Planetarian is a wonderful experience and one of my favorite VNs. The HD version is, sadly, not available in english but this version of Planetarian can look better than ever thanks to a free, relatively new, upscaling tool called Magpie. In this guide you'll find the download link for Magpie as well as an explanation on how to set it up to play Planetarian and many other games.

Magpie is a free, open-source upscaling tool created by github user Blinue. It is an app that takes any application running in a window, makes it fullscreen, and applies different upscale algorithms similar to what you would find on emulators or media players like VLC. It's the perfect tool to use with games like Planetarian, whose fullscreen mode looks a little blurry on modern resolutions.

At the time of writing, 31st of August 2021, the github page for Magpie is still written mostly in chinese, albeit easily translated with Google Translate. The app itself, as of version 0.6.0, is thankfully available in english and partly in russian thanks to github users neoKushan and ButtERRbrod.

Examples:

This is Planetarian's built-in fullscreen mode.


This is Magpie's fullscreen mode, using the ACNet scaling mode.

Magpie has the ability to inject a DLL into the game's process. This is used to fix the problem with some games displaying two cursors on screen while using it, as is the case with Planetarian. This injection may be able to trigger anti-cheat protection in games that use it. It is not recommended to use Magpie in multiplayer games with this kind of protection, purely for safety reasons.

1.- Visit Magpie's github page: https://github.com/Blinue/Magpie
2.- Click the "Releases" link and download Magpie's latest version. Alternatively, download the source code from github and compile the app yourself. At the time of writing, this is version 0.6.0.
3.- Magpie comes in a zip file. Unzip all the contents of this file into a folder of your choice.
4.- Run the application by running Magpie.exe. You will get a window like this and you can configure the options as you like. Different scaling modes make the game look different so you might have to test and find the one that suits your needs. Personally, I found ACNet looks best for Planetarian. Do note that you'll probably need to enable "Injection at Runtime" for Planetarian, if you get two cursors on screen.



5.- Run Planetarian without closing Magpie. Make sure the game is running in windowed mode, not fullscreen.
6.- While you have Planetarian's window selected, press ALT+F11 to activate Magpie. You can press ALT+F11 again to disable it and change Magpie's options, if needed.
7.- Enjoy!

Q: Steam won't let me stream the game while using Magpie.
A: You have to go to your broadcast settings and enable "Record video/audio from all applications on this machine."

Q: Is Magpie safe?
A: For singleplayer games, yes. It could be safe for multiplayer games as long as you don't use injection options but better be safe than sorry.