Paper Mario 64 HD Texture Pack v1.3 (December 12, 2021)

[BooLean]

Paper Mario 64 is a great game but sadly the original textures truly aged like milk.

This texture-pack is essentially complete and contains textures from start to finish while also remaining somewhat faithful to the original art-style.

Comparison Screenshots: (Show Spoiler)

About this texture-pack: (Show Spoiler)

I've created this texture pack because there didn't exist one for the Virtual Console version of Paper Mario 64, the superior version if you ask me (because you can play it on dolphin).
And honestly I also wasn't quite happy with the packs that do exist for the N64 version (mostly because they aren't complete and using N64 emulators feels like such a pain to me).

Many textures in this pack are AI-upscaled with ESRGAN, some are manually edited and some are created from scratch.

Generally speaking textures in this pack are 16x times larger than the original textures (some are even larger!).

This pack works with both the PAL and NTSC-U Virtual Console version of the game.

What's still missing: (Show Spoiler)

A very small amount of textures would require to include an insane amount of duplicates in the texture pack and are missing because of that.
The map and a few backgrounds are missing as well.
Apart from that there should hardly miss any texture.

Requirements & Recommendations (*Please Read*):

• Download & extract the texture pack and place it to "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\NAE" ("~/.local/share/dolphin-emu/Load/Textures/NAE" on Linux)
• Use a recent development version of dolphin
• Enable "Load Custom Textures" & "Prefetch Custom Textures" in Dolphin (Graphics -> Advanced)
• I HIGHLY recommend using some kind of Anti-Aliasing (ideally SSAA, but if your system can't handle that use FXAA). Textures WILL look jagged otherwise. This is because Paper Mario 64 textures most of time can only utilize a binary alpha-channel (i.e. a pixel is either completly solid or transparent with no in-between)
• Enable CPU-clock-override (Config -> Advanced) and set it to a high value to reduce stuttering (I used 250%, only works if your system has enough performance)
• To "remove" the black borders around the screen check out the guide below
• It is also worth mentioning that the NTSC-U version runs at a higher Framerate than PAL (30FPS vs 25FPS)
  

How to "remove" the huge black borders around Paper Mario 64: (Show Spoiler)

N64-games have black borders around them because old TVs didn't necessarily display these areas (and to save some performance).

Paper Mario 64 is even worse than many other n64-games and has exceptionally large black borders around the screen (except when you are in the main-menu), so even if you play in fullscreen almost a third of your screen will just be black emptiness, which is a shame.

You can use a custom post-processing shader to crop the black borders:

Code:

void main() {
  float2 coords = GetCoordinates() - float2(0.5, 0.5);
  float2 new_coords = float2(coords.x*0.93, coords.y*0.84);
  float2 sample_coords = new_coords + float2(0.5, 0.5);
  SetOutput(SampleLocation(sample_coords));
}

(based on Derek's code for Resident Evil 4, thanks to nastys for telling me of that shader)

Navigate to "C:\Users\UserName\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Shaders" and create a file called "zoom.glsl", use notepad or any other text editor to put the code above in that file, then go to dolphin's graphic settings and choose "zoom" as a post-processing-effect.

Note: This shader just stretches the screen so it might be a good idea to use a higher "internal resolution" than you normally would to get the best image quality (e.g. if you play on 1080p use 4x instead of 3x).

If the method above doesn't work for some reason or you want "optimal" image quality check out the method below.

Method 2 (for windows-users): (Show Spoiler)

For best quality you can increase the size of the rendering window (instead of stretching the window after it is already rendered) but it requires a third-party software called Sizer4.0, if you're still interested follow this step by step guide:

1. Download the most recent version of Sizer4.0 and also download This Preset-File.

2. Extract Sizer & open Sizer.exe, Sizer should now run silently in the background and you should see an icon in your task-tray.

3. Press Ctrl + Win + Z (sizer-dialog) -> Configure Sizer -> Load/Save -> Import from another File... -> select the PaperMario64 Preset that you downloaded in Step 1.

4. Start Paper Mario 64 like you normally would and make sure it is in fullscreen and in focus.

5. Press Ctrl + Win + Z and select PaperMario64_Fullscreen, if this doesn't work try PaperMario64_Fullscreen_alt, if this doesn't work either do the following: Ctrl + Win + Z -> Configure Sizer -> select PaperMario64_Fullscreen & edit it -> replace "w:client" with the width of you screen (in pixel) and "h:client" with height, also select the monitor you're using at the "Relative to:" field.

Note: you have to repeat step 5 each time you open and close dolphin.

Let me know if you think this method is useful or if you know of a better method.

Download Link:

https://mega.nz/file/PnBSHTAA#GCwY6zfvBidqZSMFQat0XaX61wia7LlJHUCU9GmZ4FU (DDS-BC7)


Credits

I used a small amount of textures from Invaders awesome Paper Mario TTYD texture pack
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-paper-mario-ttyd-hd-texture-pack-v1-9-april-1st-2020
so credits to the creators of that pack

I also want to say thank you to Bighead for creating the extremely useful Custom Texture Tool.


If anyone wants to contribute textures to this texture pack, feel free to post them in this thread and I'll make sure to include them as long as they look better than what's already in this texture pack.

Feel free to share whether you like or dislike this texture pack, any kind of feedback is much appreciated.

[mbc07]

Moved to Custom Texture Projects...

[evanft]

This looks pretty good. Aren't there packs available for n64 emulators? I wonder if that could be ported over and combined with this.

[BooLean]

(09-14-2021, 04:49 PM)evanft Wrote: This looks pretty good. Aren't there packs available for n64 emulators? I wonder if that could be ported over and combined with this.

Thank you.
And yes there are texture packs for the n64 version of the game and in theory it does sound like a nice idea to combine texture packs to create one superior one.
BUT there are a few reasons why I think merging my texture pack with another one is not a good idea, the main reason is the following:
While there is nothing wrong with the texture packs for the n64 version (apart from being incomplete) they do MASSIVELY change the art-style (they look more like a 3DS Paper Mario). Thus I would consider them incompatible with my texture pack which aims to be (kind of) faithful to the original art-style.

[Barabbas]

Ty bro, I'll try it out.

[jvook]

Great work, I agree there has been nothing available so this is a huge improvement.  I posted this in another thread and so I'm curious what you think about it.  What if you trained an AI on the paper mario TTYD texture project, which has a ton of hand-drawn upscaling?  Mightn't that create upscaled graphics perhaps with cleaner lines and less of the "smudginess" that is in this pack (smudginess be damned your pack still looks great though).  Would you be willing to share your texture dump with me in case I can get around to trying this out?

[BooLean]

(09-22-2021, 01:09 AM)jvook Wrote: What if you trained an AI on the paper mario TTYD texture project, which has a ton of hand-drawn upscaling?  Mightn't that create upscaled graphics perhaps with cleaner lines and less of the "smudginess" that is in this pack (smudginess be damned your pack still looks great though).

I'm actually already trying to do something like that and as far as I can tell an AI trained with the TTYD texture-pack is in fact quite decent at creating cleaner lines and overall sharper images, without creating too many unwanted side effects. So yes, my texture-pack could probably be improved a bit by doing that.
But it would most likely just be a small improvement (mostly noticable when playing in 4K) that won't fix many of the more "blurry/smudgy" textures. Many Paper Mario 64 textures are simply too low-res to begin with, which makes them quite ambiguous and very resistant to all forms of AI-upscaling (Some PM64 textures are so bad that they are basically just a bunch of similar-colored pixels).
Nevertheless I intend to upload an updated version of my texture pack as soon as I have the time.
If you're still interested in trying to train an upscaling AI yourself and want to share your results feel free to post them in this thread.

(09-22-2021, 01:09 AM)jvook Wrote: Would you be willing to share your texture dump with me in case I can get around to trying this out?

I'm afraid I can't share my texture dump due to copyrights. But a small amount of textures (that you can easily dump yourself) should be enough to see if you manage to find a better upscaling method than I did. Should you then be serious about upscaling all the textures, I guess you can't avoid playing the game and dumping all the textures.

Also thank you for liking my texture-pack and giving me feedback.

[BooLean]

I uploaded a new version of the texture-pack where I used a slightly different method to upscale the textures.
In addition I also made a few manual tweaks here and there.
As a result a large amount of textures should now look overall better and "cleaner" than before (This affects all the character-art, item-icons, badge-icons, fonts and much more).

[Florian199607073]

The Texture Pack look awesome i love the comparisons, i make myself also a Texture Pack but from Pokemon xd gale of darkness 8x upscaled.

Say the Name "masterkillua" somewhat to you? He make a Texture apck for pm64 aswell

I will try your Texture Pack and tell you my impressions later on but at a First look it looks clean to me.

[Florian199607073]

And project64 have an Feature that named "crop" when i remember correctly, with that you can crop the Picture to match fullscreen without the big black around the Image/Picture