Before we start with the best part of this blog series, if you haven’t read the first part I suggest going back a few posts and doing that, its kind of a prerequisite.

 Now that our textures are baked … er dumped, we have made a replacement for a texture and we want to test it out in a game, we take the replacement texture of the same name and place it in the textures-load folder underneath the PJ installation folder. This is a simple, yet effective way to start testing new images, no fuss just – moving files. 32-bit RGBA PNG files are supported … as well as the preferred format of DXT compressed textures since they are significantly smaller and load fast.

To make a bunch of textures into a pack you simply put them into a zip file, with a file in the root called 'pack.xml'. As you can guess PJ supports the ability to load textures from a zip file, so you don't have to extract hundreds of images as well. Below is an example pack.xml from a mario kart texture pack.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pack>
 <supported>
   <rdb>C3B6DE9D-65D2DE76-C:50</rdb>
   <rdb>2577C7D4-D18FAAAE-C:50</rdb>
   <rdb>6BFF4758-E5FF5D5E-C:4A</rdb>
   <rdb>C9C3A987-5810344C-C:4A</rdb>
   <rdb>3E5055B6-2E92DA52-C:45</rdb>
 </supported>
 <author>Kerber2k</author>
 <version>1.2</version>
 <description>Mario Kart Pack</description>
</pack>

This complete package defines what games it applies to, as well as who created it. For a user who downloaded this zip file to their desktop -- they can either right click in the rom  browser and select "Install Pack" from the menu or manually move the ZIP file into the textures-load folder.

This next part is cool, and one aspect I’m particularly happy with. To use the texture pack right click on the game you want to play and click “select texture pack” as shown above.

This dialog will show you all the available texture packs available for the game that you selected as well as the one currently in use for that particular game. The nice part about this is you can have multiple packs installed for multiple games at once.

So in closing, this is one feature people have wanted the PJ core team to have for a while, I know it took a long time but I think it was well worth the wait

I have uploaded the latest build, RDB File and created a new package (1.7.0.10) with the latest files. There is a lot of changes to this build. I fixed a lot of things, but fixing one thing may break something else that I am not aware of.

Here are the changes to the new build:

• Bug fix (0000046): When auto pause on, then will pause when going in to dialogs
• Bug fix (0000081): Fixed issue with Mario Kart not being able to run with ABL on
• Bug fix (0000083): Rom browser column width saved again
• Bug fix (0000091): Fixed issue where you could not use the number keys in the cheat dialog when game is running
• Bug fix (0000092): The handling of multiple blocks of code at same virtual address
• Bug fix: Searching rom memory now works
• Bug fix: fixed a bug in memory exception handler
• Bug fix: fixed plugin initilization for OpenGl plugins/wrappers
• Update: Added some code to hopefully stop the failed to allocate memory
• Update: Show CPU usage default is now off
• Update: created new about window
• Update: Added new icon to app
• Update: Changed the look of the first lang select dialog
• Update: Added option to turn off framerate.
• Update: The FPS now displays speed as VI/s, DL/s or a percent of the speed.
• Update: Add shortcut for display speed
• Update: Added the ability to increase/decrease game speed by keyboard shortcut
• Update: Added some new hack abilities via RDB (speed up GoldenEye)
• Update: Cleaned up the UI for the shortcut editor
• Update: Added compression type to the rom browser
• rewrote: Jump table for virtual addresses (speed increase PD, Conkers)

I got a comment today on the site saying we should do a N64 emulator for the PSP. We are not interested in doing it, but I have to say strmnnrmn has been doing a fabulous job trying to get this working nice. He has just released version 10 of his emulator which is great, you can find out more here