Mods, Emulators, and PC gaming help
Most of the sections on this page will be how to get older games to run better, or with some modern QoL features.
Giving more RAM to 32-bit apps
Last Updated: January 2026
32-bit apps can use up to 4GB of RAM, but are usually limited to 2GB because computers back then only had 4GB of RAM, so programs were only allowed access to 2GB.
Luckily, there is a simple flag in 32-bit programs that allows them to actually use 4GB of RAM on 64-bit systems.
Download and run this program, selecting the .exe of the game you want to patch when the program prompts you. That’s it. It will now have access to 2x RAM as before.
This is necessary when modding some games, especially when using HD textures. Some modpacks even come bundled with this. But on other games (especially open world games like Fallout NV), it’ll actually improve the vanilla game, running smoother and crashing less, just because it has more resources.
In-Game Settings
Ambient Occlusion
AO is essentially fake lighting. Without any light sources, we can approximate shadows from objects near each other. This is used in addition to a regular lighting engine, or ray tracing, to cast actual lights and shadows around the game world. Even a good lighting engine looks wrong without AO. It’s one of the most important tricks for making a game look good, and the lack of it is why really old games just look flat.
| Performance | Quality | Notes | |
| SSAO | Fast | Okay | causes haloing |
| HBAO | Slow | Good | Half-res/flickers |
| HBAO+ | Fast | Better | ghosting |
| GTAO | Slower | Best | more VRAM + ghosting |
| RTAO | Slowest | Realistic | Ray Tracing |
When in doubt, HBAO+ or GTAO will be your best bets, unless you really like Ray Tracing and have the performance overhead for it.
Texture Filtering
Texture filtering is how the game interprets your textures. You can have high resolution textures, but with bad filtering, you won’t notice and will just be wasting VRAM.
Texture filtering has multiple components, so we’re going to break this down into 4 sub-parts: Texture Sampling, Mipmaps, Anisotropic Filtering, and LODs
But before that, let’s discuss the literal raw images stored on your PC, and which version to load into VRAM. It’s basically where we start from to then sample, filter, etc. to render in game.
Texture Quality
This is which version of the game’s textures to load in. You can choose like low-med-high, and that will give you textures of different resolutions.
Texture quality basically ONLY costs VRAM, so you should max this out if you have the VRAM available, as it doesn’t cost anything, everything after this is based on how nice these textures look, and you already have it downloaded.
This actually makes for a solid lo-fidelity look for PC handhelds (where you care about battery life), where you set the settings all to minimum, except the textures to high. Things look simplified, but still HD.
Some games will let you choose not to install the HD or 4k textures if you don’t plan to use them, but otherwise, if you can’t afford to use the textures, games just make you download everything in the highest quality anyway.
Texture Sampling
Texture sampling is how the game reads points from a texture to load into game. So an HD texture can be really blurry if you’re using the wrong filtering technique. Try to keep this as high as possible in high fidelity games. It’s not that expensive these days.
In most games, Trilinear is the best option
- This is not an expensive part of rendering, so you shouldn’t need to drop to Bilinear unless a game doesn’t have it
If a game is pixel art, then you’ll want to disable this or use Nearest, to stop it from blurring the textures.
Mipmaps
Mipmaps are essentially the idea of taking a texture and pre-downscaling it to a smaller size, so that later in-game, you render the smaller texture on things farther away, to save the resources of rendering the full image, and also because you tend to get weird artifacts trying to render full size textures really far away and at weird angles.
Most games won’t actually let you change this, you just needed to understand this before we move on. It is an effectively free process that games will just do.
Note: Trilinear filtering, without mipmaps, won’t be any different than bilinear filtering, but it also doesn’t cost any more, so unless you’re having graphical issues, trilinear should be fine.
Anisotropic Filtering
AF renders mipmaps of different proportions and fixes textures rending strangely at odd angles and improves clarity further from the camera. It can range from 1x (off) to 16x.
On most games, you can do 16x AF. It shouldn’t cost more than a frame more than 8x AF, which already shouldn’t cost you a frame.
- If playing on hardware where 16x or 8x does cost frames, then use 4x.
On older games without mipmapping though, you’ll want this off, as it can produce strange “shimmery” artifacts.
Also on pixel art games again, just like Trilinear, you’ll just want this disabled.
On a PC handheld, you can drop this to 4x AF to preserve battery life.
Level-of-Detail
LODs are models and textures the game swaps in for objects far from the camera. If a tree is too far away to make out the smaller details, then a lower “level-of-detail” version will be rendered while it’s out of range. Think of mipmaps as the texture LODs, and then game devs make the 3d model LODs to swap in. Or UE5 uses Nanite to generate them at runtime.
Seeing this visually is often referred to as “pop-in”, so if you see objects loading in, or the terrain adjusting slightly as you enter a town, then you saw it swap a lower LOD model for the higher one. Increasing the LOD will actually just increase the range at which higher LOD models load. This can be very taxing on your PC, but also can help with immersion the most.
LOD affects the CPU a lot more than the other settings, as it’s literally handling thousands of little game decorations around the world, spawning them in and culling them out, updating their models, etc. all in real time. You basically want this as high as your PC can handle, so if the game has recommended settings for you, and this is one of them, you can try raising it to the next level, and if it doesn’t perform well, then dropping it back down.
For older games, max out the LOD, use mods if you need to, you should be able to render every object in the game at max LOD with your modern hardware.
Call of Duty: Finest Hour & Big Red One
Last Updated: September 2026
Finest Hour & Big Red One are the console ports of the first 2 Call of Duty games, except back then cross platform “ports” were often outsourced to a different studio and an entirely different game.
Play on Dolphin with these settings:
Config > General > Basic Settings
- Enable Dual Core
- Enable Cheats
Graphics > General > Shader Compilation
- Hybrid Ubershaders
- Check Compile Shaders Before Starting
Graphics > Enhancements
- Internal Resolution: 3x Native
- Anti-aliasing: 2x MSAA
- Texture Filtering: 16x Anisotropic
- Check Per-Pixel Lighting
Finest Hour
Right Click Game > Properties > AR Codes
- Click Add New Code
- Name: Widescreen
KYFW-UZWZ-MW3ZQ
11ZE-JQ6X-3DKC3GTA IV
Last Updated: January 2026
GTA IV is a very broken mess on PC, but there is a single one-mod-fix-all solution that turns it into the best way to play it.
Fusion FIx
Nexus Mods
GitHub
Download
The mod can be extracted into the game’s folder, or there’s an installer that will do it for you. Just follow the instructions on the GitHub page.
Pokémon
Last Updated: January 2026
The following ROM hacks add QOL features, such as all Pokémon being available in a single game, meaning version exclusives, but also those you have to trade to evolve, or needed a special event. They tend to have a bunch of other stuff too. They don’t make the games harder though, at least not much harder.
Gen 1
GBA UltraViolet – all Gen 1 Pokémon available in FireRed
Gen 2
GBA Heart n Soul – ROM hack for Emerald
NDS HGSS Golden Edition – all Gen 2 Pokémon in HG/SS
Gen 3
GBA Modern Emerald – QOL ROM hack true to Gen 3
GBA Delta Emerald – ports ORAS features to Emerald
3DS ORAS Polished – all Gen 3 Pokémon in OR/AS
Gen 4
NDS PlatinumQOL – all Gen 4 Pokémon in Platinum
Switch Luminescent Platinum – all Gen 4 Pokémon
I could add more, but we don’t really play the games after that.
Sonic – Classic 2D Games
Last Updated: January 2026
Sonic Origins Ultrafix
GameBanana
Hedge Mod Manager
Sonic Origins is the official way to play these games, but they have some issues and there’s a single one-mod-fix-all solution that fixes most everything, making the games more authentic, but also lets you customize how you want to play these classics, like allowing the spindash and drop-dash in games before they originally released, or making all characters playable in all levels.
First you’ll need Hedge Mod Manager, this will let you mod a bunch of Sonic games, but once you follow the instructions to install it and it’s all set up correctly, you should be able to 1-click-install from the GameBanana page.
Sonic – Classic 3D Games
Last Updated: May 2026
Sonic Adventure DX
Use the SADX Mod Installer to get the SAModManager and improvement mods
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
Render Fix
Download from Github and use SAModManager to install
If you don’t have SAModManager from the SADX installation, download it here: GitHub
Just place it in the Steam install location for your game and run it to install the Render Fix mod
Sonic Heroes
Reloaded II Modloader
Download Setup.exe from the link above and follow the directions to setup Sonic Heroes.
Download these prereqs from the Reloaded II Modloader
Search them in the “Download Mods” section. The correct ones are named these exactly and made by “Sewer56“
- Sonic Adventure 1/2/Heroes Physics Swap
- TONERR: The ONe Expandonger Reloaded Reloaded
- Reloaded File Redirector
Note that there are copies uploaded by “Sewer56lol” idk if these are like a virus or something but don’t get them
Physics Swap Mod Preset + Stage Fix
Now, you can download version Version X, A, B, or C from the link above and install the actual fix mod
Here are the explanations for the versions of the mod:
- Version A removes the repeated voice lines that are in the game multiple times when automation happens normally
- Version B removes all voice lines from the stages
- Version C leaves the voice lines untouched
- Version X has the Ver.A Dialog changes, but also makes a few gameplay changes that makes the game’s flow closer to the Adventure games, not forcing you to slow down as much
I’d recommend Version A for your first playthrough, then try Version X after that. If you have a lot of nostalgia for Tails saying “MY HEAD’S SPINNING” then you might want to use Version C.
After Downloading and extracting, open the README and follow the steps at the top to install the mod. This one is manual, but it’s just dragging+dropping some files.
There’s also some other recommended mods at the bottom of this page, and I personally use them all. Most can be installed through the Reloaded II Modloader “Download Mods” page.
Shadow ’05
Shadow the Hedhodge Reloaded
This mod changes a bit to streamline the game, as in fixing controls, making movement and abilities more fun, unlocking things earlier, etc. It also does the normal stuff like widescreen and HD HUD.
Sonic ’06
Project ’06
If you want to play the story with the bosses, hub areas, and cutscenes, emulate the original with mods. If you want a fully modernized and improved version of the game, both graphically and mechanically, that even makes Silver and Shadow’s stages more fun, then play Project ’06. Should be straightforward, it has all original assets and doesn’t require roms or anything, just unzip and run the game.
Emulating Sonic ’06 with Legacy of Solaris+Physics mods
- Use latest Xenia canary instead of normal Xenia
- Open “xenia-canary.config.toml” in the xenia directory
- Ctrl+F and set
clear_memory_page_state = true - Ctrl+F and set
gpu = "d3d12"
- Get Sonic ’06 Mod Manager, open it, and set up the game
- Prereqs, can (mostly) be installed via 1-click install buttons:
- Complete Physics Overhaul
- Physics Companion Mod
- Khronos
- Follow the instructions on the page, there’s a second step after the 1-click install
- Legacy of Solaris
- Click the green “<> Code” button at the top right and then “Download ZIP”
- Drag+Drop the “Legacy of Solaris – Physics Compatible” folder into the mods folder setup in the mod manager
Now you should be able to launch the game from the modloader.
Splinter Cell
Last Updated: May 2026
Splinter Cell 1
Enhanced SC
Fixes lighting, adds widescreen, controller support, and 3 DLC missions
Adds many additional QoL features like not needing to switch to tools manually before interacting with doors and other backport/console parity features.
If on Linux, make sure to follow those extra instructions in the GitHub page.
Pandora Tomorrow
Fusion Fix
Widescreen Fix + Controller Support
Also lets you change the color of Sam’s goggles via config
There’s mods for the other Splinter Cell games too, but they aren’t necessary like these first two. The FusionFix SC1 mod is actually included in the Enhanced SC above.