Mario Kart 64 HD, fan project texture pack, releases final trailer



Mario Kart 64 is still one of the most beloved entries in the Mario Kart franchise, with it being the first 3D entry in the series, and bringing a whole new slew of memorable courses and music to enjoy a good race with friends, or duke it out in Battle Mode.

While certainly Mario Kart 64 hasn't been the most hacked or modded entry in the series (with that honour being taken by Mario Kart Wii by a long shot), MK64 has still seen its fair share of modifications throughout the years, with some notorious ones being a 60fps hack by the boy181, a widescreen hack courtesy of gamemasterplc, and the recent Mario Kart 64 Amped Up, which features brand new tracks, and tracks from other franchises.

Alongside those great hacks and modifications, AndratVA has been working on an HD texture pack for Mario Kart 64 for almost 2 years, and the amount of work and dedication put into the project has been nothing short of outstanding. For those unaware, Mario Kart 64 uses prerendered sprites for the characters, and with that, Andrat and his team went to the extend of fully recreating the 3D models for each Mario Kart 64 character to make the new HD textures/graphics for all of them and their karts:

mariokarting.gif

Mario Kart 64 certainly takes on a whole new light and polish with this great project, and if you're interested in experiencing it yourself, you can easily grab the assets and play it through any N64 emulator and even Dolphin.

:arrow: GitHub Page
 

x65943

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I was hoping the bunch of hundreds of bucks on progressive upscalers, 0 delay HDMI buses and displays would handle part of that. I am guessing by your comment and other comments it wont run. Pity.
Upscalers are all post processing. There are many reasons why it wouldn't work - for starters trying to load even one of these textures into ram wouldn't fly.

Old games tend to run at or near their system's max capabilities. It's a hardware issue.
 

urbanman2004

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This brings back so much nostalgia, tugging at my heartstrings. I remember damn near getting into fights as a kid over how competitive I was in this game 😁😅😆😂.
 

jt_1258

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well dam, actually looks nice. certainly a lot more palatable then the crappy model swaps people do to make SM64 look "better" where every model just looks aggressively out of place
 

pedro702

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pedro702

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So basically a 4 GB DVD? As in like a PS2 game? That's not bad by modern standards.
it is bad imo lol turning a 16mb game into 3.3 gb game with textures alone is ridiculous lol, if it had more content like new tracks, new drivers, more karts or something, then it would be something, but just textures alone is way too big. there are entire hd games on xbox/ps that are the size of this texture pak.
 

wiiAdventurer

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it is bad imo lol turning a 16mb game into 3.3 gb game with textures alone is ridiculous lol
I'm not sure why it's ridiculous when we have 20 - 50gb games (and beyond) today.

If you haven't heard, the characters are not models they are textures on the N64. When each character has over a 1,000 textures and those need to be in HD (or higher), you can see how that can quickly add up.

Only way you'd get away from this is a port of the game where the textures were replaced with actual models.

For an emulator texture pack, this size isn't unreasonable, many packs are many GB in size. I can't speak to the compression of this pack specifically but there is always a compression vs quality trade off for pack creators to consider. And even favoring compression can still lead to large pack sizes if the number of textures and resolution is high enough.

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On topic, I don't care about MarioKart64 but the amount of work the team went through to do this is just astounding. And the end-result is just beautiful. Great work to everyone involved.
 

malekmaroc7

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Never seen MK64 in such a clean, high definition shape! It just looks awesome and is pretty satisfying 😄! I hope that Nintendo won't request their childish DMCA takedowns.
 

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