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Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
Just keep your saves. It'll still work on a real PS3
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,760
Died like a scrub on the first boss, now i'm in some Nexus shit and don't know how to get back to the fucker what the shit lul
You will eventually have a chance for revenge against that demon, but for now you'll need to traverse level 1-1 before accessing any other levels. The Nexus is similar to the Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls and Majula in Dark Souls 2, except that it is physically disconnected from the other levels while capable of teleportation to and from the other levels, via the Archstones.

Ee6NGcp.jpg


BTW, i see... ghosts? But the game is offline, did they put fake online shit in there? You mean all the time when i saw ghosts in DS1 or 2 it was fake people? What the shit.
Even playing Demon's Souls offline, there are a few preset ghosts in the tutorial and one in level 2-1. If you played the other games offline, any ghosts that you saw should also have been preset, not actually other players.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,810
Figured out how to bump the resolution.
Wow, so far it's steady 60 FPS at 1440. Every now and then it just likes to crawl down to 30 FPS, usually when i'm braking stuff. Also, when loading a new area have to walk around a bit to make all the textures appear.
Died like a scrub on the first boss, now i'm in some Nexus shit and don't know how to get back to the fucker what the shit lul
I actually have a half a mind of playing it like this. Wasn't actually expecting much, not with a scrub CPU like the 2600.

You never played DS ? Then you are for the ride. Imho best Souls game of them all, mostly because of archstone placement that forces you to git gud rather than to cheese everything. DS shortcuts are something feels amazing compared to all other Souls games. It is a shame though that we never got DS2 or at minimum expansion. I much prefer DS lore instead of DaS.

Those extra threads of 2600 really help with emulation.

Yes game is perfectly playable from start to finish without issues other than mentioned popping when game load first time level, enemy or effect. To not get popping you would have to get someone shader cache and put it into your files but last time i checked no one shared those.

Effectively as someone finished game once they could share shader cache and rest of the folks will not have those issues. Either way with Vulcan shader cache compilation is small issue because it is pretty fast.


I've heard something about a private server for DeS. No idea on details though.

From released server code or something like that and now people run those servers and you can connect to them by changing DNS or something like that on your PS3. RPCS3 doesn't have online yet (but it is in works) so no way to connect to anything. Once RPCS3 will have online no doubt people will make DS servers for PC or just use same ones as those for PS3.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
I remember trying the Xbox emulator for the Cave shooters. They worked pretty well, couple of them were pretty glitchy however.

To be honest, are there even that many games that makes excitement over those emulators worth it? Demon Souls was an obvious one, but i'm looking at a list of PS3 exclusive and i don't recognize anything lmao.
 
Joined
Apr 5, 2013
Messages
2,430
To be honest, are there even that many games that makes excitement over those emulators worth it? Demon Souls was an obvious one, but i'm looking at a list of PS3 exclusive and i don't recognize anything lmao.

Some of them are on PS4/X360/Switch but still, we are talking about what is not on PC:

Persona 5
Dragon's Crown
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (but superior Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers runs as good on Yuzu)
Drakengard 3
Mortal Kombat vs DC
Hard Corps: Uprising
God of War 3 (this one is a bit too choppy on my Ryzen 2600)

I could not run Last of Fags on RCPS3 though, everything crashes after intro cutscene.
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,169
For who is interested: Devil Survivor Overclocked has started to work again in citra (I tested the last canary 1762). You need to wait at the black screen for the song to loop twice, then the game starts. You can save-state at this point if you want to skip the delay in future boots.
 

Puukko

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2015
Messages
3,862
Location
The Khanate
If you want a prime example of what a meme PCSX2 can be, try Xenosaga. I don't know if 2 or 3 are any better, but this game has multiple graphical glitches with default settings that require hacks to mostly remove, but even then performance dips often, mostly during ingame cutscenes and battles with mechs out, to the point where I figured playing in software mode by default might be preferable. That doesn't get rid of the flashing borders during encoded cutscenes, but that's a minor thing.

On top of all that, about a third of the save points straight up crash the game, including ones that offer the minigames so who knows when I'll find one of those that works. There's a patch but it doesn't work with the undub that I started with.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
If you want a prime example of what a meme PCSX2 can be, try Xenosaga. I don't know if 2 or 3 are any better, but this game has multiple graphical glitches with default settings that require hacks to mostly remove, but even then performance dips often, mostly during ingame cutscenes and battles with mechs out, to the point where I figured playing in software mode by default might be preferable. That doesn't get rid of the flashing borders during encoded cutscenes, but that's a minor thing.

On top of all that, about a third of the save points straight up crash the game, including ones that offer the minigames so who knows when I'll find one of those that works. There's a patch but it doesn't work with the undub that I started with.
Pcsx2 is the only emulator which has a horrible performance while having no focus on accuracy.
Even the software renderer is highly inaccurate.
The only saving grace for the emulator is the wiki which gets updates very frequently.
 

Lutte

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Aug 24, 2017
Messages
1,967
Location
DU's mom
It's easy to criticize pcsx2 but the fact that no other ps2 emulator could reach a decent amount of playable games shows how hard it is to make a ps2 emu at all.
Yeah, pcsx2 is inaccurate and has some issues. It's still better than having nothing and there's a decent amount of great games that run mostly without issues like Nocturne.

I particularly don't care if a game series known for the amount of cutscene and dialogue spam thrown at you doesn't work well with it. Priorities, priorities. If they're going to be fixing specific game issues let them focus on things that are actually worth something.
 

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395
It's easy to criticize pcsx2 but the fact that no other ps2 emulator could reach a decent amount of playable games shows how hard it is to make a ps2 emu at all.
Yeah, pcsx2 is inaccurate and has some issues. It's still better than having nothing and there's a decent amount of great games that run mostly without issues like Nocturne.

I particularly don't care if a game series known for the amount of cutscene and dialogue spam thrown at you doesn't work well with it. Priorities, priorities. If they're going to be fixing specific game issues let them focus on things that are actually worth something.

Pretty much. I remember when Play! first appeared and people were saying that in a year or two we will have fast and accurate ps2 emulation. That's now 5? years ago.
Also PCSX2 suffers heavily from undocumented code made by people that are no longer around (Most notably Cottonvibes MicroVU) Which made it hard to improve on it.
It's a mess, but imo an understandable one.
 

Hirato

Purse-Owner
Patron
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
3,935
Location
Australia
Codex 2012 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
PCSX2's accuracy is still slowly improving.
A lot of the games are only fast and playable because of hacks that ship with the emulator; some of these reorder instructions in ways that are easier to emulate, others are fixes for weird quirks in the games, for example, xenosaga's save points call 'exit()' if the jpeg it generates is over 4kb in size.
 

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395
The pcsx2 team put up a list with major changes since the last release

https://pcsx2.net/294-1-6-0-what-s-new.html
This section covers games which went from not rendering anything to being playable, these issues are the most straight forward to fix, we debug these issues by monitoring all the abnormal activities occurring in the core leading to the game to crash and a solution is worked on to correct that behavior.

-Preliminary PSX support has been added! Go try them out yourself, though do note that the PSX backward compatibility is still in its infant state and needs lots of work to be done before it reaches a perfect state.



-Dropship United Peace Force went from not being able to get into main menu to being playable!

As it turns out, our VU branching subroutines had a longstanding bug which failed to account for a branch delay slot inside of another branch delay slot (this is as stupid as it sounds). In other words, the branch was being read as a NOP and got stuck running the wrong code until the game would crash. Never underestimate PS2 developers. If you think they won't do something that's forbidden in the manual, you're dead wrong.





-All of the World Rally championship games are now playable!

This was fixed by properly handling branches in delay slots, the old behavior wasn't addressing this properly and the new behavior was shown to be accurate to the original hardware through tests ran from the EE PS2 testsuite.

-Games which relied on game specific patches/hacks no longer need them anymore to boot!

Due to series of improvements in our core functions and recompilers, games like Jak X, Spongebob the Movie, Spongebob Battle for Bikini Bottom,The Incredibles, The Incredibles Rise of the Underminer, Soukou Kihei Armodyne, Garfield Saving Arlene, Tales of Fandom Vol. 2 are now playable without requiring the usage of any hacks or game specific patches.

This might not come of as a surprise to most users since these games were still playable in the older versions through the use of game specific patches, but handling this accurately would mean there are no potential side effects from the game specific patches and it brings us one step closer to the goal of emulation accuracy, which we strive to improve.

Graphics Synthesizer bug fixes
This section covers games which received an improvement in visual accuracy, these issues are mostly hard to debug due to the abnormal way of how the Graphics synthesizer handles most functions and the lack of any proper documentation regarding them, our GS developers however always try their best to fix them!

-GSdx: Implementation of fixed TEX0 context for all renderers

Fixes texture corruption in games like Lupin: The Third and James Bond 007 Nightfire.







-GSdx: Improvements in the D3D11 renderer
For a while, the D3D11 renderer has been lagging behind in terms of emulation accuracy in comparison to the OpenGL renderer, the renderer has now gone through various improvements by backporting changes like channel/texture shuffle, depth emulation and texture conversions from OpenGL and is now much improved compared to the 1.4 version.







-GSdx-PCRTC: Improved calculation of output circuit dimensions and add unsupported functions

Previously the height of the framebuffer was calculated using guesswork based on the width of the framebuffer. This method was obviously wrong and it caused some conflicts when scaling the buffer for upscaled resolutions. This was fixed by using the height of the output circuit as a base for the framebuffer height. This fixed upscaling issues with lots of games which didn't have adequate buffer size in 1.4 version.





-Addition of Feedback write support: Using the feedback write circuit, we can write a specific rectangular area in the output image to an arbitrary position in a local buffer at an arbitrary sampling rate dependent on the status of feedback write setting registers. This feature was not implemented before, and implementation of this allows games like Xenosaga to make use of the feedback write mechanism to convert the color to a luminance greyscale. This fix is exclusive to the OpenGL renderer at the moment.



-Improved merge circuit emulation: In some cases the GS is configured to use two side by side display rectangles for rendering. The rectangles are merged by the GS's merge circuit and the resulting image is sent to the TV. The horizontal position of the display rectangles, however, was ignored when emulating the merge circuit, which caused image overlap issues where only half the image was displayed. The display rectangles' horizontal position is now taken into account, which fixes the image overlap issues and makes split screen mode in Time Crisis 2 and 3 playable.

Time Crisis 2 (before) (320 X 224)



Time Crisis 2 (now) (640 X 224)



-Support double scan mode: The output size for games are halved whenever the INT and FFMD flag are set in the display mode registers, however there was a bug which led the halving to be done twice unintentionally, this behavior was fixed to get proper output back on games like Gitaroo man.





-GSdx: Hardware mipmapping support

Previously, all the hardware renderers suffered from mipmapping issues due to various unimplemented functions. For example, whenever mipmapping is performed, it is necessary to set the base pointer address and the buffer width of the textures of two (or) more mimpap levels, even this basic function was not emulated before as there wasn't much priority on getting mipmapping to work on hardware renderers.

The main reasons were that only some few games (around 10-30) had mipmapping related issues which is quite a small amount of games in comparison to the whole PS2 library and there was also a possibility that mipmapping could influence the performance negatively, so none of the developers were planning on tackling it, as at that time, there were far more severe bugs related to the CLUT, Texture cache, display rectangle setup and Z buffer which were more prioritized. However, mipmapping has now finally been implemented!




GSdx-HW: Improved texture search and validations in texture cache

Improve texture search/invalidation in render target by correctly matching vertex offset draws with buffer offset reads in the texture cache, the eyes are now properly rendered in hardware mode.


Before After

Core bug fixes

This section covers games which received an improvement in timing/graphical accuracy through the changes made in the core Vector units/Emotion Engine, recompilers and their relevant submodules.

Counters: Accurate Hblank calculation for all video modes
The horizontal blanking interval calculation algorithm used by video modes were modified to adapt to each and every different video mode, this change led to fixing texture corruption and irregular timings in some PSX and PS2 games.




IPU: Improved emulation of the PACK command
The pack command was modified to convert from RGB32 to RGB16/INDX4 instead of RAW8 to RGB16/INDX4. This change fixed FMV issues in "Hisshou Pachinko PachiSlot Kouryaku" series of games.

Before After

VIF: Timing fix for MSCALF, MSCNT instructions

Previously the MSCALF and MSCNT instructions were delayed along with the MSCAL instruction, these instructions trigger the execution of the micro instructions in VU1. This was done in order to fix the graphics on the Snowblind Engine games such as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath; However, delaying this seemed to cause quite a few shadow problems on games like Downhill Domination, Twisted Metal and potentially other games. These instructions are now properly handled resolving the issue.




VU0: Fix CFC2 transfers from TPC register
An instruction sequence with the CFC2 instruction had abnormal behavior when compared to the PS2 hardware on our tests, this behavior was rectified to bring you no longer levitating skirts in Street Fighter EX 3.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
I wonder if Primal is playable now, even though people said it was I had framerate issues with that one, getting past the intro was hard pass.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
Just enjoying playing ds games on melonds,oh a update on the website,i wonder what interesting new things are being added:

#BlackLivesMatter
May 30th 2020, by Arisotura
You may be aware of what's going on in USA. I'm not going to go in detail over this, but I'm going to state that I stand with the protesters. For the end of racist policing, for the end of capitalism.
I mean, as a trans girl, my existence itself is political...

God dammit,every single time.Does amazon have "making a emulator for complete dummies"?
 

Puukko

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2015
Messages
3,862
Location
The Khanate
I imagine the number of people who would opt for that version over emulating the Wii version is rather small.
 

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