that's the point though, they *need* to be unnoticable. they are not supposed to stand out, they have to be consistent with the overall look and feel of a game. you need to look at it from the other direction: if you play an old 3D game and textures stand out to you as low-res, then an HD pack might fix that. if the low-res textures don't stand out to you, then even the best texture pack is not gonna do anything for you.
It’s really disappointing how many HD Texture Pack projects are basically just running the existing assets through an AI upscaler. You get all these weird subtle changes to art style and things like abstract logos can be completely shredded to bits because the AI doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to be.
This. It's clear that SM Sunshine texture pack was a quick and dirty AI upscale job, just from looking at the HUD and those featureless cliffs he showed.
I'm honestly surprised that they were recommended Henriko's packs, since I've tried some of them and they are _far_ from high quality due to the very noticible AI upscaling. I'll still use them for my own reasons, but I wouldn't recommend them unless the someone was _really_ desperate for an HD texture pack that didn't exist elsewhere.
I believe this is expected of the "Switch 2" though I'm not sure if this came through the rumour mill or an official announcement. I am very concerned that Nintendo, if this is true, won't have a way to toggle this AI Blending off. It reminds me of Iphone cameras, how you can turn off filters and rendering and play with the light, but the phone will still "magic" the image resolution and make my very textured face into a smooth yet somehow lower quality balloon, and the second I upload those images there's a bunch of visual artifacting because of the adjustments.
I personally like using HD texture packs, but I highly dislike when they replace the hud with different renders from newer games. It really clashes with the original art style and takes me out of it.
I remember I downloaded an hd texture pack for Mario kart wii and I was always bothered looking at the character portraits, they used the Mario kart 8 character portraits, and a lot of characters still had their old blurry portraits so it just looked very jarring (also some of them weren’t cropped well) the HUD font was also changed for some reason
@@RetroAussieBloke I doubt I can share a link but a single google search should be enough, honestly should be the default playing experience because holy shit the difference is night and day
I always hate when streamers play Minecraft for the first time and install some god-ray-infested bright-as-hell shader pack, where the torch light makes everything look orange. Those things look great in screenshots, but having to watch actual gameplay with them feels like stepping outside on a sunny summer day without sunglasses.
Proper mipmapping and scaling is imperative for a texture pack to not be distracting. Unfortunately, the best visuals are the ones you don't notice, even rtgi. For something to be pretty it has to be eye catching, visual fidelity only smoothens the experience at best. It takes artistry to make a game pretty.
It's very funny that you say this. Most of what devs of the 90s and early 2000s used for 3d textures were nothing more than images found on a cd their companies bought them. There's barely any artistry in something so simple. The real artistry is what you make with said textures, where you put them, how you implement them, you get the idea.
The way I see it is how would the original graphic designer have envisioned it without the hardware limitations. If it's rough, I try to make it look as rough as intended. If cinematic, I try to make it as cinematic as possible.
@Mundwasser Half the time the textures where really low resolution photos and stuff lol. The way gamers wax philosophically about "the artistic process!" When half the time its just "Yea, this works."
@megamillion5852 No i didn't. I described taking a photo and using is a blown huge ass fucking texture and the gamers pretending that's high art. Goof.
It will never not make me crawl up a wall that Xenoblade 1 has several unique character renders for menus and UI and the (Currently abandoned) HD texture pack decided to slap the same official art as a replacement everywhere. No guys, that not the way to go.
LITERALLY I FEEL THIS SO MUCH I HATE IT AHHHHH especially with the affinity system. the characters are supposed to look hype not “hmm yes let me get out my book” IT MAKES NO SENSE
I hate that texture pack so much, lol. Makes the game look uglier than its original release and I always laugh when some people say it looks better than Definitive Edition.
i agree with your beginning points about emulation in the sense that i'd PREFER to play these games in the original intention but if im playing on an emulator i'll always crank it up
I can understand this totally. Nerrel's HD texture pack is incredible, but the clash with high quality textures on low poly models is there. I still like to play with it sometimes to admire it, but I don't prefer it. I do like playing these old games in HD though, and I'd take a texture pack if it's only the HUD any day. Though I do like HD texture packs for later consoles. I never not play Super Mario Sunshine with a texture pack when I'm on Dolphin. Not the one you played with, not a fan of that one, but the other one listed on the Dolphin wiki.
only time i would prefer normal textures is if i had normal resolution. while the models themselves are still low poly, upping the resolution and AA and such makes the low quality textures stand out, and imo the hd texture pack works great with the high resolution low poly models
@@whereswarren3719 You realize that you can do bump mapping through normal maps right? As well that is still being used to this very day with parallax appearing more often now too.
It looks like anti-aliasing because that's actually a form of AA; SSAA. Devs don't use it nowadays though, since rendering the image at a higher resolution *just* to downscale it is very, very demanding.
I heavily agree on the fact I'd only use HD textures if they're authentic to the game's art direction. The clash of styles is a really big issue for me I remember downloading a Mario Kart Double Dash HD texture pack and my eyes were greeted by HD 4K assets of icons fron modern games, and it just looked BAD Also dumb nitpick, but I really hate when creators put theur names on the title screen with these or worse, replace one of the logos with their own, it really takes me out of the experience Another example being the Kingdom Hearts HD texture mods for the PC ports. Absolutely sublime in terms of quality but oh my god, the fact it alters the start up and title screen logos is so bleh to me
The same thing happened to me when I downloaded a Mario Party 8 texture pack years ago and the character icons were replaced with generic modern character renders. I ended up just deleting those images because it looked horrible.
I’m a graphic designer/character artist and I toatally agree lol, my eye for art really fucks over my enjoyment of these because they don’t tend to line up with each other or the games artstyle or have problems in and of themselves. Games are art!! There are a lot of reasons as to why you’d wanna see the art as intended, hell I still play a lot of games on my crt/on their original console because I think that’s a better way to play them (sorry for the tangent, I thought it was kind of on topic)
It just depends honestly and that's the key take away, at least in my opinion. For example I've recently started using a texture pack for a playthrough of the original Paper Mario game and I love it. I still find the original art charming but having a crisp image that I can blast to my big screen is nice. The older games look fine even on like a 27 inch monitor but if youre playing it from original hardware to a 32+ inch tv it can be a bit hard on the eyes and just in general unpleasant.
@@YuYuYuna_ I ended up getting 2 crts because I agree, running av cables thru a modern tv stretches out the picture and looks like shit lol, I use a crt as apart of my pc setup though so I think im just more accustomed to them than most
For me personally, my discrepancy is always poor framerates (which actually isn't what the developers intended). I love a CRT look on old games. I just wish they were more fluid but we all had to make due ofcourse
I've never encountered a CRT shader/filter that looked anything like playing on a CRT. I still have a CRT and games with a CRT shader/filter on a modern screen don't look like that on it.
Every CRT filter will look horrid through direct capture. It has to be scene in person to really see what it looks like unfortunately. Trust me in person the filters do get remarkably close when you have an 4k OLED with HDR.
@@Mr.Welbig I've tried every CRT shader/filter I know of, I'm not just judging them from your video but from my own personal experience. They don't look like playing on a CRT.
@@LuigiXHero I can't say I've used that one. Looks interesting from the GitHub page with a VHS option. Ps. I still have a VHS player connected to my CRT.
While i agree for the most part, the "it looks bad with default settings so it's bad" isn't a very fair argument since its an emulator. It's entirely about configuring it to your liking instead of leaving it at default settings
You make a good point, and for anyone who uses an emulator then I'd hope they'd know how to change settings to what looks best for them. I'm only harsh on Henriko's packs because they specifically advertise a seamless install. They come in preconfig forms of Dolphin so when I see visual anomalies and slow down then my investment tarnishes. The RE Seamless project and Nerrel's MMHD pack I was able to pretty much install and play with no issues which is a thumbs up from me.
@@Mr.Welbig by the way with sunshine, the jagged goop is a common problem with running the game at high resolutions, there's a graphics pack in the game's config that fixes it
One thing that has gotten me to use emulators again is when I got a PC CRT. Playing the Mario 64 pc port at 640x480 with real scanlines seems like the closest I will get to getting a pvm. The render 96 project on a pc crt is an otherworldly experience. Now as far as texture packs, I think one type that I wish people would create are custom button prompt textures. For emulators my biggest problem is the desparity between what controller i am using, and what the game was made for. Playing Mario Sunshine with a DualShock confuses me sometimes. Now there have been texture packs that only replaces the button prompts and those are super useful.
There's a beauty to limitations paired with proper art direction. That is why I believe many old games still look good to this day despite the shortcomings in the tech. I'm more of a gameplay guy, but graphics do matter in terms of matching gameplay as well.
Only Texture Pack I've used is Nerrels one for Majoras mask, he shown his work and shown how much he wanted to stay to the original work with him using some of the designs the 3D's version did that he felt fitted better. The only problem I have with it though is the models, as every time I see HD texture packs for low poly games on the N64 and so on, is that they feel really sharp and clean, where the models are still low poly making it look odd. Still use and love Nerrels Texture pack as he did all the textures as I have come across way to many texture packs that only touch up a few things, making it so I need to download multiple but they then contrast each other, as well as a lot of HD texture packs feel more like a fan interpretation then trying to stick to the original source material, thats where Nerrel looked at the art work for Major's mask, and the higher renders they had that the game couldn't handle at the time. He's the only person actually I've seen that feels like he wanted to just stick as faithful as possible as with nearly a lot of projects, mods, textures or whatever, a lot of people can't help themselves but inject their own stuff in to it instead of sticking to the original work. I think one problem with HD textures is every texture feels like it's been overly enhanced and sharpened, which makes everything look odd, where some things aren't sharp, like dirt and stuff, there is no sharp defining edges so it shouldn't be a sharp image, another is the fact some textures don't work with the model, in the video at the Twilight section the roof top texture being sharp is flat and looks like a texture you would put on a higher poly model where you can make those tiles pop, or use a bump map, but a lot of these games don't so textures that need a bump map or few polys to pop out don't and just look flat, where back then to get around this they made sure to draw depth as well as the low quality would cover it up and look fine from afar, it would look bad up close but with the HD texture you can now clearly see it afar and it looks bad because there is no depth or anything to it and up close you will see it's still flat so it's bad on both ends compare to the original.
Your comment reminded me of another texture pack, rosa evolved for gta san andreas which has similar if not way more effort put into making it. All graffitis and banners and other artworks are manually recreated from source material which Idk where they got their hands on. While the disparity bw the low poly models and hi res texures are unavoidable, texture packs this faithful to original art really feels like a well deserved remaster which official remasters often fail to deliver
I'm not usually huge on downsampling, but I think it does a good job at making 3D assets blend well with pre-rendered backgrounds like in the PS1 Resident Evil and Final Fantasy games. On a CRT like the ones these games were intended to be viewed on, the 3D and 2D assets didn't clash as much and the jagged edges on the models weren't nearly as visible, especially if you were using component cables like most people were using at the time. Because of that, I'd argue it's a more "authentic" look than playing it at 240p with visible jaggies.
Great video, I really enjoy your channel! I've been enjoying playing games with the area sampling filter in Dolphin because of your video on that, so thanks for that! I agree with a lot of your points in this one, but recently I've started to appreciate all the awesome new ways we have to revisit older games. You are absolutely right in the fact that there is something lost when you crank up a game's resolution and texture work. It's funny, I came back around to retro gaming when I built my first powerful PC over a decade ago. I was cranking visuals as high as I could and that actually made me miss the authentic experience. I went out and picked up a nice CRT and built up a retro console setup that I use to play games in their original forms and up until fairly recently it was the only way I preferred to play older games. As you mention, both emulation and filters have gotten so good over the past decade that it's entirely possible to mimic the original CRT experience and I think that's great too considering retro game prices these days. It is nice to see someone go to bat for the "authentic" experience on PC because the massive strides that have been made in developing accurate emulation and CRT filters often go overlooked. But over the last several years, the advent of the projects you mention in the video like decompilations, exceptional texture packs like Nerrel's HD pack and the Resident Evil packs, and the recent N64 recomp project have just been so well done and full of love. I've gone back to having fun cranking the visuals as high as possible when a project like that gets released. Hell, sometimes tweaking the graphics to be as "modern" as possible can be fun on it's own. We live in an era where anyone who wants to play older games and has a moderately competent PC can enjoy them however they want - authentic, modern, or somewhere in-between. In recent years we have been absolutely spoiled with new ways to play old games and I think there's a lot to appreciate about that. Petty side note I feel compelled to share for some reason - the only thing I really don't see eye to eye on is playing the original release of RE4 letterboxed on a widescreen display, I just can't do it lol. It loses the impact it has on a 4:3 display with all the wasted blank space on the sides and just looks awkward.
You’ve really opened my eyes I will now try and play my games the way they were originally intended, original resolution, original release, and maybe crt filters and maybe widescreen but yeah I really should seek out playing games with their original artistic intent.
The RE4 HD Project is the only HD texture pack I have ever used that doesn’t look or feel janky or inconsistent with the original games art style. Stuff like using the highest polygon models for characters and items all the time instead of specific moments or the original real life photos used for the game’s textures being referenced when recreating the textures makes the game, especially the Castle section look gorgeous. I don’t think I can ever play the game with the old textures again (except the GameCube or Wii versions, they look great).
That "native resolution, unfiltered" look couldn't be further from how those games originally looked. And I don't mean that you have to use composite video. I played those original systems with RGB back in the day. You'd never see anything which had unfiltered look from an unmodified console - or even if you used a VGA mod on a CRT monitor. That is purely an emulated/hdtv look. It's not "faithful to the original" and is horribly aliased. The magic of a CRT is that you would get a beautifully filtered output even from those low resolutions. I don't mean a blurry output - VGA monitors are extremely sharp. But pixels are not squares/rectangles - they're points. With a CRT, they're points with a gaussian falloff. And you have scanlines in-between each row of pixels. You did mention ReShade briefly, and I'll recommend CRT Geom. It's not an advanced CRT shader like Royale, but is a good approximation of a high-resolution CRT without many of the distracting artifacts many shaders try to approximate (often poorly).
you're mostly right, but still a bit biased. most of us played on a garbage TV that was way too small, with a less than ideal connection technology. many of us would have preferred to play on an LCD with a retrotink 4k or an emualator with a CRT shader. or even with razor sharp pixels. we'd also have been very happy with a top of the line consumer CRT or a PVM, but there was never a point in time where that wasn't some level of luxury. but I agree that anything in the video showing off razor clear pixels is anachronistic, regardless of the resolution. and I think there's still some good benefits to rendering in a high resolution and downsampling, even if using a CRT or CRT mimicking filter, which I think was the point the video author was making right around the time they did the most egregious anachronisms. I also think it's cool that we have the option to get whatever look we personally want. sometimes I'm in the mood for emulator CRT filters, sometimes I'm in the mood for original hardware through a retrotink 4k, sometimes a MESEN HD pack, and sometimes eye-gouging 8 bit jaggies. they all do different things for me. I'd probably be happy to play on a CRT at some point too, but the limited space of apartment life and CRTs being more commonly snatched up in the tech hub city I live in prevents me being interested enough to spend that premium. and playing on smaller 90s-accurate TVs doesn't do much for me.
I guess "Higher *Definition*" doesn't always mean "Higher *Quality*". Though, we often conflate the two. It's interesting how increasing detail paradoxically exposes blemishes that were hidden by lower definition. Great video, very thought-provoking
One of the contributors to the Zelda and Metroid NES packs here. All very good points in the video. To each their own. While enhancements have their appeal from time to time, I find myself just going back to the original once in a while as well. But, the options are nice to have when the mood strikes. As far as glitches - Looks like that Game Over glitch is unique to Mesen 2. I spoke with Sour about it (the author of Mesen) and it's being investigated. It's likely something broke between Mesen version 0.9.9 and version 2.0. As far as Link not showing when walking in stairs... that's a tough one and a limitation to a layered background approach to the Overworld. A fix is possible, but it required too much of a FPS performance hit. Lastly, the sword not flashing - the graphic for that is likely too subtle (it does flash, but it is probably not noticeable enough). If enough people feel the same way, and updated version could make it a little less subtle.
@@polocatfan Enhancement packs in general seem to be a polarizing topic and I've gotten used to that. As far as some of the specific critiques of the Zelda and Metroid packs (areas that lack polish, changes that are too drastic, etc), I actually look at the current end products and feel the same way sometimes. It would be great if they could be better. The challenge is overcoming some of those shortfalls with extremely limited resources. After all, projects like this are usually no more than simple hobby projects done for free. Continuous improvement over time is the only way. Honest feedback is an important part of that as long as there are words of encouragement coming in as well to balance out the critiques. In any case, on one positive note - Sour (the NES emulator author) identified the specific issue causing the "Game Over" screen glitch in a version of Mesen 2. It was due to a change in pack logic execution. It has now been patched.
Some (like, only a few) re-released 3D games on newer hardware use the original textures - not the textures that are compiled in the original release, but the texture as it was before it was "crunched" to fit on the medium of the original release. So in rare cases it's not the original textures being upscaled, but them either not being downscaled at all or just being downscaled less.
Ngl I like unnoticeable texture packs just because I want them for the ui Like this smash bros brawl texuture pack, can’t notice it in game but makes the ui and art so much cleaner
I just want to say I love that your outro music is the menu music from Frogger Ps1. Dude, I used to hang around that screen just to hear that music, just because I sucked at that game and didn’t want to swap the disk. You got a sub from me just for that. Unlocked a core memory.
There's one main reason I increase resolution: accessibility. The thing with Resident Evil 4 is that the color palette is so monochromatic than many of the assets blend together in a brown amalgam and it turns difficult to identify it's components. An HD project helps increassing the detail at long distances too, but it needs to remain fateful to the original when looking textures that are near the camera too. Accessibility is also the reason I increase framerate and aspect ratio.
I'm in the same boat. I can tolerate Ocarina of Time at 20FPS, and it does fill in a lot of the gaps in emulation, but I kinda disassociate from it. I like the Ship of Harkinian version running at 90 on the steam deck.
I've been playing the original Doom at close to it's original res (384x200 instead of 320x200 so it's in 16:10) on my Steam Deck recently and with software rendering, I've realized how much atmosphere it used to have before higher resolutions and the better gradients of Hardware Rendering cleans it up. While it works great in the original campaigns, WADs can show the limits of 200p as distant enemies become merely a few pixels. The compromise I went with was playing at 2x resolution on each axis (640x400, 768x400 in my case and around 853/854 for 16:9) like the recent Switch port.
When learning to draw realism for the first time, I was teaching myself to look for as much detail to replicate as possible, not realizing that a humans actual eye does not see skin texture, many individual hairs, and even some topography unless a few inches away from the subject. Drawing a bunch of shapes facing different angles that only have light from one direction does far more to replicate having three dimensions since perspective and distance always affect a person's sight. I'm grateful that "ungrateful" videos like this exist as I didn't really have the language to explain this until hearing how you would say it
I know at least one older game that looks great with upscaled resolution, and thats F zero GX. Plus the game already runs at 60 fps. That game was such a marvel for the gamecube that nintendo themselves asked sega how they got it running so well
Although I disagree with almost the entirety of this video, you were extremely coherent and I fully understand and respect your preference on the matter. And you are right, sometimes HD texture packs do straight up look worse than the original textures or aren't finished yet and makes the older low res textures stand out and look even worse than the game and its base form.
Hey thanks! It's all a matter of taste at the end of the day. TBH It's only recently that I would preach the "OG" experience since CRT filters are now getting good enough, and modern OLED displays can mimic that CRT look much better. Figure that would be much easier than hunting down a real CRT and plugging in countless cables/consoles into it.
I think you make some great points. A game I think is benefiting from texture pack work is the original animal crossing. Been following the pack in the discord for it where the community is slowly coming together to hand redraw/vectorize each texture for the game. A game with simplistic textures like that can actually benefit from the pack where it simply cleans up lines for the most part.
Tip for PC to CRT TV from my experience that may or may not work for some people. For some reason, the hdmi to av adapter try to fit the whole full screen image on the TV. What I did was pluging up the HDMI port on the Nividia graphics card, make the resolution a 4:3 aspect ratio, and then stretch the image so it fits on the screen with a little adjustments. Dolphin at native resolution and PCXS2 with software mode looks great on a CRT display. If you don't have a Nivida graphics card, you can force the games on Dolphin or PCXS2 to run stretch, and it still looks good on the CRT.
Idk, as someone who grew up playing these games on a crappy CRT 12 inch TV for the longest time during my poor teen days, I don't exactly yearn for that "look" anymore. I love the way HD Texture packs seem to breathe new life into old games for me, it's like Im playing them fresh and brand new again.
As someone who's in the process of making updates to an existing HD texture pack (for Kirby Air Ride if that interests anyone), this was a great watch. You zeroed in on what I'm trying to accomplish with my pack. I want every texture to essentially look like the original but more well-defined. Artistic liberties have no place in what is, as I see it, my attempt at uncovering the hidden detail in someone else's compressed art. It's about accurate recreation, not stylized reinterpretation.
Oh I ABSOLUTELY agree with you about how old sprites work better because you have to fill in the blanks with your mind. In fact, I think it oddly enough makes it more immersive than a higher fidelity version would be. Nice to hear somebody express what I've thought for years
I've been feeling the same way lately. I kept noticing all sorts of errors cropping up when upscaling, so now I just prefer playing at native resolution. I tend to add widescreen still when possible though. I have my PC hooked up to an SD widescreen CRT so I might as well take advantage of it
With Henriko specifically, it's a really frustrating case. I actually really love the way he redraws a lot of textures, but he tries way too hard to completely change the art direction sometimes. Worse is that every texture he doesn't redraw is a terrible AI upscale. Maybe he'd have time to finish a texture pack if he wasn't balancing like 20 games at once, but instead he has way too many unfinished texture packs. I'd rather just have a single complete one so I can properly judge it and enjoy it.
In addition to those mentioned, I think the RoSA Project for GTA San Andreas also makes a great case for a good texture pack. Like RE4HD, many of the Hi-res sources for the original game's textures were reimplemented, and the rest were either faithfully redrawn from scratch, or had tasteful and careful use of AI upscaling, using different presets and with manual edits.
Use what looks best to you. Trying to get the nonexistent optimal and most authentic picture out of a game/console is a rabbit hole I don't recommend going down. It's a never ending nightmare, especially if you have OCD given the imperfect nature of display technology.
For the longest time I played a lot of older games on emulators with higher and cleaner quality and not too long ago I finally hooked up my ps2 and a old CRT because I was having trouble getting a game I wanted to play to work on a emulator and I immediately noticed how much better the games looked, it kind of blew me away, I got so used to emulators and upscaled visuals that I forgot how good these games looked on original hardware and now I highly prefer it, I can still play these games with upscaled visuals but if I can I'll make it look as close as possible to the original hardware.
I get what you mean. If it’s a 2D game, I’m usually fine with a scan line filter to help with the sharp edges on a modern television. I admit, I do like the Metroid HD pack, but that’s because I’ve always hated the original wonky walk cycle and the pack includes some QoL updates via Lua. As far as 3D games go, the only ones I’ve particularly like are some HD ones for Starfox 64, because everything is mechanical such as planes and spaceships, the HD textures and low-poly models actually work well together. I also like MasterKillua’s Paper Mario 64 pack because he’s doing his best to make the game visually match the modern games, and the pop-up book aesthetic complements the low-poly environments, as well as the character sprites working well when given the paper look. As far as the issue you describe about HD textures on models that don’t match, bump-map textures and displacement textures fix those issues by creating the illusion of additional depth and detail by changing how they’re lit depending on viewing angle. Thing is, they’re more work to create, and while emulators can support them, most I’ve seen end up abandoned and unfinished.
I think the texture packs I like the most are those who update the UI elements, like the HUD, the fonts, the menus… anything that lets you interact with the game. But I usually don't fancy those who touch the intradiegetic elements.
ever since I watched your video on dolphin a couple months ago i’ve been fully convinced that native res and crt filters are the way to go. made me fall in love with some retro games all over again
I agree on a lot of things in that video. I also love sharp pixels and when I emulate I hate the filtering on HUDs and the fact 2D and 3D elements dont mash together that well (which a lot of older games use to create their worlds). Although I have to admit that I like to increase the resolution of PS1/N64 from 240p to 480p. At this resolution it cleans the image up but still looks and feels retro. It also looks awesome on my PC CRT which I keep for old games, as that one cant do real 240p. That said, the Recompilation of Zelda MM does one thing right... it doesnt filter the HUD. So even in 4k it does look like a lost PC port with proper scaling instead of some bad emulation that hasnt improved in many, many years (N64 emulation is still very bad...)
I remember really arriving to a similar conclusion after my experiences playing the Sonic Adventure games in HD. Whenever I'd play them on Dreamcast, or even before that when I used composite on my PS3 thanks to a busted HDMi out, I never really noticed any kind of stand out low resolution textures. However in HD, the sky boxes would always stand out so much. At first I looked to AI upscaled texture projects, but with issues like the edges of textures getting mangled and the textures just kind of looking worse by being more visually noisy, I realized not only were those original textures already really high quality for their time, but they looked even better at 480p. Especially those aforementioned sky boxes. It really is insane how much of a difference it makes. Not to mention that 480p, and even 240p isn't as low quality as people tend to make them out to be. Especially with assets that really complement them well. It's still thousands upon thousands of pixels making up the image. It all just works out really well.
@@LuigiXHero Adventure got completely busted in just about every way. Adventure 2 Battle (GCN) has broken lighting, but doesn't have those cheap derpy character shadows from the original and a few other minor changes for better geometry/detail. Adventure 2 on Xbox360 and beyond seem to have completely ruined the sound levels, the music in cutscenes completely overpowers dialogue unlike the older versions and ruins the experience.
"Scouring ancient forum posts hoping in vain some other user had the exact same issue, with a potential solution that solved it." Damn. That brings back memories. That was probably 60 percent of my experience with emulation (both in general and with texture packs) when I first started messing with it. If I followed the instructions PERFECTLY and it didn't work, try what someone else said worked for them on a forum and pray.
As time goes on I am agreeing with you more. I also find that playing on OG hardware has some sort of magic to it. I do not know if that is because of slight differences due to emulation or if it is just the fact that I KNOW it is emulated, the OG hardware has a draw. I am excited to try out the Mister project for that reason. And I would love to try out a high end external upscale too.
You hit the hammer on the nail the whole video. In my own attempt to begin an HD texture pack of a beloved 6th gen game of my childhood, I noticed a simple but important rule. For your HD texture to work, it must look the same as the original, while at a medium distance, using native res. The HD texture must only feel different once you compare with the original while running the game in HD resolution. The original texture must be like a mipmap of your new one, and if the game you're working on lacks mipmaps, you must make sure not to introduce any thinner details than the original texture!! Or you'll end up with a nasty Moiré effect at a distance. So eventually, what I ended up doing for my extremely conservative start at a HD texture pack, can be boiled down to upscaling 3 times the texture by nearest neighbor, and then carefully making use of the blur, smudge and a bit of rebrush tools to deconstruct the big pixels into small ones, while making sure not to apply the same amount of blur everywhere, so that distinct bits of the texture retain their clarity or shape. The only creative improvement i'm adding to the textures is some debanding. Having only 16 to 32 colors in a texture can lead to some unfavorable color banding, and noticeable artifacts when two connected textures must allocate their 16 colors differently, causing a seam ( think of a dirt texture connected to a dirt + grass texture, the first one will have more shades of brown than the later who needs colors for the green grass ). But once again, adding more colors to the gradients by smoothing them in a 24-bit color palette wouldn't be noticeable at a native resolution, all the modifications maintain the visual identity when playing in HD, and you would quickly forget you're on HD textures to begin with. If your texture pack tries too hard to distinguish itself from the source material, it is prone to failing.
I was just about to comment about Nerrel's Majora's Mask pack when you mentioned it in the video. It is soooo good. I hope more amazing texture packs like this come out. There is one for the SM64 pc port (not render 96) that is extremely close to the original, but looks really clean.
I love HD 5th/6th gen texture packs when they serve to enhance the art style of the game. No need to insert detail that wasn't there, just to smooth the jagged pixels.
i cant believe someone explained it! ive felt this wy for so long. i think the projects are really interesting but i wouldnt use them myself. i also REALLY agree with the extra tinkering bit. i feel like most emulator people i know tell me to do all this and that and frankly i dont want to. i am the average consumer and i dont want to do more than what i am expected to.
My personal preference depends on whether it's a 2d or 3d game and what game it is, but generally I prefer some form of upscaling or filtering. Some games were meant for a tiny handheld screen and depending on how they look on a much bigger screen (either my widescreen tv or my laptop), I might use a filter that increases the res, but doesn't completely get rid of the pixely look. Now, as for some of the older games I grew up with, I try to get relatively close to what younger me saw when they played the game, which isn't necessarily playing the game in such a way as to replicate how the original graphics actually were, but how I remember them being. A keen example of this is the Majora's Mask recompilation, which somehow looks more like Majora's Mask than if I were to go back and play my original Wii VC copy of Majora's Mask. Like, in a kinda surreal way it feels like the version of Majora's Mask that 12 year old me played.
I love this subject, it's the reason why I play old games on a CRT that I have, playing Resident Evil 1 Remake on a Wii (the Gamecube version) was a subreal experience, the graphics really hold up in a weird way
I can understand this as a personal taste for yourself. Personally for me though I like both. I recently found out about texture packs and it's nice to bounce between the old and new. Like doing a playthrough with the new and then maybe in a year or however long (give it some time to feel fresh + other games I want to play) maybe play it again. I've done this with Paper mario games. When I saw the TTYD remaster was coming out I played through the original and now I'm playing through the remaster. Really I wish more games did what the Halo games have done with their remasters. You can seamlessly swap between the old and new textures. It makes it a much more fun experience that way too because you can compare the visual changes and differences between areas in the game DURING gameplay. My favorite thing replaying the Halo CE remake was roaming around every map switching textures and seeing how visuals were either updated or straight up changed and seeing if I liked the old or new versions better. Texture packs IMO are great. I will admit there is a charm to the old lower res formats because they are nostalgic but I also do like to enjoy older games that get a fresh coat of paint while still more or less respecting the visual style of the original. The only texture packs/remakes I don't like are the ones that completely change how the game looks because it no longer feels like a remake or updated textures but rather an entirely different game.
Got a CRT monitor with a high refresh rate set up, and playing decompilations on it are sublime. Sm64ex-coop and Ship of Harkinian (I used it with the 3DS model and texture pack) look and feel good on a CRT. No interlacing, no crappy composite video fringing, no 15Khz whining, and no perceivable display strobing. I just find having to resize and rescale the image in the OSD whenever I change the resolution to be annoying. At least on Linux, you can even use a modern GPU with a DisplayPort to VGA adapter and force 240p and such without needing third-party Windows drivers and an ancient GPU. You don't need an overpriced PVM.
My personal opinion is that I want the emulation experience to be as close to the original console as possible. There are some edge cases where I’m fine with visual improvements (like in dolphin, using per-pixel lighting instead of per-vertex lighting)
I have to say retroarch and CRT filters and native resolutions of systems (most of the time) is how I do it. The first title that made me really tweak my preference in CRT filters was policenauts that is kojima's second big hit Visual novel with mostly "pre rendered" full screen art work and FMV's that AI would likely butcher rather than improve. But the correct type of CRT or other filtering will hide the visual noise in the art that was not (as) apparent on CRT. One funny thing t hat happens with early 2000's 3D games in higher resolutions is that it is clear the devs were working with the hardware of the time. Silent Hill 2 enhanced edition, a community remastering and fixing of SH2 PC port, had to fix few misaligned models in scenes because they looked right in original 480i but warp a decade or two into future and now we can with Full HD and beyond resolutions see that James' pinched fingers and the needle he is supposedly holding are not lining up at all. Other such example is people meming on Final Fantasy 8 played at higher resolution on emulator or official HD release. With added resolution illusion of Squall drinking from wine glass now looks like he is trying to alcohol bleach his eyes. As long as you find a CRT or maybe other filter of your liking, the fix is also universal, no need for extreme amounts of additional data. Nobody has done a HD remaster of Koudelka, that uses same tactics as Resident Evil titles did, but native resolution and good filter of your liking will make all the artwork look appropriate, and if you have a 4k TV, CRT filters may very well be one thing your PC can actually run and get benefits from with the increased resolution. You could also just enjoy the crispy pixels, a lot of people do though they also play the games in wrong aspect ratio. Indie horror game "Signalis" was clearly inspired to look like crispy pixel game but is simulating a PS1 game in 3D rather than a 2D game more common in this genre. With Signalis and two bloodborne fan projects, PS1 3D is next big thing with indie games it seems.
I agree alot with what you say. Especially mind "filling in the blanks" and creating more effective experience than just flat out overly clear view at the assets or 'excess detail'. i felt that way about many far more drastic remasters and fan projects. With all the focus on hiper detail, and excusing one of the worst "remakesters" just because technical fidelity, ignoring how it ruins the games look case and point GTA Definitive Trilogy or even worse Warcraft 3 Reforged, ruining how the game looked in the menues even if you dont use HD mode and ruining the look entirely in HD mode itself all the while becoming the default version on the store..(original is unplayable despite what the store says) Console games being emulated avoided this ruin that befalled some pc only games Wc3 being one of them.) SD game looked like comic book/disney film art in 3D that is trapped between peak of N64 and early PS2 games, being pleasant to look at to this day while you can interpret "full detail" look like you said/ HD mode looks nothing like Warcraft style wise be it Wc3 or WoW and just looks like one of those hedious Unreal engine "concepts" mixed with Raid Shadowlegends. Its just mind boggling and in my personal case heartbreaking as i loved Warcraft 3 alot. People excused it especially ones that didnt play the game for decades. I wish the only problem with Wc3 as it is now was a slightly messy upscale of the textures.
For me, I do like playing at Native Res for most games, unless they are really hampered by that and or from a gameplay perspective its much more enjoyable to play it in widescreen. An easy example for this is any 3D Racing game. Most of the time they really benefit from all the emulation enhancements (60 FPS, Widescreen or higher res) Especially for some PS1 racers that needed the rally styled indicators to be sort of playable. For HD Texture packs nine times out of ten they end up coming with widescreen patches for some old pc games and or its just to make it work better with widescreen. Which I am personally okay with. Most actual texture packs don't look great but generally just hud improvements is really all I need.
I just started playing the gamecube Twilight Princess and you're video on the wii/HD releases was a big help in figuring out which version I wanted to play. :P
as someone who uses 10 years old+ hardware (a 2014 gamer laptop and a 2014 laptop) for most stuff, and who tends to like some 20+ years old games and indie stuff more than the average 4~10 years old AAA (which somehow are playable on my 10 y/o dual core i7 with a GPU), I... honestly agree most HD texture packs aren't that appealing, honestly older graphics, like the ps1 Tomb Raiders, feel quite different from Tomb Raider 2013, just as the graphics look different. Altho the Tomb Raider trilogy remaster actually looks quite great, but I'd say that's because the devs understood the game's tone and visual identity, I'd say
Hey there, you've made a great video on this subject, I got a question though, how did you make your Luigi's Mansion look like that? I mean like pitch black in dark rooms, give more of a spooky vibe
I've never really used HD texture packs, but I *strongly* prefer a good CRT shader to raw pixels. Raw pixels - especially on Super Nintendo and earlier - just looks really wrong to me.
A ton of games, new and old, use a top down photo of river rocks in place of geometry. In older games, it's low resolution, so you can barely even tell what it is. I doesn't matter, it's rocks. But in a modern game, that texture is extremely obvious and distracting when it's in HD on a flat surface.
It's always lovely to hear another creator use Cave Story music for their background music! (Edit) I didn't realize until you mentioned Twilight Princess that I've watched this channel before. Whoops.
There was a texture pack for Serious Sam HD that I thought was amazing. It basically touched on textures that were for some reason not updated, which clash with the ones that were changed. The texture pack tries to make them all HD which is great.
I don’t like too much hd texture packs but some of my favs are Henriko Magnificos twilight princess, nerrels, OOT reloaded. Lately I’ve been using them a lot more cause my eyesight has been getting really bad and specifically n64 Zelda’s the text hurts my eyes to read at a low res. So I need that HD fonts and stuff
Something you might like is that I believe the recompiled versions of the games will actually have antialiasing support, Even at native res, which should help with some of the pixel shimmering you said you dont miss
13:50, yeah the photoreal high frequency textures in games like half life 2, are a bit grating to me, whereas in uncharted the textures are hand-painted, so it creates a more coherent aesthetic. i think it's good to think of texture work like the parts of a photograph; some areas are in focus by design, and others are not. if everything is in focus, it's harder to direct the emotion and gaze of the viewer. 20:00 it's funny how the ones I like are the some ones you mention; the re2 hd pack, nerrel's majora's mask pack. trying to restore what was there, or implied to be there, without adding a bunch of ugly photoreal high frequency disjointed detail. it's true a texture has to be seen IN CONTEXT, to know how to improve it.
I understand where you're coming from and mostly agree. If the texture pack is fully complete and appropriately matches the original game's art style, I would say go for it, but otherwise it can be a bad distraction when trying to play the game.
I managed to connect my gaming laptop through a signal converter to a 1998 crt tv, and forced the 640 X 480 resolution (No longer supported natively in my laptop) to play games in the most vanilla way I possibly can, and while ps1, n64 and games and below look great, I recognize I am nitpicking the hell out of emulation by doing that, most people with a crt filter on their monitor will get a pretty good experience lol. It seems weird to try to alter the game beyond that with varying results, usually HUD or still imaged upscaled to HD are alright but when they alter every texture it is hit or miss.
As someone who prefers enhancing my games I have a very similar discontentment with HD texture packs to you, I completely ignore packs that only or majority upscale the original graphics. In most cases, I just use (or even make my own) handmade HD HUD/UI textures because doing an entire game may be too much of an undertaking to feasibly get done beautifully and accurately to the source material
Whoah TH-cam can be scary with this recommendations sometimes. Just the other day I remembered Nerrel existed and decided to watch him then wanted to see some more videos about his texture pack and the like. This is not what I expected, but it’s bound to interesting.
Understanding an artist's intent on a re texture is very important. The only way to enjoy a re texture is to read the README on why and what was upgraded. Just expecting "it will be better" will have you end In a better rant It's so cool to follow an artist's intent in why and how they inhanced the game
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
I find a lot of HD textures to either be a bit uncanny or just unnoticeable
And some of them make the art too different, even when they're internally consistent
that's the point though, they *need* to be unnoticable. they are not supposed to stand out, they have to be consistent with the overall look and feel of a game.
you need to look at it from the other direction: if you play an old 3D game and textures stand out to you as low-res, then an HD pack might fix that. if the low-res textures don't stand out to you, then even the best texture pack is not gonna do anything for you.
The best texture packs are the unnoticeable ones imo
Yeah it feels like it wasn't supposed to be in this game
Same, the Xenoblade HD texture pack made everyone look weird and out of place. HD texture packs just sort of clashes with the art direction
It’s really disappointing how many HD Texture Pack projects are basically just running the existing assets through an AI upscaler. You get all these weird subtle changes to art style and things like abstract logos can be completely shredded to bits because the AI doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to be.
This. It's clear that SM Sunshine texture pack was a quick and dirty AI upscale job, just from looking at the HUD and those featureless cliffs he showed.
I'm honestly surprised that they were recommended Henriko's packs, since I've tried some of them and they are _far_ from high quality due to the very noticible AI upscaling. I'll still use them for my own reasons, but I wouldn't recommend them unless the someone was _really_ desperate for an HD texture pack that didn't exist elsewhere.
I mean if I did an AI texture pack, I'd try to fix those problems after upscaling
I believe this is expected of the "Switch 2" though I'm not sure if this came through the rumour mill or an official announcement. I am very concerned that Nintendo, if this is true, won't have a way to toggle this AI Blending off. It reminds me of Iphone cameras, how you can turn off filters and rendering and play with the light, but the phone will still "magic" the image resolution and make my very textured face into a smooth yet somehow lower quality balloon, and the second I upload those images there's a bunch of visual artifacting because of the adjustments.
I personally like using HD texture packs, but I highly dislike when they replace the hud with different renders from newer games. It really clashes with the original art style and takes me out of it.
Oh yeah I hate that. Excellent example.
I remember I downloaded an hd texture pack for Mario kart wii and I was always bothered looking at the character portraits, they used the Mario kart 8 character portraits, and a lot of characters still had their old blurry portraits so it just looked very jarring (also some of them weren’t cropped well) the HUD font was also changed for some reason
@@Mr.Welbig it's a bad example because people rarely do this.
Shoutouts to the Four Swords Adventure HD texture pack for getting rid of the billinear ass textures
Based texture pack
I hate bilinear filters
yo what have a link to it?
Tried playing FSA and just uuuuuugh it looks ugly as Sin
Yeah, I don't really see much reason for Bilinear to even exist in HD
@@CosmicSponge2004 real
@@RetroAussieBloke I doubt I can share a link but a single google search should be enough, honestly should be the default playing experience because holy shit the difference is night and day
Playing N64 games with hd textures feels like playing Minecraft with hypertealistic 8 bazillion pixel textures
i think the photorealism pack got popular way back when because it was so absurd
My favorite part of those packs was to see how cursed the villagers looked.
I always hate when streamers play Minecraft for the first time and install some god-ray-infested bright-as-hell shader pack, where the torch light makes everything look orange. Those things look great in screenshots, but having to watch actual gameplay with them feels like stepping outside on a sunny summer day without sunglasses.
Proper mipmapping and scaling is imperative for a texture pack to not be distracting. Unfortunately, the best visuals are the ones you don't notice, even rtgi. For something to be pretty it has to be eye catching, visual fidelity only smoothens the experience at best. It takes artistry to make a game pretty.
It's very funny that you say this. Most of what devs of the 90s and early 2000s used for 3d textures were nothing more than images found on a cd their companies bought them. There's barely any artistry in something so simple. The real artistry is what you make with said textures, where you put them, how you implement them, you get the idea.
The way I see it is how would the original graphic designer have envisioned it without the hardware limitations. If it's rough, I try to make it look as rough as intended. If cinematic, I try to make it as cinematic as possible.
@Mundwasser Half the time the textures where really low resolution photos and stuff lol.
The way gamers wax philosophically about "the artistic process!" When half the time its just "Yea, this works."
@@aureateseigneur5317You just described art. Yes.
@megamillion5852 No i didn't. I described taking a photo and using is a blown huge ass fucking texture and the gamers pretending that's high art.
Goof.
That opening made me do a double take to make sure I hadn't missed a section lmao
It will never not make me crawl up a wall that Xenoblade 1 has several unique character renders for menus and UI and the (Currently abandoned) HD texture pack decided to slap the same official art as a replacement everywhere. No guys, that not the way to go.
LITERALLY I FEEL THIS SO MUCH I HATE IT AHHHHH
especially with the affinity system. the characters are supposed to look hype not “hmm yes let me get out my book” IT MAKES NO SENSE
This is also the same for the psp persona games and it kills me there too
definitely does not help that the texture pack makes everyone's eyes freakishly sharp
I hate that texture pack so much, lol. Makes the game look uglier than its original release and I always laugh when some people say it looks better than Definitive Edition.
i agree with your beginning points about emulation in the sense that i'd PREFER to play these games in the original intention but if im playing on an emulator i'll always crank it up
That's awesome man! Crank that shit up if it looks good to you!
I can understand this totally. Nerrel's HD texture pack is incredible, but the clash with high quality textures on low poly models is there. I still like to play with it sometimes to admire it, but I don't prefer it. I do like playing these old games in HD though, and I'd take a texture pack if it's only the HUD any day.
Though I do like HD texture packs for later consoles. I never not play Super Mario Sunshine with a texture pack when I'm on Dolphin. Not the one you played with, not a fan of that one, but the other one listed on the Dolphin wiki.
only time i would prefer normal textures is if i had normal resolution.
while the models themselves are still low poly, upping the resolution and AA and such makes the low quality textures stand out, and imo the hd texture pack works great with the high resolution low poly models
Bump Mapping might be something to look forward too, but it only fixes the literal flatness you describe.
@@whereswarren3719 ya I sorta ment normal maps, I just forgor.
@@whereswarren3719 You realize that you can do bump mapping through normal maps right? As well that is still being used to this very day with parallax appearing more often now too.
personally i like running them at a high res but then downscaling to the original res. so u basically get the og game but with rly good AA
That and combining It with crt filter is a chef’s kiss
It looks like anti-aliasing because that's actually a form of AA; SSAA.
Devs don't use it nowadays though, since rendering the image at a higher resolution *just* to downscale it is very, very demanding.
@@pacomatic9833 looks *really* good though...
he mentioned that at the end but yeah it's a great way to play
I heavily agree on the fact I'd only use HD textures if they're authentic to the game's art direction. The clash of styles is a really big issue for me
I remember downloading a Mario Kart Double Dash HD texture pack and my eyes were greeted by HD 4K assets of icons fron modern games, and it just looked BAD
Also dumb nitpick, but I really hate when creators put theur names on the title screen with these or worse, replace one of the logos with their own, it really takes me out of the experience
Another example being the Kingdom Hearts HD texture mods for the PC ports. Absolutely sublime in terms of quality but oh my god, the fact it alters the start up and title screen logos is so bleh to me
The same thing happened to me when I downloaded a Mario Party 8 texture pack years ago and the character icons were replaced with generic modern character renders. I ended up just deleting those images because it looked horrible.
I’m a graphic designer/character artist and I toatally agree lol, my eye for art really fucks over my enjoyment of these because they don’t tend to line up with each other or the games artstyle or have problems in and of themselves. Games are art!! There are a lot of reasons as to why you’d wanna see the art as intended, hell I still play a lot of games on my crt/on their original console because I think that’s a better way to play them (sorry for the tangent, I thought it was kind of on topic)
It just depends honestly and that's the key take away, at least in my opinion. For example I've recently started using a texture pack for a playthrough of the original Paper Mario game and I love it. I still find the original art charming but having a crisp image that I can blast to my big screen is nice. The older games look fine even on like a 27 inch monitor but if youre playing it from original hardware to a 32+ inch tv it can be a bit hard on the eyes and just in general unpleasant.
@@YuYuYuna_ I ended up getting 2 crts because I agree, running av cables thru a modern tv stretches out the picture and looks like shit lol, I use a crt as apart of my pc setup though so I think im just more accustomed to them than most
For me personally, my discrepancy is always poor framerates (which actually isn't what the developers intended). I love a CRT look on old games. I just wish they were more fluid but we all had to make due ofcourse
I've never encountered a CRT shader/filter that looked anything like playing on a CRT. I still have a CRT and games with a CRT shader/filter on a modern screen don't look like that on it.
I think custom GitHub filters for Retroarch and ones on Fightcade have some real convincing ones, just wish I remembered their names
Every CRT filter will look horrid through direct capture. It has to be scene in person to really see what it looks like unfortunately. Trust me in person the filters do get remarkably close when you have an 4k OLED with HDR.
@@Mr.Welbig I've tried every CRT shader/filter I know of, I'm not just judging them from your video but from my own personal experience. They don't look like playing on a CRT.
@@voteDC Best one I seen was ShaderGlass
@@LuigiXHero I can't say I've used that one. Looks interesting from the GitHub page with a VHS option. Ps. I still have a VHS player connected to my CRT.
While i agree for the most part, the "it looks bad with default settings so it's bad" isn't a very fair argument since its an emulator. It's entirely about configuring it to your liking instead of leaving it at default settings
You make a good point, and for anyone who uses an emulator then I'd hope they'd know how to change settings to what looks best for them.
I'm only harsh on Henriko's packs because they specifically advertise a seamless install. They come in preconfig forms of Dolphin so when I see visual anomalies and slow down then my investment tarnishes.
The RE Seamless project and Nerrel's MMHD pack I was able to pretty much install and play with no issues which is a thumbs up from me.
@@Mr.Welbig by the way with sunshine, the jagged goop is a common problem with running the game at high resolutions, there's a graphics pack in the game's config that fixes it
One thing that has gotten me to use emulators again is when I got a PC CRT. Playing the Mario 64 pc port at 640x480 with real scanlines seems like the closest I will get to getting a pvm. The render 96 project on a pc crt is an otherworldly experience. Now as far as texture packs, I think one type that I wish people would create are custom button prompt textures. For emulators my biggest problem is the desparity between what controller i am using, and what the game was made for. Playing Mario Sunshine with a DualShock confuses me sometimes. Now there have been texture packs that only replaces the button prompts and those are super useful.
Let me guess the scanlines filter is something from reshade?
@@ssg-eggunnerfrom my understanding this person bought a physical CRT
There's a beauty to limitations paired with proper art direction. That is why I believe many old games still look good to this day despite the shortcomings in the tech. I'm more of a gameplay guy, but graphics do matter in terms of matching gameplay as well.
RE4 HD Fan project is amazing IMO. Only HD Texture pack that doesn't get rid of the soul of the original.
There is an HD Quake texture pack that is pretty decent
RE4 HD and doom 3 essential hd pack are some of the best hd texture packs out there!
Afaik creator even took photos of some walls and stuff that were used as textures
ttyd hd as well
Only Texture Pack I've used is Nerrels one for Majoras mask, he shown his work and shown how much he wanted to stay to the original work with him using some of the designs the 3D's version did that he felt fitted better. The only problem I have with it though is the models, as every time I see HD texture packs for low poly games on the N64 and so on, is that they feel really sharp and clean, where the models are still low poly making it look odd. Still use and love Nerrels Texture pack as he did all the textures as I have come across way to many texture packs that only touch up a few things, making it so I need to download multiple but they then contrast each other, as well as a lot of HD texture packs feel more like a fan interpretation then trying to stick to the original source material, thats where Nerrel looked at the art work for Major's mask, and the higher renders they had that the game couldn't handle at the time. He's the only person actually I've seen that feels like he wanted to just stick as faithful as possible as with nearly a lot of projects, mods, textures or whatever, a lot of people can't help themselves but inject their own stuff in to it instead of sticking to the original work.
I think one problem with HD textures is every texture feels like it's been overly enhanced and sharpened, which makes everything look odd, where some things aren't sharp, like dirt and stuff, there is no sharp defining edges so it shouldn't be a sharp image, another is the fact some textures don't work with the model, in the video at the Twilight section the roof top texture being sharp is flat and looks like a texture you would put on a higher poly model where you can make those tiles pop, or use a bump map, but a lot of these games don't so textures that need a bump map or few polys to pop out don't and just look flat, where back then to get around this they made sure to draw depth as well as the low quality would cover it up and look fine from afar, it would look bad up close but with the HD texture you can now clearly see it afar and it looks bad because there is no depth or anything to it and up close you will see it's still flat so it's bad on both ends compare to the original.
Your comment reminded me of another texture pack, rosa evolved for gta san andreas which has similar if not way more effort put into making it. All graffitis and banners and other artworks are manually recreated from source material which Idk where they got their hands on. While the disparity bw the low poly models and hi res texures are unavoidable, texture packs this faithful to original art really feels like a well deserved remaster which official remasters often fail to deliver
why not using nerrel hd texture and then downscaling the resolution? I think that would look better than the vanilla game.
It’s like those GTA shaders mods that just put a bunch of puddles on the ground
I'm not usually huge on downsampling, but I think it does a good job at making 3D assets blend well with pre-rendered backgrounds like in the PS1 Resident Evil and Final Fantasy games. On a CRT like the ones these games were intended to be viewed on, the 3D and 2D assets didn't clash as much and the jagged edges on the models weren't nearly as visible, especially if you were using component cables like most people were using at the time. Because of that, I'd argue it's a more "authentic" look than playing it at 240p with visible jaggies.
really glad you mentioned downsampling at the end, as that's generally how i like to emulate games for similar reasons
honestly the absolute worst part of hd packs is the repeat tiling. the muddiness of lower resolution works hand in hand with smaller assets honestly
Great video, I really enjoy your channel! I've been enjoying playing games with the area sampling filter in Dolphin because of your video on that, so thanks for that! I agree with a lot of your points in this one, but recently I've started to appreciate all the awesome new ways we have to revisit older games.
You are absolutely right in the fact that there is something lost when you crank up a game's resolution and texture work. It's funny, I came back around to retro gaming when I built my first powerful PC over a decade ago. I was cranking visuals as high as I could and that actually made me miss the authentic experience. I went out and picked up a nice CRT and built up a retro console setup that I use to play games in their original forms and up until fairly recently it was the only way I preferred to play older games.
As you mention, both emulation and filters have gotten so good over the past decade that it's entirely possible to mimic the original CRT experience and I think that's great too considering retro game prices these days. It is nice to see someone go to bat for the "authentic" experience on PC because the massive strides that have been made in developing accurate emulation and CRT filters often go overlooked.
But over the last several years, the advent of the projects you mention in the video like decompilations, exceptional texture packs like Nerrel's HD pack and the Resident Evil packs, and the recent N64 recomp project have just been so well done and full of love. I've gone back to having fun cranking the visuals as high as possible when a project like that gets released. Hell, sometimes tweaking the graphics to be as "modern" as possible can be fun on it's own. We live in an era where anyone who wants to play older games and has a moderately competent PC can enjoy them however they want - authentic, modern, or somewhere in-between. In recent years we have been absolutely spoiled with new ways to play old games and I think there's a lot to appreciate about that.
Petty side note I feel compelled to share for some reason - the only thing I really don't see eye to eye on is playing the original release of RE4 letterboxed on a widescreen display, I just can't do it lol. It loses the impact it has on a 4:3 display with all the wasted blank space on the sides and just looks awkward.
You’ve really opened my eyes
I will now try and play my games the way they were originally intended, original resolution, original release, and maybe crt filters and maybe widescreen but yeah I really should seek out playing games with their original artistic intent.
The RE4 HD Project is the only HD texture pack I have ever used that doesn’t look or feel janky or inconsistent with the original games art style. Stuff like using the highest polygon models for characters and items all the time instead of specific moments or the original real life photos used for the game’s textures being referenced when recreating the textures makes the game, especially the Castle section look gorgeous. I don’t think I can ever play the game with the old textures again (except the GameCube or Wii versions, they look great).
That "native resolution, unfiltered" look couldn't be further from how those games originally looked.
And I don't mean that you have to use composite video. I played those original systems with RGB back in the day.
You'd never see anything which had unfiltered look from an unmodified console - or even if you used a VGA mod on a CRT monitor.
That is purely an emulated/hdtv look. It's not "faithful to the original" and is horribly aliased.
The magic of a CRT is that you would get a beautifully filtered output even from those low resolutions.
I don't mean a blurry output - VGA monitors are extremely sharp.
But pixels are not squares/rectangles - they're points.
With a CRT, they're points with a gaussian falloff.
And you have scanlines in-between each row of pixels.
You did mention ReShade briefly, and I'll recommend CRT Geom.
It's not an advanced CRT shader like Royale, but is a good approximation of a high-resolution CRT without many of the distracting artifacts many shaders try to approximate (often poorly).
yea he can have whatever opinion he wants but him keep saying that the sharp jaggies from native resolution is more faithful is pretty disingenuous
you're mostly right, but still a bit biased. most of us played on a garbage TV that was way too small, with a less than ideal connection technology. many of us would have preferred to play on an LCD with a retrotink 4k or an emualator with a CRT shader. or even with razor sharp pixels. we'd also have been very happy with a top of the line consumer CRT or a PVM, but there was never a point in time where that wasn't some level of luxury. but I agree that anything in the video showing off razor clear pixels is anachronistic, regardless of the resolution. and I think there's still some good benefits to rendering in a high resolution and downsampling, even if using a CRT or CRT mimicking filter, which I think was the point the video author was making right around the time they did the most egregious anachronisms.
I also think it's cool that we have the option to get whatever look we personally want. sometimes I'm in the mood for emulator CRT filters, sometimes I'm in the mood for original hardware through a retrotink 4k, sometimes a MESEN HD pack, and sometimes eye-gouging 8 bit jaggies. they all do different things for me. I'd probably be happy to play on a CRT at some point too, but the limited space of apartment life and CRTs being more commonly snatched up in the tech hub city I live in prevents me being interested enough to spend that premium. and playing on smaller 90s-accurate TVs doesn't do much for me.
I guess "Higher *Definition*" doesn't always mean "Higher *Quality*". Though, we often conflate the two. It's interesting how increasing detail paradoxically exposes blemishes that were hidden by lower definition. Great video, very thought-provoking
One of the contributors to the Zelda and Metroid NES packs here. All very good points in the video. To each their own. While enhancements have their appeal from time to time, I find myself just going back to the original once in a while as well. But, the options are nice to have when the mood strikes. As far as glitches - Looks like that Game Over glitch is unique to Mesen 2. I spoke with Sour about it (the author of Mesen) and it's being investigated. It's likely something broke between Mesen version 0.9.9 and version 2.0. As far as Link not showing when walking in stairs... that's a tough one and a limitation to a layered background approach to the Overworld. A fix is possible, but it required too much of a FPS performance hit. Lastly, the sword not flashing - the graphic for that is likely too subtle (it does flash, but it is probably not noticeable enough). If enough people feel the same way, and updated version could make it a little less subtle.
he's literally bullying you. how are those "good points"
@@polocatfan Enhancement packs in general seem to be a polarizing topic and I've gotten used to that. As far as some of the specific critiques of the Zelda and Metroid packs (areas that lack polish, changes that are too drastic, etc), I actually look at the current end products and feel the same way sometimes. It would be great if they could be better. The challenge is overcoming some of those shortfalls with extremely limited resources. After all, projects like this are usually no more than simple hobby projects done for free. Continuous improvement over time is the only way. Honest feedback is an important part of that as long as there are words of encouragement coming in as well to balance out the critiques. In any case, on one positive note - Sour (the NES emulator author) identified the specific issue causing the "Game Over" screen glitch in a version of Mesen 2. It was due to a change in pack logic execution. It has now been patched.
Some (like, only a few) re-released 3D games on newer hardware use the original textures - not the textures that are compiled in the original release, but the texture as it was before it was "crunched" to fit on the medium of the original release.
So in rare cases it's not the original textures being upscaled, but them either not being downscaled at all or just being downscaled less.
Ngl I like unnoticeable texture packs just because I want them for the ui
Like this smash bros brawl texuture pack, can’t notice it in game but makes the ui and art so much cleaner
I just want to say I love that your outro music is the menu music from Frogger Ps1. Dude, I used to hang around that screen just to hear that music, just because I sucked at that game and didn’t want to swap the disk. You got a sub from me just for that. Unlocked a core memory.
You make good videos 👍. Well written, convey your ideas well, clear voice.
There's one main reason I increase resolution: accessibility. The thing with Resident Evil 4 is that the color palette is so monochromatic than many of the assets blend together in a brown amalgam and it turns difficult to identify it's components. An HD project helps increassing the detail at long distances too, but it needs to remain fateful to the original when looking textures that are near the camera too.
Accessibility is also the reason I increase framerate and aspect ratio.
I'm in the same boat. I can tolerate Ocarina of Time at 20FPS, and it does fill in a lot of the gaps in emulation, but I kinda disassociate from it. I like the Ship of Harkinian version running at 90 on the steam deck.
I'm really loving your unique takes. These opinion pieces are great, keep it up!
I've been playing the original Doom at close to it's original res (384x200 instead of 320x200 so it's in 16:10) on my Steam Deck recently and with software rendering, I've realized how much atmosphere it used to have before higher resolutions and the better gradients of Hardware Rendering cleans it up. While it works great in the original campaigns, WADs can show the limits of 200p as distant enemies become merely a few pixels. The compromise I went with was playing at 2x resolution on each axis (640x400, 768x400 in my case and around 853/854 for 16:9) like the recent Switch port.
When learning to draw realism for the first time, I was teaching myself to look for as much detail to replicate as possible, not realizing that a humans actual eye does not see skin texture, many individual hairs, and even some topography unless a few inches away from the subject. Drawing a bunch of shapes facing different angles that only have light from one direction does far more to replicate having three dimensions since perspective and distance always affect a person's sight. I'm grateful that "ungrateful" videos like this exist as I didn't really have the language to explain this until hearing how you would say it
I enjoyed hearing your opinions!
Thanks for educating us on the quirks of old displays.
Super interesting!
I know at least one older game that looks great with upscaled resolution, and thats F zero GX. Plus the game already runs at 60 fps. That game was such a marvel for the gamecube that nintendo themselves asked sega how they got it running so well
Although I disagree with almost the entirety of this video, you were extremely coherent and I fully understand and respect your preference on the matter. And you are right, sometimes HD texture packs do straight up look worse than the original textures or aren't finished yet and makes the older low res textures stand out and look even worse than the game and its base form.
Hey thanks! It's all a matter of taste at the end of the day. TBH It's only recently that I would preach the "OG" experience since CRT filters are now getting good enough, and modern OLED displays can mimic that CRT look much better. Figure that would be much easier than hunting down a real CRT and plugging in countless cables/consoles into it.
I think you make some great points. A game I think is benefiting from texture pack work is the original animal crossing. Been following the pack in the discord for it where the community is slowly coming together to hand redraw/vectorize each texture for the game. A game with simplistic textures like that can actually benefit from the pack where it simply cleans up lines for the most part.
Experiencing classic games as close to the original experience as possible is one of the reasons I love mister fpga emulation so much.
Sorry to break to you but FPGAs are accurate as software emulation, since both are still based on the same documentation available
Tip for PC to CRT TV from my experience that may or may not work for some people. For some reason, the hdmi to av adapter try to fit the whole full screen image on the TV. What I did was pluging up the HDMI port on the Nividia graphics card, make the resolution a 4:3 aspect ratio, and then stretch the image so it fits on the screen with a little adjustments. Dolphin at native resolution and PCXS2 with software mode looks great on a CRT display. If you don't have a Nivida graphics card, you can force the games on Dolphin or PCXS2 to run stretch, and it still looks good on the CRT.
Idk, as someone who grew up playing these games on a crappy CRT 12 inch TV for the longest time during my poor teen days, I don't exactly yearn for that "look" anymore. I love the way HD Texture packs seem to breathe new life into old games for me, it's like Im playing them fresh and brand new again.
As someone who's in the process of making updates to an existing HD texture pack (for Kirby Air Ride if that interests anyone), this was a great watch. You zeroed in on what I'm trying to accomplish with my pack. I want every texture to essentially look like the original but more well-defined. Artistic liberties have no place in what is, as I see it, my attempt at uncovering the hidden detail in someone else's compressed art. It's about accurate recreation, not stylized reinterpretation.
You're not alone, I totally agree with you.
Oh I ABSOLUTELY agree with you about how old sprites work better because you have to fill in the blanks with your mind. In fact, I think it oddly enough makes it more immersive than a higher fidelity version would be. Nice to hear somebody express what I've thought for years
21:19 You no longer need to use retroarch for the filters since someone has made a reshade plugin that allows you to use them on any program or game
I've been feeling the same way lately. I kept noticing all sorts of errors cropping up when upscaling, so now I just prefer playing at native resolution. I tend to add widescreen still when possible though. I have my PC hooked up to an SD widescreen CRT so I might as well take advantage of it
The wind waker hd texture pack looks really nice imo, and the clean textures and high resolution really work well with the cartoony style imo.
With Henriko specifically, it's a really frustrating case. I actually really love the way he redraws a lot of textures, but he tries way too hard to completely change the art direction sometimes. Worse is that every texture he doesn't redraw is a terrible AI upscale. Maybe he'd have time to finish a texture pack if he wasn't balancing like 20 games at once, but instead he has way too many unfinished texture packs. I'd rather just have a single complete one so I can properly judge it and enjoy it.
Henriko is a scammer
@@nunyabiddeness6544 Isn't all his stuff available for free? It's on Patreon but I haven't had to pay a cent to download it.
@@nunyabiddeness6544 Scammer how? As far as I know all his work is available for free. I have issues with the end result but it's not a scam.
@@nunyabiddeness6544 I wouldn't say that as most are free
In addition to those mentioned, I think the RoSA Project for GTA San Andreas also makes a great case for a good texture pack. Like RE4HD, many of the Hi-res sources for the original game's textures were reimplemented, and the rest were either faithfully redrawn from scratch, or had tasteful and careful use of AI upscaling, using different presets and with manual edits.
Use what looks best to you. Trying to get the nonexistent optimal and most authentic picture out of a game/console is a rabbit hole I don't recommend going down. It's a never ending nightmare, especially if you have OCD given the imperfect nature of display technology.
For the longest time I played a lot of older games on emulators with higher and cleaner quality and not too long ago I finally hooked up my ps2 and a old CRT because I was having trouble getting a game I wanted to play to work on a emulator and I immediately noticed how much better the games looked, it kind of blew me away, I got so used to emulators and upscaled visuals that I forgot how good these games looked on original hardware and now I highly prefer it, I can still play these games with upscaled visuals but if I can I'll make it look as close as possible to the original hardware.
I get what you mean. If it’s a 2D game, I’m usually fine with a scan line filter to help with the sharp edges on a modern television. I admit, I do like the Metroid HD pack, but that’s because I’ve always hated the original wonky walk cycle and the pack includes some QoL updates via Lua.
As far as 3D games go, the only ones I’ve particularly like are some HD ones for Starfox 64, because everything is mechanical such as planes and spaceships, the HD textures and low-poly models actually work well together. I also like MasterKillua’s Paper Mario 64 pack because he’s doing his best to make the game visually match the modern games, and the pop-up book aesthetic complements the low-poly environments, as well as the character sprites working well when given the paper look.
As far as the issue you describe about HD textures on models that don’t match, bump-map textures and displacement textures fix those issues by creating the illusion of additional depth and detail by changing how they’re lit depending on viewing angle. Thing is, they’re more work to create, and while emulators can support them, most I’ve seen end up abandoned and unfinished.
I think the texture packs I like the most are those who update the UI elements, like the HUD, the fonts, the menus… anything that lets you interact with the game. But I usually don't fancy those who touch the intradiegetic elements.
ever since I watched your video on dolphin a couple months ago i’ve been fully convinced that native res and crt filters are the way to go. made me fall in love with some retro games all over again
Seeing Re2 with a crt filter makes it look super cool.
The frogger sky zone music Hits different 👌
I agree on a lot of things in that video. I also love sharp pixels and when I emulate I hate the filtering on HUDs and the fact 2D and 3D elements dont mash together that well (which a lot of older games use to create their worlds). Although I have to admit that I like to increase the resolution of PS1/N64 from 240p to 480p. At this resolution it cleans the image up but still looks and feels retro. It also looks awesome on my PC CRT which I keep for old games, as that one cant do real 240p.
That said, the Recompilation of Zelda MM does one thing right... it doesnt filter the HUD. So even in 4k it does look like a lost PC port with proper scaling instead of some bad emulation that hasnt improved in many, many years (N64 emulation is still very bad...)
I remember really arriving to a similar conclusion after my experiences playing the Sonic Adventure games in HD. Whenever I'd play them on Dreamcast, or even before that when I used composite on my PS3 thanks to a busted HDMi out, I never really noticed any kind of stand out low resolution textures. However in HD, the sky boxes would always stand out so much. At first I looked to AI upscaled texture projects, but with issues like the edges of textures getting mangled and the textures just kind of looking worse by being more visually noisy, I realized not only were those original textures already really high quality for their time, but they looked even better at 480p. Especially those aforementioned sky boxes. It really is insane how much of a difference it makes.
Not to mention that 480p, and even 240p isn't as low quality as people tend to make them out to be. Especially with assets that really complement them well. It's still thousands upon thousands of pixels making up the image. It all just works out really well.
Both adventure games got absolutely butchered in the gcn and future ports. SA1 got it much worse than SA2 but it's still bad there too.
@@LuigiXHero Adventure got completely busted in just about every way. Adventure 2 Battle (GCN) has broken lighting, but doesn't have those cheap derpy character shadows from the original and a few other minor changes for better geometry/detail. Adventure 2 on Xbox360 and beyond seem to have completely ruined the sound levels, the music in cutscenes completely overpowers dialogue unlike the older versions and ruins the experience.
"Scouring ancient forum posts hoping in vain some other user had the exact same issue, with a potential solution that solved it." Damn. That brings back memories. That was probably 60 percent of my experience with emulation (both in general and with texture packs) when I first started messing with it. If I followed the instructions PERFECTLY and it didn't work, try what someone else said worked for them on a forum and pray.
13:31 This perfectly captures my thoughts on good texture work.
If I did an HD sprite pack for an NES game, the sprites would remain low res but would have more colors and shading
The Zelda Redux patch did a similar sorta thing and it looks far more appropriate and tasteful imho.
As time goes on I am agreeing with you more. I also find that playing on OG hardware has some sort of magic to it. I do not know if that is because of slight differences due to emulation or if it is just the fact that I KNOW it is emulated, the OG hardware has a draw. I am excited to try out the Mister project for that reason. And I would love to try out a high end external upscale too.
You hit the hammer on the nail the whole video.
In my own attempt to begin an HD texture pack of a beloved 6th gen game of my childhood, I noticed a simple but important rule.
For your HD texture to work, it must look the same as the original, while at a medium distance, using native res. The HD texture must only feel different once you compare with the original while running the game in HD resolution. The original texture must be like a mipmap of your new one, and if the game you're working on lacks mipmaps, you must make sure not to introduce any thinner details than the original texture!! Or you'll end up with a nasty Moiré effect at a distance.
So eventually, what I ended up doing for my extremely conservative start at a HD texture pack, can be boiled down to upscaling 3 times the texture by nearest neighbor, and then carefully making use of the blur, smudge and a bit of rebrush tools to deconstruct the big pixels into small ones, while making sure not to apply the same amount of blur everywhere, so that distinct bits of the texture retain their clarity or shape.
The only creative improvement i'm adding to the textures is some debanding. Having only 16 to 32 colors in a texture can lead to some unfavorable color banding, and noticeable artifacts when two connected textures must allocate their 16 colors differently, causing a seam ( think of a dirt texture connected to a dirt + grass texture, the first one will have more shades of brown than the later who needs colors for the green grass ). But once again, adding more colors to the gradients by smoothing them in a 24-bit color palette wouldn't be noticeable at a native resolution, all the modifications maintain the visual identity when playing in HD, and you would quickly forget you're on HD textures to begin with.
If your texture pack tries too hard to distinguish itself from the source material, it is prone to failing.
I was just about to comment about Nerrel's Majora's Mask pack when you mentioned it in the video. It is soooo good. I hope more amazing texture packs like this come out. There is one for the SM64 pc port (not render 96) that is extremely close to the original, but looks really clean.
I love HD 5th/6th gen texture packs when they serve to enhance the art style of the game. No need to insert detail that wasn't there, just to smooth the jagged pixels.
i cant believe someone explained it! ive felt this wy for so long. i think the projects are really interesting but i wouldnt use them myself. i also REALLY agree with the extra tinkering bit. i feel like most emulator people i know tell me to do all this and that and frankly i dont want to. i am the average consumer and i dont want to do more than what i am expected to.
The joy I feel when MrWelbig uploads is unparalleled
I think nostalgia is a lot of it for you but that's ok because we all can have a preference to the way we like to play games.
My personal preference depends on whether it's a 2d or 3d game and what game it is, but generally I prefer some form of upscaling or filtering. Some games were meant for a tiny handheld screen and depending on how they look on a much bigger screen (either my widescreen tv or my laptop), I might use a filter that increases the res, but doesn't completely get rid of the pixely look.
Now, as for some of the older games I grew up with, I try to get relatively close to what younger me saw when they played the game, which isn't necessarily playing the game in such a way as to replicate how the original graphics actually were, but how I remember them being. A keen example of this is the Majora's Mask recompilation, which somehow looks more like Majora's Mask than if I were to go back and play my original Wii VC copy of Majora's Mask. Like, in a kinda surreal way it feels like the version of Majora's Mask that 12 year old me played.
I love this subject, it's the reason why I play old games on a CRT that I have, playing Resident Evil 1 Remake on a Wii (the Gamecube version) was a subreal experience, the graphics really hold up in a weird way
I can understand this as a personal taste for yourself. Personally for me though I like both. I recently found out about texture packs and it's nice to bounce between the old and new. Like doing a playthrough with the new and then maybe in a year or however long (give it some time to feel fresh + other games I want to play) maybe play it again. I've done this with Paper mario games. When I saw the TTYD remaster was coming out I played through the original and now I'm playing through the remaster. Really I wish more games did what the Halo games have done with their remasters. You can seamlessly swap between the old and new textures. It makes it a much more fun experience that way too because you can compare the visual changes and differences between areas in the game DURING gameplay. My favorite thing replaying the Halo CE remake was roaming around every map switching textures and seeing how visuals were either updated or straight up changed and seeing if I liked the old or new versions better. Texture packs IMO are great. I will admit there is a charm to the old lower res formats because they are nostalgic but I also do like to enjoy older games that get a fresh coat of paint while still more or less respecting the visual style of the original. The only texture packs/remakes I don't like are the ones that completely change how the game looks because it no longer feels like a remake or updated textures but rather an entirely different game.
Got a CRT monitor with a high refresh rate set up, and playing decompilations on it are sublime. Sm64ex-coop and Ship of Harkinian (I used it with the 3DS model and texture pack) look and feel good on a CRT. No interlacing, no crappy composite video fringing, no 15Khz whining, and no perceivable display strobing. I just find having to resize and rescale the image in the OSD whenever I change the resolution to be annoying.
At least on Linux, you can even use a modern GPU with a DisplayPort to VGA adapter and force 240p and such without needing third-party Windows drivers and an ancient GPU. You don't need an overpriced PVM.
Native resolution + a good CRT filter is pure eye candy
My personal opinion is that I want the emulation experience to be as close to the original console as possible. There are some edge cases where I’m fine with visual improvements (like in dolphin, using per-pixel lighting instead of per-vertex lighting)
excellent vid. put into words how I also feel about most HD texture packs. my preference is close to the original at an increased FPS.
I have to say retroarch and CRT filters and native resolutions of systems (most of the time) is how I do it. The first title that made me really tweak my preference in CRT filters was policenauts that is kojima's second big hit Visual novel with mostly "pre rendered" full screen art work and FMV's that AI would likely butcher rather than improve. But the correct type of CRT or other filtering will hide the visual noise in the art that was not (as) apparent on CRT.
One funny thing t hat happens with early 2000's 3D games in higher resolutions is that it is clear the devs were working with the hardware of the time. Silent Hill 2 enhanced edition, a community remastering and fixing of SH2 PC port, had to fix few misaligned models in scenes because they looked right in original 480i but warp a decade or two into future and now we can with Full HD and beyond resolutions see that James' pinched fingers and the needle he is supposedly holding are not lining up at all.
Other such example is people meming on Final Fantasy 8 played at higher resolution on emulator or official HD release. With added resolution illusion of Squall drinking from wine glass now looks like he is trying to alcohol bleach his eyes.
As long as you find a CRT or maybe other filter of your liking, the fix is also universal, no need for extreme amounts of additional data. Nobody has done a HD remaster of Koudelka, that uses same tactics as Resident Evil titles did, but native resolution and good filter of your liking will make all the artwork look appropriate, and if you have a 4k TV, CRT filters may very well be one thing your PC can actually run and get benefits from with the increased resolution.
You could also just enjoy the crispy pixels, a lot of people do though they also play the games in wrong aspect ratio. Indie horror game "Signalis" was clearly inspired to look like crispy pixel game but is simulating a PS1 game in 3D rather than a 2D game more common in this genre. With Signalis and two bloodborne fan projects, PS1 3D is next big thing with indie games it seems.
I am a weird person who thinks that upscaled res even looks better for CRT filters and native res never really works.
I agree alot with what you say. Especially mind "filling in the blanks" and creating more effective experience than just flat out overly clear view at the assets or 'excess detail'. i felt that way about many far more drastic remasters and fan projects. With all the focus on hiper detail, and excusing one of the worst "remakesters" just because technical fidelity, ignoring how it ruins the games look case and point GTA Definitive Trilogy or even worse Warcraft 3 Reforged, ruining how the game looked in the menues even if you dont use HD mode and ruining the look entirely in HD mode itself all the while becoming the default version on the store..(original is unplayable despite what the store says) Console games being emulated avoided this ruin that befalled some pc only games Wc3 being one of them.) SD game looked like comic book/disney film art in 3D that is trapped between peak of N64 and early PS2 games, being pleasant to look at to this day while you can interpret "full detail" look like you said/
HD mode looks nothing like Warcraft style wise be it Wc3 or WoW and just looks like one of those hedious Unreal engine "concepts" mixed with Raid Shadowlegends. Its just mind boggling and in my personal case heartbreaking as i loved Warcraft 3 alot. People excused it especially ones that didnt play the game for decades. I wish the only problem with Wc3 as it is now was a slightly messy upscale of the textures.
For me, I do like playing at Native Res for most games, unless they are really hampered by that and or from a gameplay perspective its much more enjoyable to play it in widescreen. An easy example for this is any 3D Racing game. Most of the time they really benefit from all the emulation enhancements (60 FPS, Widescreen or higher res) Especially for some PS1 racers that needed the rally styled indicators to be sort of playable. For HD Texture packs nine times out of ten they end up coming with widescreen patches for some old pc games and or its just to make it work better with widescreen. Which I am personally okay with. Most actual texture packs don't look great but generally just hud improvements is really all I need.
I just started playing the gamecube Twilight Princess and you're video on the wii/HD releases was a big help in figuring out which version I wanted to play. :P
as someone who uses 10 years old+ hardware (a 2014 gamer laptop and a 2014 laptop) for most stuff, and who tends to like some 20+ years old games and indie stuff more than the average 4~10 years old AAA (which somehow are playable on my 10 y/o dual core i7 with a GPU), I... honestly agree most HD texture packs aren't that appealing, honestly older graphics, like the ps1 Tomb Raiders, feel quite different from Tomb Raider 2013, just as the graphics look different. Altho the Tomb Raider trilogy remaster actually looks quite great, but I'd say that's because the devs understood the game's tone and visual identity, I'd say
Hey there, you've made a great video on this subject, I got a question though, how did you make your Luigi's Mansion look like that? I mean like pitch black in dark rooms, give more of a spooky vibe
the hud on any mario sunshine texture pack drives me up the wall, aside the official one from 3d all stars
I've never really used HD texture packs, but I *strongly* prefer a good CRT shader to raw pixels. Raw pixels - especially on Super Nintendo and earlier - just looks really wrong to me.
A ton of games, new and old, use a top down photo of river rocks in place of geometry. In older games, it's low resolution, so you can barely even tell what it is. I doesn't matter, it's rocks. But in a modern game, that texture is extremely obvious and distracting when it's in HD on a flat surface.
It's always lovely to hear another creator use Cave Story music for their background music!
(Edit) I didn't realize until you mentioned Twilight Princess that I've watched this channel before. Whoops.
There was a texture pack for Serious Sam HD that I thought was amazing. It basically touched on textures that were for some reason not updated, which clash with the ones that were changed. The texture pack tries to make them all HD which is great.
I don’t like too much hd texture packs but some of my favs are Henriko Magnificos twilight princess, nerrels, OOT reloaded. Lately I’ve been using them a lot more cause my eyesight has been getting really bad and specifically n64 Zelda’s the text hurts my eyes to read at a low res. So I need that HD fonts and stuff
Something you might like is that I believe the recompiled versions of the games will actually have antialiasing support, Even at native res, which should help with some of the pixel shimmering you said you dont miss
100% agree, the only things I need in hd are HUD elements that look horrible at higher resolutions and that's all!
13:50, yeah the photoreal high frequency textures in games like half life 2, are a bit grating to me, whereas in uncharted the textures are hand-painted, so it creates a more coherent aesthetic. i think it's good to think of texture work like the parts of a photograph; some areas are in focus by design, and others are not. if everything is in focus, it's harder to direct the emotion and gaze of the viewer.
20:00 it's funny how the ones I like are the some ones you mention; the re2 hd pack, nerrel's majora's mask pack. trying to restore what was there, or implied to be there, without adding a bunch of ugly photoreal high frequency disjointed detail. it's true a texture has to be seen IN CONTEXT, to know how to improve it.
I understand where you're coming from and mostly agree. If the texture pack is fully complete and appropriately matches the original game's art style, I would say go for it, but otherwise it can be a bad distraction when trying to play the game.
I managed to connect my gaming laptop through a signal converter to a 1998 crt tv, and forced the 640 X 480 resolution (No longer supported natively in my laptop) to play games in the most vanilla way I possibly can, and while ps1, n64 and games and below look great, I recognize I am nitpicking the hell out of emulation by doing that, most people with a crt filter on their monitor will get a pretty good experience lol. It seems weird to try to alter the game beyond that with varying results, usually HUD or still imaged upscaled to HD are alright but when they alter every texture it is hit or miss.
As someone who prefers enhancing my games I have a very similar discontentment with HD texture packs to you, I completely ignore packs that only or majority upscale the original graphics. In most cases, I just use (or even make my own) handmade HD HUD/UI textures because doing an entire game may be too much of an undertaking to feasibly get done beautifully and accurately to the source material
Whoah TH-cam can be scary with this recommendations sometimes. Just the other day I remembered Nerrel existed and decided to watch him then wanted to see some more videos about his texture pack and the like. This is not what I expected, but it’s bound to interesting.
Understanding an artist's intent on a re texture is very important.
The only way to enjoy a re texture is to read the README on why and what was upgraded. Just expecting "it will be better" will have you end In a better rant
It's so cool to follow an artist's intent in why and how they inhanced the game
Yeah, I cringe when people recommend Heriko's textures. Most of the time they're (often poorly) AI upscales of the original textures.
Yeah removing artifacts before makes better results and using the right AI model takes time to tailor.
Henriko's Pikmin 4K texture pack is so god awful. I don't understand why people continue to use it.
It's very "NINTENDO, HIRE THIS MAN."