Emulator

This is an issue that was brought to me by razius, so the credit goes to him for all the information and screenshots. I don't know if this is really a proper issue, or if this is a fitting title for the issue so feel free to close it or update it to something that better describes it.

I'll quote razius' messages to me in an attempt to try and convey what is going on here:

Any reason why the standard Dolphins wouldn't switch to grayscale transparent textures (used for particles/specular maps) with a black bkg like the Ishiiruka one?
I find it hard sometimes impossible to retexture transparent textures since not every effect/plugin works well with transparent

Seems like Ishiiruka dumps the real full information files with an alpa mask while the normal Dolphin applies the alpha mask and it's missing the extra info.

IMO, the normal Dolphin should treat the transparent files same way Ishiiruka does.

The problem with original Dolphin's transparency is that... i can't use certain plugins coz the edge will look like crap on some of them but if i could split the image into alpha and the texture, then i can apply the plugin to both images.
There's also the fact that... even with a black BKG, Dolphin's texture doesn't look like the Ishiiruka one. Dolphin texture with black BKG seems to have a higher contrast so i'd say there's some lost info there since that's sort of a compression of the dynamics that you can't undo... it's like trying to mix a song where every stem is heavily compressed.. there's not much you can do to restore the dynamics once it's squashed.

End of razius messages. So based on what little I know, Dolphin is converting the "black" value of single channel textures (I4/I8) to that of one with transparency (IA4/IA8?). Wiimms ISO Tools and Ishiiruka correctly dump these texture formats with intensity ranging from black-white rather than alpha-white. In the conversion Dolphin is doing, it appears that at least half the intensity is lost.

I'm not 100% certain what is happening in the second screenshot, but razius seems to have a pretty good idea. Here part of the color is removed and replaced with transparency. Again Wiimms ISO Tools and Ishiiruka properly dumps these textures, but Dolphin is missing some information.