Have you ever been playing Mario Kart 64 on a modern monitor and wished for a crisper, cleaner image? Well now, thanks to a group of fans belonging to the Mario Kart 64 HD team, it's possible to mod your game to replace some of its blurry character textures and environments with some high-res alternatives (as spotted by GamesRadar). The mod even has a trailer, complete with snappy editing and a Mario voiceover.
How it works is that the Mario Kart 64 HD team has gone in and painstakingly recreated and replaced the old character models and environment textures with new, higher-quality ones.
As the team explains on Twitter, Mario Kart 64's characters work a lot like Donkey Kong Country's in that they were created as 3D models first, animated, and then compressed into sprites. So what this group has essentially done is remake those models from scratch and transform them back into sprites, in addition to introducing all the other upgrades you'd expect to the courses themselves.
The results are pretty stunning and tickle that part of our brain that still loves staring at high-quality renders of Nintendo and Rare characters from 90s video game marketing.
If you fancy giving it a go, it should be a fairly simple mod to install. You can find a download for a ZIP folder on Github and you just need to drag the contents into your "hires_texture/MARIOKART64" folder. There's also a Discord for it you can join called Enhanced 64. The mod should work alongside your copy of the game on most N64 emulators or on Dolphin too. One last thing to note is that it is still in development, so it will continue being developed until its final release.