Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, released in Japan as Paper Mario RPG, is a console role-playing game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo GameCube. The Thousand-Year Door is the fourth Mario RPG and the second in the Paper Mario series.

Problems When Using Older Graphics Cards
Revision introduced changes to the Vertex Loader JIT implementation of Bounding Boxes. This change requires GPU-specific features that are not present on older GPUs (older than 3rd quarter 2012). As such, graphics cards without Direct3D 11 or OpenGL 4.3 support are no longer supported. In essence, only computers with GPUs: Nvidia GeForce 400 series and newer, ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series and newer, and Broadwell integrated GPUs (HD Graphics 5300+) are supported by Dolphin for games requiring certain bounding box implementations. Using newer revisions with unsupported GPUs will lead to graphical glitches and softlocks. If game-breaking bugs are experienced, use revision or lower as a workaround. For more information, refer to, ,.

Requires Bounding Box
A large portion of this game requires bounding box emulation. Without bounding box emulation, there will be graphical errors, crashes, and other issues throughout the game. It is not recommended to ever disable bounding box emulation while playing this game.

Major Slowdown During Transitions
During some transitions (many of the ones including "paper effects:" boat flipping in prologue, bridges folded into place, back wall in Bowser's castle torn through, etc.), the game will slow down dramatically. The framerate usually dips to 10/15/20/25 fps on sufficiently powerful hardware, depending on the transition. This is due to bounding box using atomics and blocking, making it very slow for certain drivers.

The D3D12 implementation of bounding box batches reads and fixes this issue, but is not merged into the emulator yet. It can be found here - https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/3713

Direct3D Graphics Defects
Direct3D has a few graphical defects, such as Mario flickering in Tube Mode and improper scaling when in Airplane, Paper (when moving around), and Boat Modes. Use OpenGL to avoid this problem.

Glitched Transitions
Most transition effects will show only garbage. Disable EFB Copies to Texture Only to prevent that. Note: In some cases the game will actually crash if you have EFB Copies to Texture Only enabled.

Audio Lag
When playing, the audio may lag, queuing shortly after an action occurs visually. This issue can be fixed by setting the Audio Backend to XAudio2.

The error occurs if the player talks to Merluvlee and asks for where to go next.

JITIL Crashes
JITIL causes crashes at battles. Use JIT to prevent that. Fixed in recent development builds.

Professor Frankly's Gate
The gate outside Professor Frankly's house turns into a cyan block, and then disappears when he is opening it to show you the Thousand-Year Door. Fixed in.

Background During Pageflip
In the castle in Chapter 1, and there's this switch puzzle where Koops are used to hit a block. Walls become improperly transparent behind where the stairs move to. Refer. Fixed in.

Improper Water Effect
After Stone Key Quiz and going through a pipe into the sewers, the water reflections are a bit messed up depending on where you walked. Refer. Fixed in.

Chapter 3 Posters
In Chapter 3, when you peel the posters off the walls, they show up improperly and look weird, sometimes casting blackness over the wall, sometimes showing up as a tiny piece of a poster, and sometimes drawing over geometry they shouldn't be. Refer. Fixed in.

Punies
The Punies may display incorrectly on all backends. EFB Copies to Texture Only displays garbage, but with it disabled the Punies are distorted. It only happens when they are standing still, and seems to happen more when they are facing left and not right. See. There is a workaround using a custom texture to replace the garbage. Fixed in.

16:9 Aspect Ratio Fix
The built-in Widescreen Hack causes clipping issues. The following AR codes work as a replacement, causing less issues. To avoid conflicts, make sure that Widescreen Hack is disabled while using these codes. This code also speeds up the emulator in the Shhwonk Fortress.

NTSC-J
04193838 4E800020 044195F8 3FE38E39

NTSC-U
04199598 4E800020 0441F6D8 3FE38E39

PAL
0419B274 4E800020 0442C158 3FE38E39