The Paper Mario Games

Korados · 01-14-2014, 04:48 AM #1

I decided to make a new thread now to sum up the quirks and problems I experienced with the three Paper Mario games.

I'm using 4.0-609 now.

Paper Mario 64 doesn't work at all on my PC. When I start up the game, there's the "You will need the Classic Controller"
prompt and afterwards the screen freezes and the title bar shows FPS 0 - VPS 0 - 0 %.
When I try to start it another time, the prompt "This file can not be used because the data is corrupted" appears.
I tried deleting the savegame folder but this didn't help.

Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door works beautifully now. I had the problem that after 10 minutes
of play time the performance went down to 80 % and lower. I cleaned out the dust of my PC and installed the newest driver for my graphics card
and the newest sound driver which made this problem disappear. EFB to Texture causes the usual graphical bugs
to appear. Interestingly, EFB to RAM even results in a little speedup. It even works on 100 % with Anti-Aliasing 8 samples (quality level 32)
and Anisotropic Filtering x16. Only downer are the fights in the Glitz Pit which are always pretty slow because of the in-game screen which
mirrors the events on the stage. Furthermore, the Punies aren't rendered properly, even with EFB to RAM.

Super Paper Mario generally works, too. With EFB to Texture it's at 100 % most of the time but the performance drops
in fights with many enemies and all boss fights because most of the bosses are big. EFB to RAM slows down the performance noticeably.
Strangely, the game suddenly crashes occasionally. AA and AF seem to slow down the performance and make crashes
more likely.

Does anyone know how I could get Paper Mario 64 to start?

**KHg8m3r** · 01-14-2014, 05:22 AM #2

Can't help with Paper Mario 64 on Dolphin

Switch over to OpenGL, it will an extra speed-up.
Also, check for driver updates with Intel Driver Update (google)
Make sure you have Dolphin set to a high-performance profile in Nvidia Control Panel.

**mbc07** · 01-14-2014, 06:12 AM #3

(01-14-2014, 04:48 AM)Korados Wrote: Does anyone know how I could get Paper Mario 64 to start?

Playing it with an N64 emulator would fix all problems...

**pauldacheez** · 01-14-2014, 08:41 AM #4

Playing it in an N64 emulator wouldn't actually be that much better. There tend to be less issues playing N64 Virtual Console games in Dolphin than there are with real N64 emulators.

**DJBarry004** · 01-14-2014, 08:49 AM #5

I don´t like to argue, but I actually would second what Jhonn said. For instance, Paper Mario works fine on PJ64 as far as I played.

**JMC47** · 01-14-2014, 08:51 AM #6

You probably have an incomplete/bad dump of Paper Mario for 64. I've been playing it fine on Dolphin for a few weeks with absolutely zero issues (then again, I've just derped around occasionally)

Make sure you completely dump it from the Wii without taking a partial file.

haddockd · 01-15-2014, 12:08 AM #7

Paper Mario has issues on 1964 and pj64 that still plague it. They differ based on your Graphics plug-in. Glide tends to be the lesser of all evils but there are several graphical issues that persist.

**pauldacheez** · 01-15-2014, 07:17 AM #8

I'd love to provide an anecdote on how it runs with mupen64plus with glide64mk2, but I really can't be arsed to boot up that mess right now, it'd take me a while to figure out how to use it again.

Korados · 01-15-2014, 09:10 AM #9

Ok, I tried out a few things now. Paper Mario 64 definitely doesn't work. I switched to OpenGL but
this causes the same problem as with D3D. I already played the game on PJ64 but I thought it would
be nice to play it on Dolphin, too.

The other two games don't run properly on OpenGL. They are both terribly slow, just at 20 FPS and less.
The audio stutters so much it's unbearable. I'm going to update my Intel driver and then I could check
it again but I doubt that this will fix that. I always had problems with OpenGL on any game.

Maybe my PC isn't strong enough to render it properly? But why am I able then to play it on PJ64?
It runs perfectly on PJ64 besides some graphical bugs. I thought that these bugs might have been "fixed" in
the Wii Ware version. The wad I have is proper, I don't know what could be possibly wrong with it.

**DJBarry004** · 01-15-2014, 09:21 AM **#10**

(01-15-2014, 09:10 AM)Korados Wrote: Ok, I tried out a few things now. Paper Mario 64 definitely doesn't work. I switched to OpenGL but
this causes the same problem as with D3D. I already played the game on PJ64 but I thought it would
be nice to play it on Dolphin, too.

The other two games don't run properly on OpenGL. They are both terribly slow, just at 20 FPS and less.
The audio stutters so much it's unbearable. I'm going to update my Intel driver and then I could check
it again but I doubt that this will fix that. I always had problems with OpenGL on any game.

Maybe my PC isn't strong enough to render it properly? But why am I able then to play it on PJ64?
It runs perfectly on PJ64 besides some graphical bugs. I thought that these bugs might have been "fixed" in
the Wii Ware version. The wad I have is proper, I don't know what could be possibly wrong with it.

Because emulating N64 games requires less resources than emulating Wii/Virtual Console games?