To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.15-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
needs, the controller database and the texture tools including the AI
upscaler engine - and no game assets or data of any kind. The executable
contains the game's code in translated form; without your copy of the game it
does nothing. Updating an existing install: unzip over it; game\, dlc\,
user\ and your settings are never touched.
Fixed - the bundled AI upscaler was never looked at
v1.0.14 put the Real-ESRGAN engine in the zip at tools/upscaler/ and made
AI the default, but the two places that decide whether the AI is available -
the Textures page and the pack tool - still looked only in the texture
folder's own upscaler/, where the Download button puts a copy. On a fresh
install the page said "not installed yet", reset the method to Lanczos, and
every pack was made with Lanczos. Both now check the texture folder first and
the port's tools/upscaler/ second, and the log says which copy was found.
Changed - the pack tool decides before it decodes, and holds paths, not pixels
Phase 1 of a full run decoded every dumped texture in pure Python before
asking whether it was art, and kept every decoded image in memory until phase
2. The tool now turns render targets, fonts and HUD away by shape and format
before decoding, reuses the decoded PNG beside each raw dump when it exists,
and keeps only the path until the chunk that needs the pixels. The output is
byte-identical to the old tool's (185 of 185 on a 300-texture sample of this
game's dumps); on a 196,000-dump folder phase 1 went from hours to seconds.
Fixed - continuing a stopped run no longer keeps the previous pack's files
A run at new settings rewrites the manifest first and then overwrites the
pack file by file. Stopped halfway, the next run continued it and counted
every file already in the folder as done, including the ones the old settings
had made. Files older than the manifest of a stopped run are now redone, and
the "already in the pack" count no longer counts a texture twice when its
decoded PNG is in the dump folder.
The runtime and GPU plugin are the stock pair, unchanged since v1.0.13.