NOTE: If you have any questions, write a comment.

CHANGELOG

27th of October, 2010: Tested with Windows 7.

12th of March, 2008: Tested with Windows XP.

The communities for old console games are quite amazing, I myself am mostly interested in Nintendo 64 games, especially The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (best game ever made), and I had heard about someone redoing all the textures. I finally decided to check it out and since it took me forever to figure this out, I thought I might as well do a guide about it.

Emulator

First of all you need an emulator to run the game, the most popular are 1964 and Project 64. Since I got everything working first on 1964, that’s what I’ll be talking about in this guide. So, without further ado:

1. Download 1964 version 0.9.9 here.
2. Install it.

Now we need a better video plugin, the most popular is the Rice Video Plugin version 6.1.1 beta 10. As far as I’ve understood a guy named ‘Mudblood’ started updating it after that, so this is the last version made by ‘Rice’ himself.

1. Download Rice Video Plugin version 6.1.1 beta 10 here.
2. Unpack it and put the two dll files in this folder: C:/<installation folder>/1964/099/plugin/.
3. You need another file though, it’s called BMGlib.dll and you can download the package here.
4. Unpack it and put the dll file in C:/<installation folder>/1964/099/.

Now we need to configure 1964.

1. Open the program.
2. Go to Plug-ins -> Change Plug-ins.
3. Select Rice’s Video Plugin 6.1.1 beta 10 from the dropdown window under System Default Video Plugin.
4. Press OK.
5. Go to Plug-ins -> Video Settings.
6. Go to the General Options tab.
7. Change Full Screen Resolution to something higher (like 1024 x 768).
8. Uncheck Hide Advanced Options.
9. Press OK (closing the options window).
10. Reopen Plug-ins -> Video Settings.
11. Go to the Texture Filters tab.
12. Change Texture Quality to 32-bit Texture.
13. Change Texture Enhancement to 2x (Double the texture size).
14. Check Load hi-res textures if available.
15. Press OK.

That’s all for setting up the emulator.

ROM

Now you need the rom, the game itself. I can’t really help you with that, although looking here may be a good idea. The rom I’m using is called Legend of Zelda, The – Ocarina of Time (U) (V1.0), the guide may work on other versions of, though. If you find the rom you can run it from 1964 by pressing Ctrl + D and then selecting the folder where it’s located.

Cell-Shading and Hi-Res

This is really what makes it worth going through all this trouble to play the game. The texture packs are rather hard to find, but I found two of the most popular. The first one is made by a guy named ‘Djipi’. He spend 1,5 years redoing every single texture in the game, making it look like Wind Waker. The second pack is with high-resolution textures, which look a lot like the textures from Twilight Princess. This is how you install them:

1. Download the cell-shading package here (mirror 1, mirror 2).
   Or, download the hi-res package here (mirror).
   UPDATE: I found a more complete, community-created hi-res package, download here. (More info, video and screenshots here.)
2. Unzip the package you selected.
3. Put everything into C:/<installation folder>/1964/099/plugin/hires_texture/ (you may need to manually create the hires_texture folder).
4. Now your directory structure should look like this: C:/<installation folder>/1964/099/plugin/hires_texture/The Legend of Zelda.

If that’s the case you’re done! If you want to try the other package you can rename the The Legend of Zelda folder, and then put the other folder in there. Now, when you open up 1964 and double-click the rom the emulator should start going through all the new textures before loading the game. If it doesn’t find anything you probably forgot to check Load hi-res textures if available.

Taking it to the next level

Playing Ocarina of Time on a keyboard isn’t quite the same though, I decided to buy this, so now I use my wireless Xbox 360 controller to play it and all my other roms. Also, you can connect eight controllers to it, which is awesome.

There are also some unfinished high-resolution texture packs for Ocarina of Time but I haven’t been able to find working download links. There are a lot more texture packs on emutalk.net, but, as I said, it’s pretty hard to find packs that are totally done. Anyway, hope the guide is helpful, here are some screenshots:

Cell Shading Package

High-Resolution Package