Rice Video

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Rice Video
The interface of Rice Video
Developed by	Rice (Beta 10 and before) Mudlord (post beta 10)
Latest release	6.1.4 / December 31, 2007
OS	MS Windows, Linux
Genre	Nintendo 64 Emulator Plug-in
Licence	GPL
Website	ricevideo.bountysource.com

Rice Video is an open source DirectX and OpenGL graphics plug-in for Nintendo 64 emulators that support the Zilmar-Schibo video plug-in specifications. The project became open source at version 6.1.1 beta 10 on March 30, 2006 when Rice posted the source code at the EmuTalk forums. Since version v6.1.1 beta 1, the plug-in has been able to load custom user-made textures that replace the original game art, which is currently what sets it apart from other publicly available plug-ins. Custom textures can be used to potentially improve the aesthetical quality of games by using textures that use higher resolutions than those that ship with the games, as well as allowing end users to implement their own graphical designs, thus being able to create a different graphical look for the game. It supports scaling filters such as 2xSaI, Scale2X or the HQXX (HQ2x/HQ3x/HQ4x) filters, and has many options available, making it a very customisable plug-in. It can also can be used to dump games' original textures in PNG, JPG and BMP formats, for the methods discussed above.

[edit] Performance

Required System Specifications: Pentium III/Athlon (AMDK7) 800 MHz 128 MB of RAM GeForce 2

Recommended System Specifications: Pentium 4 Athlon XP 1.6 GHz 256 MB of RAM Geforce 4 TI 4200 or Radeon Equivalent

Rice Video performs differently depending upon the graphics it is processing. Using high resolution textures and texture filtering techniques will degrade the performance.

[edit] Current State

The Rice Video plug-in was written in C++ and compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005. The 5.2.x versions use DirectX 8.0, while versions 5.6.x use DirectX 8.1 and the current 6.1.0 release uses DirectX 9.

Rice no longer maintains the plug-in, and has stated that he would like to see someone make use of the source code. An unofficial build of Rice Video, with various enhancements and bug fixes, is being developed by Mudlord. Additionally, the Mupen64Plus project maintains newer versions of the Linux port made from the original Mupen64 port by Hacktarux.