Making SNES-Game-Retexturing-Projects possible....

[Roi de Janeiro]

This is something, I had in mind for a long time, not knowing if it is really possible. But whether it's possible or not, I will probaby never find out if I don't say anything about it. So here is my idea:

While emulating, when ZSNES grabs the tiles of a game, to arrange them on screen, wouldn't it be possible to dump them to files (perhaps in a folder called like the rom and under filenames generated from the position of the tile in the rom). After that I think of something like an additional graphics mode, where ZSNES checks if there is a dumped tile and loads that instead.
That should make it possible to create new "real" highres version of your favorite SNES-game, by just making new 2x or 4x sized versions of the tiles. I don't know if my idea is new, but I didn't find anything about it here so I hope to start a new generation of SNES experience.

Jipso.... Roi

[grinvader]

1- old
2- not feasible
3- moo

[Nach]

We already have a much more AI version of this feature with 2x, 3x and 4x modes.

Look for HQ.

[Nach]

1- old
2- not feasible
3- moo

That was supposed to be:

1) old
2) not feasible
3) ???
4) profit

[Roi de Janeiro]

I don't think of xsai and other ai stuff. I mean from the scratch new produced tiles, like in the various doom, quake, duke3d and so on retexturing projects. Just using ai will not add any details to the game.

[Nach]

Well, if you want to design the system, and get the initial code working by yourself, we'll be more than happy to help you from there.

[grinvader]

I don't think of xsai and other ai stuff. I mean from the scratch new produced tiles, like in the various doom, quake, duke3d and so on retexturing projects. Just using ai will not add any details to the game.

Maybe you didn't get it:

Tiles aren't enhancable. There are effects applied to single pixels, and there is NO way to spread them to the new surface used by whatever 'enhanced' tile you'd use.

1- use graphic filters, for they are the only option
2- still old
3- we know what you mean, and it is not feasible
4- rice
5- ????
6- profit !!

[Roi de Janeiro]

Im not a very good programer but ill ask a friend of me to help me. I had this idea the first time ca. 8 jears ago but thougt of it more as a stupid dream. But knowing more about all the stuff today, I believe it should be really possible. While Im sceptical about myself being able to afford something like this, you can be shoure that I'll try. But even than you should see this as kind of a feature request. Just enter "retexturing project" in google to see how many similar projects exist and how big the comunitys are.
To be honest, Im don't believe that I can do the program modifications to ZSNES, but I definitely could make up some kickass highres tiles.
My main intention is just to make more people think about possibilitys like this.

[Roi de Janeiro]

1- use graphic filters, for they are the only option
2- still old
3- we know what you mean, and it is not feasible
4- rice
5- ????
6- profit !!

Ok ok....

[creaothceann]

http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2777

[Agozer]

http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2777

Yes, that pretty much covered what I was about to write.

[Gospel]

Did SNES games ever have textures to begin with?

[grinvader]

Did SNES games ever have textures to begin with?

Closest to that is a tile used on a background layer in mode 7.

Which means, 'no'.

[Nightcrawler]

http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2777

Yes, that pretty much covered what I was about to write.

Yup we discussed this to death. Until someone presents proof of concept, it is deemed not feasible.

I truely believe it is probably less work and more feasable to do a remake of whatever game your interested in. Then you can use whatever high resolution graphics you want. You can rip the original graphics to start with and work from there. How about that idea?

[Roi de Janeiro]

Ok... you are the guys who really know how ZSNES works. And I didn't want to offend anyone of you. I simply belive that every SNES-game uses tiles, stored in a specific part of the rom, and that there is a standard way how this tiles are loaded. That should make it possible to simply get the tiles from an alternative location. But I will keep silent about this stuff until I know how it really works and decide afterwards for myself if something like I imagined would be possible. Ill keep it as a dream, and perhaps someday I, or somebody else will make it possible. Anyway thank you guys.

[The Sage Of Time]

Yes, these people know how the emulator work.. This isn't as simple as what you are thinking, they aren't textures and cannot be done in the same way. To my understanding, unlike textures there is no way to define what sprite or pixel is what and how, so there is really no way to grab that and replace it. You could reverse engineer the game and allow the sprites to be loaded from an external file, sort of like what was done with Star Ocean, but this wouldn't allow higher resolution textures or anything like that, and would make the whole thing pretty much moot.

This isn't something feasibe to be applied to SNES, you need to accept that.

[grinvader]

I simply belive that every SNES-game uses tiles, stored in a specific part of the rom

Changes with every game, but yeah, it's specific if you focus on a single game.

and that there is a standard way how this tiles are loaded.

Nope. The game code loads the raw data, and it could be used as 2, 4 or 8bpp. This *could* be checked by dumping the tile and verifying manually.
But there are also per-line effects and per-pixel effects set by code, which is NOT predictable beforehand (as in, the first time you dump the tile the effect isn't there, and not the second, but only the 32147th time you load it, for example).
Those can change colours, or change pixel priority. How could work with a 16x16 tile when the code only has these effects for a 4x4 one ?

That should make it possible to simply get the tiles from an alternative location.

This could be done, but as said above, you wouldn't have the special effects.

Also as pointed by the link posted, most background tiles look fine because they are lowres. When they are lined up next to each other, some pixel-big detail can appear out of nowhere. This is likely to be un-done by hires tiles.

You're better off recoding the whole game, and instead of limiting yourself to the SNES, code it for PC.
You don't have to make huge 3d games, a hires LttP is a good project.

[Richard C.]

my understanding of how the graphics packs must be way off then. i thought that in order to make them, the graphics were somehow dumped from the game, uncompressed, verified, and then contained in a graphics pack which was loadable by snes9x and zsnes. special effects were still available this way, and, if i understand correctly, the same idea could be applied to others games as well, in which someone could edit the tiles within the graphics pack, allowing new graphics to be displayed. however, higher-res graphics wouldnt be a possibility...

[Jipcy]

Please correct me if I'm wrong:

I believe graphics packs are specific to certain games. Some games have special chips on the cartridge that have compressed graphics and stuff. These particular chips aren't emulated by ZSNES, so you have to have the separate graphics packs.

I don't think all games have graphics packs the same way FEOEZ has, for example. For those that do, perhaps different graphics are possible.

Either way, it's simply not the same thing as dumping/loading textures like on the N64. It's more like changing the game data itself.

[grinvader]

special effects were still available this way

Only with the original tiles.
The original tile has no difference from a normal tile loaded from an external file.

The problem here is that he wants to use HIRES tiles. Hires -> more pixels. Effects go boom. Period.
Unless you recode the whole game.

[creaothceann]

I simply belive that every SNES-game uses tiles, stored in a specific part of the rom, and that there is a standard way how this tiles are loaded.

Nope, that's not the case. Like most computers, the SNES has a RAM area, and tiles can be loaded to VRAM from either ROM or RAM. (VRAM could be compared to the RAM on your gfx card.)

Tiles that come from ROM must be uncompressed, because they can't be modified in VRAM. To save precious module space, many games store the data compressed in the ROM and decompress them into RAM, from where they're uploaded to VRAM.

(Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Some games "draw" the tiles in RAM. Remember Mario Paint? Some tiles are drawn by the user, and are nowhere in the ROM. This also means that a game could, for example, load tiles from ROM and add some software effects to them, according to the current level. How would you handle that?

[Nightcrawler]

That pretty much covers it..

Let's reiterate the major points made here today by these intelligent folks:

1.) There is NO standard place in the ROM for the graphical data.

2.) There is NO standard way in which a tile is loaded. Many games have custom tiles and are transformed into a usable SNES tile in RAM before sending to VRAM.

3.) Most games employ compression and the fnished tile comes from RAM.

4.) Graphics don't even originate from ROM in some cases period.

5.) All HDMA and other pre line graphical effects would be lost.

Now onto the graphics pack for Star Ocean. A huge amount of reverse engineering went into these graphics packs.

This demonstrates that deriving the location of all tiles IS possible, but required a huge amount of work by a very skilled individual. In fact, Darkforce claims there was virtually NO ONE else who could have done this for Star Ocean at the time.

This was my point from the last topic. Each game to have enhanced graphics would need to be manually reverse engineered. There is no way for any kind of automated process to know where the tile graphics originated from.

The people with the skills to reverse engineer these games aren't interested in your hi-res tiles.

It is not feasable to apply this to anything more than a particular individual game that has been reverse engineered. And even then, several of the points mentioned above would still apply.

You can think what you want.. but it's not going to happen. The SNES does not use 'textures' such as an N64 which is where most anyone who brings this up got the idea from.

The emulator would have to be modified for each individual games 'graphics pack'.

There are a very limited amount of people with the ability to create such graphics packs and to my knowledge, none of them are interested.

[Guest]

What about games like Doom,aren't "Texture" like pixels used in there?

[Agozer]

What about games like Doom,aren't "Tuxture" like pixels used in there?

Doom used the SuperFX2 chip, if I'm not mistaken, hence the 3D effects.

[Guest]

Yes the superFX chip really pulled a fast one over people tricking them into thinking it was 3D.much like Sony Playstation's 3D games weren't really 3d.