Hey guys, not sure if anyone is still interested but I followed up on
Cuban Legend
's work regarding the blurry textures in 2.1.0, and how it is easy to use custom textures in newer versions of Dolphin. I've just finished the upscaled "prevbase" files, ie the large previews in the top left corner, so at least now you can see clearly which stage is which. In the end only 9 of the prevbases differed from those in 2.0.0 and had to be re-made in Gimp. I also fixed the fact that on Pokemon stadium the R+Z and the L+R stages were flipped.
I personally didn't want to use the "0000000" texture directory for my custom textures, since I have multiple boot.elf's in my dolphin library, so instead I made a wad that launches Kapedani's build (so long as the sd has the file apps/projectm/boot.elf) with title id 000100014b415045 (this is similar to, for example, the legacy xp wad which has title id 000100014c585032). If you only have the one boot.elf feel free to launch from your boot.elf rather than the wad, and rename the texture directory from 000100014b415045 to 00000000.
So in short, the instructions for Dolphin users who want to load the custom textures I've made are as follows:
1) Add kapedani.wad to your dolphin library (these days this just means putting it in the right folder, next to kapedani.png if you want it to show up in Dolphin with the right banner).
2) Move the directory 000100014b415045 which I've included to DolphinEmulator/Load/Textures (by default the global user directory for dolphin is in C:\Users\YourNameHere\Documents\DolphinEmulator)
Here are the
textures and wad and, to save someone the trouble in the future, here are some
helpful gimp files for making prevbases in Kapedani's format.
I actually plan to upscale all of the textures, and possibly try to fix bugs with some of the stages (I'm looking at you Zant's black cloud of slow-rendering and that one beach stage where the camera goes all wonky). I plan on using this as a launching point for my personal, modest, build. There are a few stages I'm hoping to add (especially
this one), and I might even try to fix the Rob/Lucas issue with the Patt edition although that might be over my head. Everything else I'm pretty sure I can fix eventually. Anyway, if you're interested stay tuned and happy smashing!
[Edit] Another helpful thing for anyone who is new to this is that Dolphin actually now handles virtual SDHC cards perfectly well. I have everything stored in an 8gb virtual SD so I don't have to do any iso modding whatsoever. I recommend
Virtual SD Card Maker for this purpose, then just add everything that's in the "Dolphin Full" sd card, plus all the files that were meant to go into the iso.
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So in the process of upscaling these textures I'm realizing that I'm not happy with how many cool stages are totally hidden, eg no picture and no mention even of a button combination (except in the excel spreadsheet). I kept forgetting which was which. It is for this reason that I introduce to all of you
the stageflower(or so I'm calling it). It replaces the upper of the two game logos that appear on the left in the SSS. It struck me as silly to have two. The way it works is that if you hold A and a direction on the D-pad you'll wind up in the corresponding stage on the stageflower. If you hold A and left or right and Z you'll wind up on the far left stage or the far right stage. Basically it's six more "visible" stages per slot, making for a total of (11+6)*78 = 1326 non-hidden stages at max. Not sure I will get up to that many but my aim is to rework Kapedani's mod without any hidden stages. Or at the very least no hidden stages except for "holding Y always gives you the omega variant" kinds of things (which as far as I can tell Kapedani was about half way through implementing).
Here is a photo of what the stageflower looks like in the SSS, as you can see I've added that dope stage I mentioned to DpadUp+A.
Here's me playing the stage inside Kapedani's build, after getting to it via the DpadUp+A shortcut
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Progress on the texture upscaling continues. I've done all of the Franchise Icons and all the icons on the first page. I've also added a few more stageflowers. I'll upload again when I finish the icons and stageflowers.
For your viewing pleasure