Required tools:#

Tools/programs you need before we continue further in the tutorial:

Note: i will not be teaching you how to acquire or the basics of using your Linux distribution, that is up to the user to figure out or how to install blender, wine, Melonds or steam as the installation can completely vary from the distribution you are using, i simply will be teaching you how to generally use these programs within the environment. I will also not provide on how to acquire a MKDS rom, it is up to you to dump the game or find it.

Getting started:#

With all tools installed, what first you will want to do is launch steam and enter in your steam account, if you don't then create your steam account. After that is done you will be greeted to the main screen. What you will want to do is go to the settings located here:

You the will be greeted with this window, go to beta participation, for you it would be set to none, change it to Steam beta update:

Afterwards just let steam restart and let it update to steam beta. Once you are back to the main screen again go to settings again and click on steam play:

After you are there, Enable steam play for all other titles and set it to proton experimental.

Now that you have access to steam proton and will be able to run Mktoolbox and Nitropaint. But first we will need to add Mktoolbox and Nitropaint as non-steam games in our library. So go to the library tab in steam and click on Add A Game, then select Add a non-steam game:

you will be greeted with a window to select any non steam game you have available, click on browse:

Note: Remember to have Mktoolbox and Nitropaint downloaded and extracted.

Now simply select the mktoolbox executable and click open:

Now that mktoolbox is selected, simply do the same thing with nitropaint. After that is done, simply click on add selected program:

Now that we have the programs added to the steam library, right click on the program and select properties:

You will be greeted with a new window, select compatibility and after that click on Force the use of specific steam play compatibility tool:

Note: you must do this with both mktoolbox and nitropaint.

After that is done, you are finally done and can launch mktoolbox and nitropaint!!!

Extracting the MKDS file system:#

The goal here now is to extract the entire Mario kart DS file system and have every file accessible to us to mess with. First lets launch Mktoolbox in steam. We should be greeted with something like this:

In this window all you have to do is simply search for your Mario kart ds rom and open it. After you did that you should be greeted with the main program. Now what we will want to do is simply hover to file and select export > export project:

After that then simply select the folder you wish to save the project file on:

You will have a prompt asking you to unpack the files, select yes:

After you are done with that simply go to the directory you have your files saved:

Now that is done you have access to the entire mkds file system!!!

Now you can open the .nkproj file in mktoolbox and edit the game from the extracted files:

When you are ever done editing anything in the game, all you will have to do is simply export as NDS and save it on the directory of your choice:

With this we conclude this and now on to the next section...