HD Textures App

HD Textures, in the MKDD-NX Tools app, converts the community MKDD HD texture pack, made for Dolphin, into the one file MKDD-NX loads on the Switch. The Switch can't use the pack's PNGs directly (about 1 GB, and decoding them would stall the game), so the app turns them into GPU-ready textures at the pack's full resolution.

Download

From the latest release:

Computer	File
Windows	MKDD-NX-Tools.exe
Mac, Apple Silicon (M1 and later)	MKDD-NX-Tools-arm64.dmg
Mac, Intel	MKDD-NX-Tools-x86_64.dmg

Nothing else needs installing. It's one app for all of MKDD-NX's tools, each in its own tab: click the HD Textures tab (or Open on its card on the Start tab). You can switch tabs at any time; each tool keeps what you were doing.

• Windows: if it says "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway.
• Mac: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. The app isn't signed by Apple, so the first time, right-click it and choose Open. On newer macOS, if that isn't offered, try to open it once, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

Get the pack

Download the English version of the pack from mkddhd (the Mega link on that site; the app has the link too) and extract it. The pack isn't included with MKDD-NX.

Convert

1. Open MKDD-NX Tools and click the HD Textures tab.
2. Texture pack: choose the pack's GM4E01 folder, or the folder you extracted it into (the app finds GM4E01 inside).
3. Output folder: where to save hd-textures.bin (about 800 MB).
4. Convert. It takes about 5-15 minutes and keeps the computer awake, so you can walk away. When it's done, the window says where the file is.

Install

1. Copy hd-textures.bin to sdmc:/switch/MKDD-NX/mods/hd/ (create the folders). The name must be exactly hd-textures.bin.
2. Start the game. HD TEXTURES in the − menu now shows ON. Switch it off to compare during a race; the hint on that row counts the textures shown in HD.

Textures load in the background from the SD card: one shows in its original form for a moment, then switches to HD. Up to about 80 MB of GPU memory is used at a time, and races stay at 60 fps.

Other packs

Textures are matched the way Dolphin matches them (format, size and the XXH64 hash of the original texture), so other packs in Dolphin's tex1_ format for GM4E01 work the same way.

Command line

The tool is tools/hdtex_app/hdtex_gui.py in the repository, part of tools/mkddnx_tools.py. The converter alone is tools/hdtex_pack.py.

Needs: Python 3 with Pillow (py -3 -m pip install pillow) and a C compiler for the bundled BC7 encoder (tools/bc7enc.c, built automatically on first run). On Windows that is MSYS2's UCRT64 gcc (pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc in an MSYS2 shell, found at C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin); elsewhere any gcc or clang. Set CC to use another compiler.

1. Find the pack's GM4E01 folder (the one Dolphin would load from Load/Textures/GM4E01, full of tex1_..._.png files).

2. Convert it (about 6 minutes on a 12-thread PC; the result is about 790 MB):

   py -3 tools/hdtex_pack.py "D:/Downloads/MKDD HD/GM4E01" "D:/Downloads/hd-textures.bin"
   

3. Copy it to the SD card and turn it on, as in Install.