GlideHQ 0.4 Released

[[vEX]]

Category: <b>Nintendo 64</b><br><br>

This project dedicated to bring you, Glide64 users, various advanced texture enhancements. The author of GlideHQ is famous Hiroshi ‘KoolSmoky’ Morii, well known as an author of 3dfx drivers and tools. I also must thank Rice for his indirect help – most of texture enhancement algorithms were taken from RiceVideo sources.

GlideHQ is a separate optional module. That is, Glide64 can work without it, if you don’t need texture enhancements. GlideHQ can apply various filters (smooth, sharp), enhancements (X2SAI, HQ4X etc) and compressions to input texture. Resulted texture is used instead of the original one.

To install and test GlideHQ, download GideHQ distributive and unpack it into Plugin folder. In Glide64 configuration dialog, open “Texture enhancement” tab and select options you like.

Current version is a prototype, based on Glide64 “WonderPlus”. That is, for end-users this is Glide64 “WonderPlus” with texture enhancements. Since it is a prototype, it can be buggy, slow, inconvenient and so on. Thus, we need your feedback to make it better.

GlideHQ 0.4:
I've restricted memory cache to 128Mbytes. It will grow till it reaches 128mb and swap out old texture cache. The memory cache will be dumped to disk when you stop emulation and loaded when started. A "*.dat" file will be created for each game under .\Plugin\cache\. For now they will be saved uncompressed.

GlideHQ 0.3:
I've added memory cache to cache filtered textures. Once a texture is filtered it will stay in the cache and be used until you exit emulation. For now only memory cache. In the Glide64 configuration dialog, open “Texture enhancement” and tick "Cache texture to system memory".

:: Glide64 Official Site
:: GlideHQ Release Thread
:: GlideHQ 0.4

Thanks to ggab for the heads up.

 

[ggab]

thanks, but the news and version uploaded are wrong, this is the thread with current release (Update 2):

New GlideHQ - Now with hi-resolution texture pack support!
http://emuxhaven.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6490

and binary file (570kb) is in:
http://emuxhaven.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=6289&d=1192081955
or mirror:
http://files.ngemu.com/n64/glide64/tools/GlideHQ_bin.zip

 

[ggab]

News' quote:

Two updates have been released since the last news post about the N64 plugin Glide64. This plugin allows you to modify N64 games with high-resolution textures to get better graphics during gameplay. The changes are as follows:
Fixed CRC calculation for 4bit textures.
Fixed a lot of problems with texture CRC calculation. Now most of hires textures are loaded.
Instant load from saved texture cache. You have to wait while hires textures are loaded only on the first run. Game will be loaded in a blink on subsequent runs.
Various fixes in texture coordinates calculations.
Various attempts to increase plugin's stability. Not all problems are fixed here. Plugin may crash on exit if texture cache is not saved yet (on the first run of a game). Temporal workaround: On the first run, close game/emulator right after all hires textures are loaded and the game is started to run. Texture cache will be saved, and you should not have problems on subsequent runs.
Two new options:
Texture enhancement _ Ignore backgrounds.
It is used to skip enhancement for wide narrow textures, usually used for backgrounds. This may save texture memory greatly and increase performance. Default value: On.

Hi-resolution textures _ Alternative CRC calculation.
This option enables emulation of palette CRC calculation bug in RiceVideo. Default value: On.