Crash Team Racing - Graphics Upgrade (Code)

This is just a small taste, in comparison to what is coming. Niko finally figured out the infamous "226" region of the game, related to level rendering, and the 226 research revealed that the key to upgrading graphics was in the EXE all along.

Option 1 - GameShark:
80070090 0000
80070092 3408

Option 2 - Assembly:
80070090 = li $t0, 0

This change forces the game to draw all level geometry as mid-high LOD, disabling low LOD. We do know how to force all high LOD, but then the texture resolutions are higher than the screen resolution, causing texture artifacts, due to lack of hardware mipmapping. An all-high LOD upgrade can be achieved eventually with a PC port of the game.

This applies to 1P and 2P game modes, not 3P and 4P. While we can "improve" 3P and 4P graphics, they still stink. Research is being done to load 1P levels into 4P mode.
There are also some rare polygon flicker bugs, these can be fixed by expanding PrimMem and OTMem, but this is just a simple test for today.

Also with our new "226" region research, we have efforts to fix the corruption in the 4P Oxide Station LEV (yes, it is corrupted). We can get Oxide Station loaded into 3P mode on retail CTR by mathematically filling in the holes, which is an improvement, but not 4P yet. The corruption does not impact any data from the artists, only meta data that can be regenerated with a known algorithm. The corruption is in the middle of the file (shortened VisMem 8X region, 60% present). All data before-and-after is entirely intact. We are investigating exactly how Naughty Dog's tools might have worked, to come up with a logical reason for how their software could have bugged, to cause a corrupt file.

Stay tuned for more.