Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums - Paper Mario 64 HD Texture Pack v1.3 (December 12, 2021)

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)

What's still missing: (Show Spoiler)

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)

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.

Moved to Custom Texture Projects...

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

(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.

Ty bro, I'll try it out.

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?

(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.

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).

The Texture Pack look awesome Smile

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.

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

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