GameCube/Wii emulation - high resolution awesomeness

Console emulation is awesome. Why? Because not only can it make games on older systems prettier, it can also do it for a current system. While Nintendo's stubbornness to not compete in the 'graphics race' with Sony and Microsoft resulted in a console without HD graphics, it also made it much more possible for Wii to be emulated in the first place (also, being a beefed up GameCube didn't hurt). And even though WiiU will finally jump into HD graphics, Nintendo already made it explicitly clear that WiiU won't be upscaling older Wii games to HD resolutions. Why wait for them to do something about it, when you can be playing Wii games in HD resolutions today?

Enter Dolphin, the free and incredible GameCube and Wii emulator that can run most of GC's and Wii's library, while also adding graphical capabilities that make games played on Wii look kind of embarrassing. Wii's maximum resolution is measly 640 x 480 pixels, which looks horrible on todays' big TVs and monitors. With Dolphin you can play them in your monitor's or TV's native resolution, with Dolphin's internal resolution set to up to 4x it's native one - that's 2560 x 2112 pixels, more than any of todays' TVs. Not good enough? Add up to 9x SSAA anti-aliasing, making all jaggies disappear, and up to 16x anisotropic filtering for nicer looking distant textures. Still not good enough? Let's add 3D Vision, enabling 3D support in games, which we'll probably get from Nintendo in a decade, and even some lightning and other texture enhancements.

Of course, all of the above will bring even the mightiest of everyday computers almost to their knees, so it depends what your computer will be capable of. Even Wii's regular 640 x 480 resolution looks infinitely better with AA and AF enabled, without most of the needed processing power for outputing higher resolutions. You probably shouldn't be thinking about trying this out if you don't have at least a dual-core CPU clocked at 2.5+ GHz, 2 GB of RAM and a fairly modern GPU. Sorry. :)

To make this a bit more clear, let's make a comparison of a few games without all the added candies (640 x 480, no AA and AF) on the left, a middle ground (640 x 480 with 9x AA and 16x AF) in the middle and in extremely high internal resolution (2560 x 2112 with 9x AA and 16x AF) on the right:

New Super Mario Bros. Wii:




Metroid: Other M:



Red Steel 2:



Convinced yet? If so, jump to Dolphin's download page and download the latest version or daily build. The whole process of setting everything up is a bit long for me to cover it all here, so for now I'm just gonna point you in the direction of already written guides and links that should put you on your merry way:

• NeoGAF's Dolphin thread with an extensive guide how to set everything up
• WiiHacks.com guide on ripping your own Wii games to ISO files, which you need for Dolphin
• The official Wii compatibility list and GameCube compatibility list to see which games work with Dolphin

What you need in a nutshell: 

• a capable computer with Dolphin installed (optional 64bit version for a speed gain)
• Wii games in ISO format (rip them yourself using a Wii, USB drive/SD card and the already mentioned WiiHacks.com guide or ignore your moral scruples and download them)
• a Bluetooth adapter if you want to connect your Wiimote to the PC
• an Xbox 360 (or one you prefer) controller to use as a GameCube pad

Also, while it's not a perfect solution, it is the cheaper one: just use your Wii's sensor bar with Dolphin. It means you'll need to have your Wii turned on when using Dolphin, but it's cheaper than ordering an additional wireless sensor bar.

And there you have it. If anyone wants me to make some screenshots of other games, to see how they compare, let me know in the comments. Until next time!

Setting up Project 64 - now with pictures!

So I thought I'd expand the previous guide by including pictures for all the steps while you're configuring Project 64's settings. Might help someone, if they aren't accustomed to these types of programs. Here it goes:

Open Project 64 and set it up:

• choose Options/Settings/Plugins from the menu, select "1964Video N64 Video Plugin community version" and click OK

• choose Options/Configure Graphics Plugin ... and:

• in the General Options tab set your desired Window Mode and Full Screen resolution

• if you want to, you can enable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering in the DirectX tab for a much nicer picture

• in the Texture Enhancement tab check 'Load hi-res textures if available'

High resolution textures for Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 retexturing projects. My foremost reason for starting this blog.

While the N64 was an awesome console with some of the most cherished games of all times, the graphics haven't really stood the test of time well. It managed a measly resolution of 256 × 224 (lowest) up to 640 × 480 (highest, which was used by very few games) and most games had ridiculously tiny textures spread over big areas, resulting in highly blurred textures all around.

So let's be thankful for emulation and the wonders it brings. While there's a whole bunch of emulators out there, I'm most at home with Project64, so this is the one I'm going with. And while there's quite a few high-res texture projects out there, only a handful are (in my opinion) worth your time. Mainly Djipi's Cell Mod for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which makes the game look something like this (click to expand):


If you don't prefer the Wind Waker inspired cell-shaded look the author, Djipi, was going after, there are also other, more realistic high res textures available, but more on that later.

So, how do we get all this together? It's quite simple actually:

1. Hop on to Project 64's download page and download the latest free (version 1.6) installer here, install Project 64 to your desired directory
2. Download the latest 1964 video plugin from here and put it in your Project 64 1.6\Plugin\ directory
3. Make a 'hires_texture' directory inside of the Plugin directory
4. Get Djipi's Final Cell Mod from here and extract (using WinZip, 7-zip ...) it to Project 64 1.6\Plugin\hires_texture directory, so you get a Project 64 1.6\Plugin\hires_texture\The Legend of Zelda\ directory
5. Download the Ocarina of Time ROM from one of many ROM places (Google is your friend) and hopefully have the original cartridge so you're not meddling in piracy
6. Open Project 64 and set it up:
   
   • choose Options/Settings/Plugins from the menu, select "1964Video N64 Video Plugin community version" and click OK
   • choose Options/Configure Graphics Plugin ... and:
   • in the General Options tab set your desired Window Mode and Full Screen resolution
   • if you want to, you can enable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering in the DirectX tab for a much nicer picture
   • in the Texture Enhancement tab check 'Load hi-res textures if available'
7. Open the game by double-clicking on it in the list

And voila, that's it, Ocarina of Time in glorius high res texture goodness. The first time you load it, it's gonna take a while to load all 7000 and something high res textures, but it should speed up considerably after the first time.

Also, if you experience cracking and popping sounds while playing, try opening 'Options/Configure Audio Plugin ...' and checking 'Sync Game to Audio'. Helped in my case.

You can get different texture packs for Ocarina of Time and completed texture packs for other N64 games here, or you can follow the progress of unfinished packs (including Djipi's incredible Majora's Mask texture pack and his 2011 update to Ocarina of Time) right over here.

Some examples of the game with regular textures (left side) and Djipi's high res textures (right side):

Hello world.

Well, if 'Hello world' works, everything works.

A quick introduction: I'm your regular creeping-on-30 guy, living in your typical (eh?) European country, with a job (yaaay!), which is quite mundane (booo!), but it gets me, the missus and the dog through life and with some spare time. And: I like gaming consoles and PCs. I love Nintendo's old consoles and I love seeing crazy people do magical things to old games through emulation.

So, I'm gonna write about mostly emulation-related things that excite me. Might just be I write something useful every once in a while, we'll see.

Here it goes!