 4 and Xbox controllers. Press the left stick to open the pause menu.
Saves: retry a race, not the whole cup
Super Circuit keeps your trophies, records and unlocked cups in the cartridge’s save, and Nagori keeps that save for you automatically. Save states help with the rest:
- Save before the last race. A cup is four races, and one bad finish at the end can cost you the trophy. Pause and choose Save at the start of the final race. If it goes wrong, Load and race it again with your points from the first three intact.
- Quit any time. Close the app mid-race and Continue puts you back on the track where you left it.
- Practice a tricky corner. Slow Motion runs the game at half speed while you learn a new track. Bind it to a controller button or add the ×0.5 button in My Layout.
Single-player only
On the Game Boy Advance, Super Circuit races friends over a link cable between consoles. Nagori plays GBA games for one player and has no link support, so multiplayer modes aren’t available. You race the computer in the Grand Prix cups and chase your best times in Time Trial.
Best settings
- Picture Smoothing blends the pixels of the karts and the track. Turn it off for the sharp, blocky look of the original screen.
- Full Screen stretches the picture to fill the display. Leave it off to keep the GBA’s 3:2 shape, and the extra width on the sides is free space for your touch controls.
- Screen Effects → CRT Screen adds scanlines, and Bloom makes bright colors glow. Both go from Off to Strong.
