OT: can you?

Wrong thread to be posting this topic, but I belive your thinking of eding sprites of SNES games and NES games. This has been done before, just not with high resolution. Just google NES or SNES rom hacks and get yourself a ISP patcher. Programing a NES or SNES emulator to load high resolution textures is probably not a bad idea....just not worth the time. Although I dont condone or recomend the mutilation of these classics.

Hmmmmm.......isn't Ocarina of Time kinda like a classic and thats being redone.

Theboy said:

I was wondering if you could use these same techniques (or similar) on something like a Nintendo emulator, or if a similar project is all ready out there. I think it would be a blast to update graphics for older NES games like Contra or Super Mario. I know that there are editors that you can change the graphics with in a rom but you are limited to the color set and space. I was thinking it would be cool if you could have the games physics but updated graphics. Just a thought.

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Finally, someone who shares the same oppinion as I do! arty:
I just can't believe something like this hasn't been done or is being worked on.
Maybe if we make enough noise, someone will hear our cry and take up the challange no matter how great it is.

OOT is 3d its diffrent your just putting your own spin on somthing thats already set in stone. If I change the level textures in a dungeon in OOT people can still recognize it mabey even consider it a improvment. If you change the textures in a semi-linear game like Link to the Past people wont recognize it unless the artist stays VERY close to the original design. Not to say this isnt a good idea I just ment I like my retro NES\SNES games to stay that way. N64 isnt retro yet IMO, but soon it will be and I will feel even more old.

I think nothing like that has been done before because not all programmers can do art, so they don't necessarily think about those kinds of things that artists would. The artists had to work around what was made available to them, and do things like rom hacks and just sprite replacement.

Kerber2k said:

Programing a NES or SNES emulator to load high resolution textures is probably not a bad idea....just not worth the time. Although I dont condone or recomend the mutilation of these classics.

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I got into a huge argument with a moderator about the feasibilility of this on the Genesis. We also had a side-argument about whether the Genesis could do sprite scaling or not. I was arguing that it was possible, and would probably be easier than doing it with the N64 after the coding for it had been done (which would be an admittedly big task anyway). He was arguing that it would be so difficult as to be nigh-on impossible, and sprite scaling would just add to that (assuming the Genesis can even do that, which I'm still not convinced of).

So who was right? Is it possible to do high-resolution on older consoles or is there something about them that makes it inherantly harder? Also, can the Genesis actually do sprite scaling or was I right in thinking it can't do that?

I don't know about older console emulators very well but I have some thoughts here about why such texture replacement can be done for N64 emulators. You can then use my ideas to judge the possibility on other emulators.

Is N64 the first console of 3D gaming? (As I heard that Playstation is not a real 3D console. It does not have a z-buffer).

Rendering in 3D is a revolution from 2D sprite rendering. In 3D rendering, textures does not change. Vertex is transformed by matrix to obtain the final 2D screen coordinates. Textures are then mapped onto the triangles of the vertices by hardware.

N64 emulator is emulating video in HLE (High Level Emulation). This is the key why textures can be replaced. Game textures are clearly defined by the HLE ucodes (function calls) so they can be indentified, saved, loaded, used, replaced, CRC-indexed and so on. The way N64 processes graphics is like OpenGL very much, also not too different from DirectX or Glide. Vertices, matrix and textures can be directly transformed to OGL/DirectX/Glide vertices/matrix/textures. N64 textures are easy to replace.

Again, I don't know about older console emulators or playstation GPU. If these emulators have the concept of texture, and such textures can be identified/indexed/replaced, then high-res texture feature can be implemented on these emulator, too. If such emulators/GPUs are not in HLE, textures are not likely replaceable.