All of the limitations discussed above can be circumvented with the right tools, and now WinMip facilitates the use of original textures, eliminating the need to rely solely on pre-existing textures from Papyrus and making possible, for example, those Player's and Molson adverts seen in the Toronto shot on the main page.

So just what does WinMip do? It provides a tidy Windows 9x interface to convert the various Papyrus texture formats (MIP, MI4, M16, PMP, PM4, P16, STP, SRB) to bitmap format (BMP), and vice-versa. The bitmaps can be easily edited in an image program like Paint Shop Pro, and then reconverted and placed back into the DAT. There are a few caveats here, primarily centering around color depth and texture format; a texture utilizing 16 million colors must be reconverted to an M16 (or P16) file, for instance. If you initially converted an MI4 to a bitmap and then increased its color depth, it will not be convertible back into an MI4 but must be converted into an M16.

One feature of ICR2-3D that makes graphics enhancement much easier is the fact that a 24-bit PCX file (using 16 million colors), if placed in the same directory as the DAT (within a track directory, for instance), will override the corresponding M16 file within the DAT, assuming the size is the same. To take an example, if you extract the file BRIDGE2.M16 from the Laguna Seca DAT, convert it to a 24-bit PCX, edit it graphically as you wish, and place it back in the Laguna Seca directory as a 24-bit PCX, the game will use that texture in lieu of the corresponding BRIDGE2.M16 in the DAT. Handy, huh? This applies to non-track DATs (such as CARS.DAT) as well.