In May, Wes played an impressive PC port of Mario 64 that ran like a dream at 60fps and 4K resolution. But as he pointed out at the time, smoother frame rates and sharper resolution cannot improve on the textures created for the 1996 Nintendo 64 game.

However, the arrival of a new community-made 4K texture pack makes the port look like a full-fledged current generation remaster. This "sm64redrawn" pack is the handiwork of 16 contributors, all of whom manually redrew the game's textures at 10 times the normal scale, sometimes even more.

While most of the original character models used color instead of texture, the most noticeable improvements in the video embedded below are in the surface textures: the checkerboard floor in Peach's Castle and the dirt walkways in Bob-omb Battlefield, You should see some pretty obvious improvements. The result is a surprisingly crisp reincarnation of the 1996 platformer, which is rumored to be remastered by Nintendo itself.

This is not the only texture pack currently circulating for the PC port of Mario 64. Some are more artistically liberal, like this pack that replaced the skyboxes in the field around Peach Castle; a video of the 4K texture pack can be seen below. You can also check out the greatly improved compiler here.