Making HD Retextures

**JosJuice** · 04-10-2015, 04:20 AM **#11**

When a game loads a texture from the disc and displays it on the screen, Dolphin will both display it on the screen and save it in the Dump folder. The filename of each texture will contain a unique ID for the texture. You can then make new textures based on the original textures and place them in the Load folder like KHg8m3r said. When you run Dolphin after that and the game tries to display a texture on the screen, Dolphin will check if there is a file in the Load folder that has the original texture's ID in the filename. If there is one, Dolphin will load the new HD texture and display it instead of the original texture.

Yoyoman · 04-10-2015, 05:23 AM **#12**

(04-10-2015, 04:20 AM)JosJuice Wrote: You can then make new textures based on the original textures and place them in the Load folder like KHg8m3r said.

Do you create the textures from scratch or change the existing ones?

masterotaku · 04-10-2015, 05:35 AM **#13**

(04-10-2015, 05:23 AM)Yoyoman Wrote:
(04-10-2015, 04:20 AM)JosJuice Wrote: You can then make new textures based on the original textures and place them in the Load folder like KHg8m3r said.

Do you create the textures from scratch or change the existing ones?

Whatever you want, it's just an image file. You just need to place the new PNG or DDS file in the "Load\ID-OF-THE-GAME" folder with the same name as the original texture. You can also use subfolders.

Yoyoman · 04-10-2015, 05:59 AM **#14**

Now how would you tamper with a disc instead?

**AnyOldName3** · 04-10-2015, 06:21 AM **#15**

If you use something like WiiScrubber you can modify the contents of a disk image, but you'd have to know exactly how files are stored and you might be very limited as to what you can change, as there may not be any room for better textures.

Sylux102 · 04-15-2015, 02:55 PM **#16**

In order to make texture changes permanent to the disc rather than loaded by Dolphin, you would need to reverse engineer the format used for that particular games textures. Every game is different and they might be compressed (LZ, yaz0, zlib, etc). Then you'd have to find a way to convert that texture to a useable format, edit it, and replace it. The problem is that you couldn't have it any bigger than the original texture size ( both pixels and file size). That's why external texture loading is much better, you can have it any size you'd like (within reason of course).

Sylux102 · 04-16-2015, 02:32 AM **#17**

The problem with replacing textures on the actual disc is that you cannot make the game size any bigger than what the disc can handle. In most cases, the discs are only 8 GB discs, so that really only leaves 200-300 MB for anything. Depending on the game, there may be checksums, data lookup tables, and other various anti hacker precautions.

If he wanted to play them on the Wii itself, he'd more than likely have to upgrade the RAM, if you'd want to even do that. There's a limit to the RAM (don't know offhand, but the OG Xbox could only handle a 64 MB upgrade). Its not worth the effort really.

**JosJuice** · (This post was last modified: 04-16-2015, 04:43 AM by JosJuice.)

(04-16-2015, 02:32 AM)Sylux102 Wrote: The problem with replacing textures on the actual disc is that you cannot make the game size any bigger than what the disc can handle. In most cases, the discs are only 8 GB discs, so that really only leaves 200-300 MB for anything.

8 GB? Try 1.35 GB for a standard GameCube disc Wink

The list of games that use dual-layer DVDs is very small. I don't remember exactly how many, but probably less than 15. Out of those few games, even fewer only have a few hundred megabytes free.

I wonder if this is a problem in Dolphin too. Dolphin's limit for discs is at 16 GB, but it doesn't sound unlikely that games make some sort of assumption about how large discs can be...

(04-16-2015, 02:32 AM)Sylux102 Wrote: Depending on the game, there may be checksums, data lookup tables, and other various anti hacker precautions.

Are you sure? People do modify ISOs from time to time, and I've never heard about problems with any measures like that.

(04-16-2015, 02:32 AM)Sylux102 Wrote: The problem with replacing textures on the actual disc is that you cannot make the game size any bigger than what the disc can handle. In most cases, the discs are only 8 GB discs, so that really only leaves 200-300 MB for anything. Depending on the game, there may be checksums, data lookup tables, and other various anti hacker precautions.

If he wanted to play them on the Wii itself, he'd more than likely have to upgrade the RAM, if you'd want to even do that.

I don't think the software is made to handle more than what is in a standard console. That also applies when it's running in Dolphin.

Sylux102 · (This post was last modified: 04-16-2015, 06:08 AM by Sylux102.)

Sorry. I mostly play games like SSBB, Zelda, and Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii, which use multi-layer discs. I don't recall the OP mentioning GameCube. I'm sure there is a limit on the Wii (I don't think its 64bit so technically its theoretical RAM limit is 4 GB) and its game size (probably 16 GB) but nobody would ever have to worry about that limit.

Almost all games nowadays use some sort of hacking protection. Most end user tools take care of that stuff in the background. For example, try modding Metroid Prime on the GameCube. Have fun with the 3 or 4 WIP tools for it.