supermochi64 / sm64-plaque-decode

# What does the Super Mario 64 courtyard plaque say?
**Short answer — most likely:**
> ***Eternal Star***
> ***We hope so***
…set in **Palatino Bold Italic**, most likely **Adobe's own 1990 PostScript Palatino** (Adobe Type Manager era), and **not** "L is real 2401".
With that font, a blind search over 17.7k English words returns exactly **"We hope so"** as its best string.
The plaque on the star statue in Peach's castle courtyard is a single 32×32 grey texture. Its two lines of text are
3–5 pixels tall, too small to *read*. This project doesn't try to read or upscale it. Instead it **simulates how a
1996 artist made it** and searches for the text that best explains the stored pixels:
1. Type the text in a period font, on a canvas of some size.
2. Resize to 32×32 with a standard filter.
3. Apply blur and gamma.
4. Lay it on the stone.
Millions of fonts, process settings and texts were scored on a GPU, and the method was calibrated on synthetic
plaques with known text.
*Top: the real texture and our final fit. Bottom: the artwork the model implies before it was shrunk: "Eternal Star /
We hope so" in Adobe Palatino Bold Italic (1990) at 26 px and 19 px, typed on one 190×160 canvas, every letter nudged by
hand, then shrunk to 32×32 (bilinear, light blur, gamma 1.4) onto the extracted stone. Inside the text the model is on
average about 1 grey level (of 31) away from the plaque.*
📄 **Full report:** `report/report.pdf` (LaTeX source in `report/`)
🏆 **Think it's wrong?** Take the challenge: beat the score with your own reading, or hide a secret word and try to fool the decoder.
🎬 **Video:** L is Real 2401 SOLVED: What Mario 64's Plaque Really Says (the whole story on the mochi64 channel)
## See it move
| 1 · real vs. model | 2 · blink | 3 · more pixels |
|---|---|---|
| | | |
| Left of the yellow line: the real plaque from the game. Right: the model. The letters run across the line without a jump. | Switches between the real plaque (white frame) and the model (green frame). It looks like the same picture. | The model at the game's 32×32 size, then the same model with more pixels: "Eternal Star / We hope so". |
## Key results
| question | answer | evidence |
|---|---|---|
| font | **Palatino Bold Italic** — best of all: Adobe's 1990 Type 1 original | best of ~530 era fonts and of every Palatino digitisation 1990–1999 (Adobe, Apple, URW, Linotype); wins an identical rigid process search against Times, New Century Schoolbook, Bookman, Georgia, Helvetica, Zapf Chancery, Courier… |
| in-game font? | **No** | SM64's own dialog font (extracted from the ROM, same process search) fits far worse than Palatino and ranks near the bottom |
| process | with Adobe's file: **192×160** artwork, **26 px** type, tracking +2, whole-pixel advances, **bilinear** resize, blur σ≈0.3 px, **gamma 1.4** | the free URW clone and the genuine Apple 1996 Palatino independently converge on 160×128, 23 px, tracking +1, blur 0.45, gamma 1.8 |
| plain stone (2nd pass) | same recipe, sam