Inputting High-res textures into the rom

[AleX_XelA]

Firstly, I know this question has already been asked many times, and most of you have said "No, it's impossible, you can't replace textures within the ROM and load it in the emulator." Mainly because :
- It is hard to input the textures and remove the original ones
- No emulator would read the rom with High-res textures instead of normal ones

From what I've heard the second problem shouldn't be a problem in the next few weeks, as the next release of Project64 will support hi-res, from what I've heard.
Now I found a method of actually inputting the textures into the rom, the only problem is that I'm kinda of newbie in that kind of stuff, so I'll just link the tutorial for you guys. Before you go and read it, you have to know that :
- The tutorial only works for the US Rom of OoT v1.0
- It has been used to translate OoT into Russian, so it works!

The Tutorial : You'll arrive into a russian webpage, just click on the link under the banner on-top of the website and you'll have the English version of the tutorial.

If anyone manages to do this with one of the high-res projects, he could make a patch for it, as patches are legitimate, instead of putting the patched Rom for download. If this has already been attempted, then I'm sorry and please do delete this topic.

 

[Agozer]

Err, hires-textures are already supported by Rice's Video plugin, so replacing textures in N64 games is possible.

This begs the question: have you been living under a rock or haven't you just understood what you've read on the forums?

Personally, I wouldn't even go so far as to permanently replace textures in a game. Original textures still have their good points.

 

[AleX_XelA]

What I meant is that you don't have to have Rice's plugin, the textures would already be inside the rom.

 

[ScottJC]

Not practical at all, the graphics plugin would have to expect the larger textures to display them otherwise it would look awful [cut off at the sides or worse] not to mention the difficulty in putting these textures in the rom in the first place. Putting textures in roms is something that hardly anyone knows how to do as well.

 

[AleX_XelA]

Have you checked out the tutorial? It doesn't seem THAT difficult once you get the proper tools, and I'm sure someone could at least try it, see what we get. And it would be very practical not to have all those hires texture folders and file.

 

[Clements]

Translating a game is completely different to adding hi-res textures. Trust me, it is not possible at all via this method. The N64 has hardware limitations and simply could not load the altered rom, and the rom image has a size restriction just like the SNES, GBA and DS. The textures are also stored in a completely different format. The list goes on why this could never work.

The translated text they are putting in is in the exact format of the text on the cart. The font normally has to be decompressed, altered and then reinserted into the rom and recompressed. There is no code in the cart to load Hi-res PNG images, and even if it did, you would run out of the 8MB of RAM the N64 had very fast. If you inserted the hi-res textures into a rom and then tried it on a copier, or flashed to a blank N64 cartridge - it would not work. If it does not work on a copier/real N64, it won't work in PJ64 either.

There is nothing wrong with loading textures with Rice's plugin anyway.

 

[Agozer]

Besides, translating stuff (regardless of how the text is stored in the rom) is completely different than changing actual textures, and hoping to turn that into an IPS patch of some sort isn't going to work like that.

Sure, this method would be a lot easirer if we were talking about a fully 2D system, such as the NES or SNES. No such luck with the N64.

 

[AleX_XelA]

Mmh, well according to the tutorial it would be possible to open compressed graphics and uncompress them. And you can also compress your graphics in the proper format. I guess the biggest issue is the memory... And what is wrong about Rice's plugin is that it won't work on Mac or Linux, that's why I'm posting this. Still if anyone would try, at least replace a couple of textures to see if it works.

 

[legend of zelda]

why not just do it yourself since your the one who wants it done so bad?

 

[AleX_XelA]

Because for some odd reason it doesn't work on my computer, I'm stuck in the first part of the tutorial, when I try to load the rom in the Sprite Viewer, it doesn't load it and and a message is displayed : "Not enough memory for the file". Which is impossible because I have 512 Mb of memory and the rom is only 32... That's why I would like to know if someone else could try it.

 

[Vanit]

This tutorial is old man. I did some proper hacking of Oot with help from this tutorial a year or 2 ago. In the tutorial he used it to change the language, not upgrade the quality of the images or change the style effectively which is the goal of the hi res texture scene.

And as you've already proven by your own efforts, its damn hard to get right and could be done with the plugin in a matter of minutes. I will be using this method to make my translation of Sin and Punishment built into the rom, but it won't be changing the quality at all.

I'm afraid you're preaching to the wrong crowd.

 

[AleX_XelA]

I understand, but in the tutorial he did change something, and what if we make the textures lighter? I'm sure you can compress the pngs a bit more! And you said you used it, what did you use it for?

 

[TS_Death_Angel]

I understand, but in the tutorial he did change something, and what if we make the textures lighter? I'm sure you can compress the pngs a bit more! And you said you used it, what did you use it for?

Ok, look, you cannot add textures of a higher/lower resolution into the rom. However, it is possible to shrink down a texture pack (Djipi's Celda Mod, for ex.) by four times and put it into a rom. This is actually a good idea, someone should try it

 

[Vanit]

Its only useful if you're not going to be using a PC emulator (ie N64 emulator on Xbox).

 

[TS_Death_Angel]

Its only useful if you're not going to be using a PC emulator (ie N64 emulator on Xbox).

..or CD64 on N64 That was my main idea. I think it would be pretty awsome to play Celda on an N64! Do the filenames of the textures Rice's dumps reference the location of the texture in the rom?

 

[AleX_XelA]

Finally someone who shares my point of view! And how could you shrink down Djipi's mod and then put it in the rom? Seems impossible, I thought replacing textures was the only way.

 

[TS_Death_Angel]

Finally someone who shares my point of view! And how could you shrink down Djipi's mod and then put it in the rom? Seems impossible, I thought replacing textures was the only way.

What...? That's what you were preaching the whole time lain:

 

[Vanit]

/feints

 

[tailslol]

yep it can be useful to play on revolution or on xbox (or linux or mac or cd64 or ique...) the remplacement of old texture with hirez will realy be usefull

 

[Knuckles]

what happens in general is:
-The N64 is limited in the size of the textures it can load.
-The N64 is limited in memory for the textures loaded.
-the N64 Cart has a limited memory size for the entire game.
-The Offset of the textures would be all changed, if a texture usually takes 40K is now taking 500K will either take over what's after or will push back everything else. All adress calls from the game would get something that it shouldn't. It's not easy to know if from X to Y it's all textures or there's code in the middle, or from X to the end it all textures or if all textures are at the start..