call me skeptic but it's pretty blurry. Has anyone been able to look at the texture files to see if that's what it really says? (for those who don't know; people have made the connection with "L is real 2401", which is what's supposed to be written on the concrete star statue and somewhere in ocarina of time - I haven't really played that game so I don't know where it is, and paper mario which was supposedly released on february 4, 2001 (2/4/01).)
It's been done, second image on this page: http://eternalstar.50webs.com/ Today, it's generally believed that the sign says "Eternal Star". While this has never been verified by anyone who worked on the game, it seems to be the most logical interpretation. As everett mentioned, the sign appears on a statue of a star in SM64. As well, the final board in the original Mario Party is called "Eternal Star", so the name does reoccur within the series.
I am glad that the stupid idiot author of that poorly written document did not once consider the possibility that the text may be Japanese script as the last part does look very like the Japanese katakana character Ko (could be Fu or Su too)... I am sure that the same texture in a better resolution exists in the Japanese Mario 64 ROM...
I agree about the japanese thing, but why would there be a better quality texture in the Japanese version?
OoT's version of the texture, freshly ripped from Dodongo's Cavern, in all its 32x32 pixel glory. Just for the record, I guess.
I was about to say the same, the last characters of the top line definitely look like Katakana Ko and I(コイ), but I can't make out anything else. I think the very first character might be a hiragana A(あ）. If I had to guess anything, it's possibly just random characters typed in in order to give the appearance of real sign of some sort. It's unintelligible.
Maybe it doesn't say anything? Could be scribble to make it look like text? It's possibly nothing more than a silly rumour. It's way to pixelated to really figure out WHAT it says. I agree on the Japanese script, I doubt I'd be in any other language or type face. Random Image Search threw this out
yeah, one of their design fuck-ups SGI should have known better but they were on a buggy and rushed schedule to complete the machine..
Well, you should be able to get up to 128x64, but only with grayscale I 4-bit textures, which aren't exactly pretty to look at by themselfs. Learned that the hard way recently, trying to convert images to N64-compatible textures and getting them to load correctly...
And we all know what their biggest design fuck-up was... I never knew the same sign was in OoT too, but the rumor itself always sounded stupid to me.
Given the size of the texture, I've always felt it was meant to be unreadable. (And, for that matter, I'd say it's pretty much impossible to determine whether the text is an actual language or just random squiggles.) I don't know much about the N64's texture limitations, but it seems to me that, had the developers intended the plaque to be readable, they could have created a higher-res image for it by piecing together four 32x32 textures, or two 64x32 textures... as I recall, this is how the paintings were done. (For what it's worth, the texture is exactly the same in OOT and Mario... they're just scaled differently in-game.) I've always wondered how non-English players interpreted the text... wouldn't know where to begin looking, but it'd be interesting to know.
