Nintendo 64 Games In High Resolution Glory

By Jeffrey | July 7, 2008


A while back I did a guide on how to get your Playstation games to look stunning again, so now I figured it was time I balanced things out and wrote up a similar guide for the Nintendo 64.

Only this time, thanks to the power of emulation and high resolution packs, the games will look far better than what can be done with simple graphics shaders. Who needs the Virtual Console?

Disclaimer: You are only entitled to play Nintendo 64 ROMs if you own the original game! SavvyGeek is not responsible for any illegal use as a result of this guide.

What You’ll Need:

  • Project 64: The best N64 emulator out there.
  • Glide64 Napalm Release 1.0: Supports high resolution packs, and is the best graphics plugin, in my opinion.
  • Complete Plugins Pack - Some of you have requested this, so I have uploaded a collection of all of my plugins - including Glide64 - for Project64 in 1.7 format. Make sure you copy the included glide3x.dll to your main Project64 directory.

Texture Packs

There are many texture packs available for games, but these are the best that I’ve found, and more importantly, they are complete for their individual games.

Note that I did not create these packs. The credit goes to the original authors - listed below - for their incredible work.

You can find other texture packs for other games at EmuTalk.

Set It Up

I’m not going to go into all the details of setting up Project64 in general, as guides for that exist all over the Internet. Instead I will focus on setting up your graphics.

After installing Project64 copy the Glide64 files into the plugins folder. Make sure you copy glide3x.dll into the main Project64 directory, since chances are you aren’t running a Glide-capable card.

Now create a folder in your plugins folder named hires_texture and copy the folder from the ZIP file of each texture pack you downloaded into it. It will look something like this:

Make sure you do not change the name of those folders, or Glide64 will be unable to find and use them!

Hint: If you are using Project64 1.7, you will need to copy the Glide64 plugin into the GFX folder of your plugins folder, as well as creating the hires_texture folder in the GFX folder.

Open up Project64. The window will look like this:

Click Options, then Settings. Now under Video (graphics) plugin select Glide64.

This is also where the other settings for Project64 are set up, so if you haven’t already done so go into the rest of the options and change them how you’d like.

Now click OK to save and close the window.

Now click Options, then Configure Graphics Plugin. The Glide64 window will pop up.

You can set up your options however you’d like, but these settings have worked best for me:

Also, make sure you click Wrapper settings on the main Config tab. My options look like this:

Finally, click on the Texture enhancement tab. Again, you can set these options however you’d like, but I recommend setting them to exactly how I have them below:

If no options are available when you click the drop-down boxes, just click them once to select them, then use the down arrows on your keyboard to scroll through the different options.

That’s it! Now click OK to save and close the window.

Now double-click any game to start playing it. There will be a black screen for a minute as Glide64 loads the textures, but that only needs to happen once. After it is finished the game will always start up instantly.

Video & Screenshots - Original vs. Texture Pack

It may be hard to tell the quality difference on the YouTube video. If so, you can download the full resolution video by clicking the image below:

The Legend of Zelda:

Original -

Cel Shaded-

Federelli & KMan’s Pack-

Super Mario 64

Original-

HiRes-

Mario Kart 64

Original-

HiRes-

Super Smash Brothers

Original-

HiRes-

Thoughts & Comments

Feel free to share your comments, advice, and links to other texture packs below!

Topics: Guides |

12 Responses to “Nintendo 64 Games In High Resolution Glory”

  1. Could you please send me a link to your PJ64v1.7 plugins folder. I dont seem to have any of the plugins that you have. The texture enhancement tab doesnt have the Rice Format plugin. Also, the glide wrapper configuration is much different from yours. Send me a message on youtube at Samm5506. Thanks!

    Posted by: Samm5506 on July 16th, 2008 at 10:16 pm

  2. No problem! See the updated downloads above.

    Hope this helps!

    Posted by: Jeffrey on July 17th, 2008 at 12:10 am

  3. Great work! Thank you!

    Posted by: George on July 17th, 2008 at 12:38 am

  4. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I now have the plugins. :D

    Posted by: Samm5506 on July 17th, 2008 at 8:44 am

  5. Hmm… for somereason the Mario Kart 64 highres texture pack will not load :/

    Any idea why?

    Posted by: Samm5506 on July 17th, 2008 at 9:55 am

  6. What exactly is happening when you try to load it up? Does it try to load and fail, or does it just go straight into the game?

    Just in case, make sure the folder is in your “hires_texture” folder and named SUPER MARIO 64.

    Posted by: Jeffrey on July 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

  7. No. All the other games load fine except for Mario Kart 64, it does the texture loading screen for like 1 sec and then goes straight ingame.

    Posted by: Samm5506 on July 20th, 2008 at 9:59 am

  8. The only reason that would be happening would be that it’s not finding any textures to load.

    Make sure your texture folder is named MARIOKART64 and is in the right place (hires_texture) and it should be loading.

    Posted by: Jeffrey on July 20th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

  9. Wow, thanks. This is really awesome, and sooo easy. Thanks again.

    Posted by: Roland on July 21st, 2008 at 4:57 am

  10. Would be awsome if this could be done on a xbox, but i guess it would be too demanding for its limited stock CPU and memory speeds.

    Thanks for the article, great stuff :)

    Posted by: Davinci on July 26th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

  11. Hey!

    Can you re-upload your Celda textures somewhere please. The ones I’ve got have some textures missing and i had your pack a while back and it was perfect. Thanks in advance

    Posted by: dajo on August 7th, 2008 at 10:16 pm

  12. To be honest, things don’t look THAT much better, judging by the screenshots.

    I still wanted to try them so I can judge for real, but all download links are broken! :(

    Posted by: DaVince on August 12th, 2008 at 12:44 pm


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