Paper Mario TTYD HD Texture Pack v2.0 (April 3rd, 2023)

[ubergeek77]

Apologies for the 5-month old bump (hasn't been 6 yet! ), but I was thinking this is the best place to post a question like this. I'm using the texture pack, and it's great, but I'm sure we all know how many issues arise when we try to run this game with widescreen hacks.

But take a look at this:

Video: (Show Spoiler)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7l-kFKKIb4

As you can see, the person in the video is running the game with 16:9 hacks, but all UI elements are being stretched from 4:3. And this is a good thing. This completely gets rid of the ugly transition issues, the black bars not going across the screen in cut scenes, and more. And you'll notice the rest of the game is properly widescreen - Mario isn't being stretched and there's no pop-in.

But here's the thing: it seems like no one can replicate this. If you go and read the comments, it looks like a few other Dolphin users asked the video poster how he got it to look like this for his recording, and he doesn't seem to know, although he was using Ishiiruka 381. The strangest part is that he didn't change his configuration since the video, but now he can't get it to run that perfectly again. Very strange.

And here's the strangest part: If you ran this cheat on a real Gamecube, the desired effects are achieved. Take a look at these screenshots.

This suggests that a certain change to Dolphin's accuracy could have broken the widescreen cheat, but if nothing else, the video and screenshots prove it's possible. The how and why is yet to be discovered. I think this pack deserves true widescreen support, so I hope a solution is found!

[farcry15]

(12-19-2015, 05:41 AM) ubergeek77 Wrote: Apologies for the 5-month old bump (hasn't been 6 yet! ), but I was thinking this is the best place to post a question like this. I'm using the texture pack, and it's great, but I'm sure we all know how many issues arise when we try to run this game with widescreen hacks.

But take a look at this:

Video: (Show Spoiler)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7l-kFKKIb4

As you can see, the person in the video is running the game with 16:9 hacks, but all UI elements are being stretched from 4:3. And this is a good thing. This completely gets rid of the ugly transition issues, the black bars not going across the screen in cut scenes, and more. And you'll notice the rest of the game is properly widescreen - Mario isn't being stretched and there's no pop-in.

But here's the thing: it seems like no one can replicate this. If you go and read the comments, it looks like a few other Dolphin users asked the video poster how he got it to look like this for his recording, and he doesn't seem to know, although he was using Ishiiruka 381. The strangest part is that he didn't change his configuration since the video, but now he can't get it to run that perfectly again. Very strange.

And here's the strangest part: If you ran this cheat on a real Gamecube, the desired effects are achieved. Take a look at these screenshots.

This suggests that a certain change to Dolphin's accuracy could have broken the widescreen cheat, but if nothing else, the video and screenshots prove it's possible. The how and why is yet to be discovered. I think this pack deserves true widescreen support, so I hope a solution is found!

'i was able to reproduce the effect with dolphin-7997(last recent build i had) by turning off the 16:9 cheat and using the built in force 16:9 option.
http://i.imgur.com/5BE0SCS.jpg
I\'m not really sure how widescreen textures would be done, since you get best results with the textures being a multiple of the original size. I'll look into it. in the meantime since I'm out of school for now, I hope to post some new textures in the next few days

[ubergeek77]

(12-19-2015, 07:24 AM)farcry15 Wrote: 'i was able to reproduce the effect with dolphin-7997(last recent build i had) by turning off the 16:9 cheat and using the built in force 16:9 option.
http://i.imgur.com/5BE0SCS.jpg
I\'m not really sure how widescreen textures would be done, since you get best results with the textures being a multiple of the original size. I'll look into it. in the meantime since I'm out of school for now, I hope to post some new textures in the next few days

That's actually just the normal 4:3 game being stretched to fill the entire screen to fit a 16:9 resolution. Here's a screenshot of the game with the widescreen AR code on, you can see what I mean more clearly here:

Image: (Show Spoiler)

I walked to the same spot as you in your screenshot. Notice that Mario isn't as stretched out, the wooden structure to the left isn't being cut off, and you can see much further beyond the item shop to the left, so much that the entire bulletin board is completely visible.

So to make this more clear, the desired effect would be to only stretch anything on the HUD (so the health meter, coins, the d-pad on the bottom right, etc) from 4:3 to 16:9, and leave everything else to be rendered in proper native 16:9, just like it is in my screenshot. The reason for this is, by stretching only the HUD elements, you're leaving the rest of the game to be rendered in 16:9, and tackling some undesired graphical problems that were a problem with the widescreen hack on. These are 2D elements that are only normally rendered in the 4:3 portion of the screen, such as the black transition screens when you move areas, the white flashes that happen frequently during crystal star cutscenes, and the black "cinematic" bars on the top and bottom of the screen during cutscenes.

Now here's the really weird part: as I was typing this post, I loaded a save state to go grab another screenshot, and the HUD elements were being properly stretched! Take a look:

Image: (Show Spoiler)

If you look at the two screenshots I posted side-by-side, you get a visual representation of what I'm talking about. I really don't have a way to reproduce this though; it just happened randomly. I'm going to try and play as much of the game as I can like this, but in the meantime, I hope there is an eventual solution to this. Maybe I can upload a log or a savestate for a developer to analyze?

Here's the widescreen cheat I'm using, if it helps. It's better than the built in widescreen hack (which is disabled for me), as it prevents pop-in for things rendered outside the 4:3 range:

Code:

04199598 4E800020
0441F6D8 3FE38E39

[Bighead]

To reproduce the stretched HUD, you just need to save a state without the code in effect then load the state with the code in effect. I honestly always thought this was a bug. Your save state was probably when the code was off. My guess is this might have to do with Dolphin's implementation of the action replay, as there are cases where codes don't work exactly like they would using an actual action replay.

It was mentioned here that Dolphin isn't doing something quite right.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/03/09/datel-unlicensed-products-showcase/

It might be possible to test this if the 16-digit hex code can be converted to the 13-digit AR code. But, I do not know how to do this.

[ubergeek77]

(12-19-2015, 11:37 AM)Bighead Wrote: To reproduce the stretched HUD, you just need to save a state without the code in effect then load the state with the code in effect. I honestly always thought this was a bug. Your save state was probably when the code was off. My guess is this might have to do with Dolphin's implementation of the action replay, as there are cases where codes don't work exactly like they would using an actual action replay.

It was mentioned here that Dolphin isn't doing something quite right.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/03/09/datel-unlicensed-products-showcase/

It might be possible to test this if the 16-digit hex code can be converted to the 13-digit AR code. But, I do not know how to do this.

You mean this? This is actually the code I used, Dolphin did the conversion to hex code by itself. Here's the original: 

Code:

7ZT7-QH3Q-QNB6A
WQQH-F789-00FB6
R9XG-VQJ9-HD7T9

Thanks for the tip on the savestates!

[Bighead]

It appears my suspicions were correct. Using the AR disc and the widescreen code gives the expected results, meaning Dolphin's implementation is probably doing something wrong. I had to hunt down the NTSC-U version of the code because the one mentioned above was for the PAL version of the game.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

An interesting fact is that it's still possible to use the texture pack if the folder is name to "GNHE5d" which is the Disc ID of the AR.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

[Amon1995]

Is there any chance that Dolphin itself can be tweaked in a future version so that you wouldn't have to use the save state trick to make this work?

[Bighead]

It depends whether or not someone with the talent is interested enough in fixing up the action replay support in Dolphin. It's probably not worth the trouble to play it through the AR disc at the moment because it's a hassle to get it working. It requires a real GC BIOS, LLE Audio, and Dual Core must be enabled. And Paper Mario doesn't like dual core.

[masterotaku]

From my point of view, HUD stretching is evil. Some things should retain the correct aspect ratio (menus, HUD, etc) while other effects (transitions, back bars, etc) should fill the entire screen. But there isn't a simple solution for this with AR codes.

A good middle ground (if the default behaviour in widescreen is HUD stretching) would be correcting the textures so they have the correct aspect ratio, even if their position is moved to the sides. Unless some textures appear in some places where they aren't stretched (like the items menu vs the HUD in Zelda OOT).

[Lufkin]

Hi guys,

I'm new in using Dolphin and texture packs, I'm sorry if it's a silly question already answered. I'm using this texture pack (which is amazing, congrats to all the contributors!) but I get frequent 5 FPS drops while playing, but I'm getting super smooth constant 60 FPS without the texture pack. Any ideas why?

My specs :

Intel Core i7 4790K 4.0ghz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
32 GB RAM
Windows 7 64bits

Using Dolphin 4.0-6219.

I'll post my configs if you need it, but it's pretty much everything default.