Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Morpheus Kitami]

Plus not having the complete set of MAME roms can make it hard for someone starting out with the damn thing. I remember thinking for the longest time that it was much more complex to get started than it really was. And its still a pain in the ass to get non-arcade games working. Since one of the reasons why you'd even use MAME in that case is for systems poorly emulated elsewhere, good luck getting help with that.

 

[spekkio]

Ryujinx kinda works (game, DLCs), but is still throwing a fit when trying to enable updates:

People mention this error online, in various situations. Maybe it just hates my CPU (7th gen a.k.a. Kaby Lake)?

Updates and DLC installed fine for me on 11.0. Not a clue how it works on real hardware.

Tested on version older than Puukko's (6894) and newest (6976), on firmware 12.0.3 & 11.0.0, so I don't think it's version / firmware - related.

Problem kinda fixed ITZself:

I think it was caused by outdated (incompatible with firmware / emu?) prod.keys. Tried current build (7058) with latest keys available @ EmuGen (from 20.07.2021) and updates worked properly (no errors). Tested on firmware 12.0.3 & 12.1.0. Latest update 13.0.0 doesn't work with these keys at all:

Anyway, if anyone gets the "arithmetic operation" error with Ryujinx, try updating your keys.

I've tested mods as well, since I had problems with using them in Ryujinx previously. Not sure why, 'cuz they worked fine this time. Just extract them to the proper folder:

And volia: 60 FPS + No outline on models:

 

[spekkio]

Speaking of cue files can anybody recommend a good cue mounting software?
Windcemu does not comply and most other options are bundle ware like daemon tools.

If looking for an alternative/something clean (without sailing the high seas while putting full trust in the uploader's files),

ImgDrive
(Note: Some VPNs/DNS resolvers may blocked the site though)

+ Freeware
+ Runs on Win2k to Win10
+ Installable OR Portable download packages
+ Minimalist UI with no bloated features
+ Support ISO, CUE, NRG, MDS/MDF, CCD, ISZ images
+ Mount APE, FLAC, M4A, WAV, WavPack, TTA file as AUDIO CD (16-bit/44.1kHz)
+ Does not require rebooting after installation

- MDS 2.0/MDX, CDI not supported

I'm able to play Dai Akugi CD Audio BGM ingame (from a mixed mode disc image) using ImgDrive, whereas my usual virtual drive image program (VirtualCloneDrive) can't.

Tested and I can confirm that it supports CD-Audio (wav+cue). Mounts mixed-mode (data + CD audio) images as well (bin + cue), but I can't test if they work, because it looks like all Win10-compatible players gave up on supporting such formats (old PC / PS1 / Saturn games) long time ago.

I guess I would have to find grandpa Winamp in some old backup...

There's also this:
https://www.elby.ch/en/products/vcd.html

Does not support wav+cue or bin+cue at all. So it's probably supposed to work with "protected" images (.ccd) only. Hard pass.

Verdict:

If you don't need Safedisc / Securom emulation, use ImgDrive, Deamon can suck dick.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Can't wait for the inevitable decompilation/port like SM64 got.

 

[Duraframe300]

Can't wait for the inevitable decompilation/port like SM64 got.

https://zelda64.dev/progress.html

 

[Duraframe300]

Random Note: PCSX2 now fully supports Disc Swapping, used in titles such as the Monster Rancher games, Dynasty Warriors and of course titles such as Singstar. Also makes Dual Disc games a bit more convenient since you don't have to use the savegame route anymore.

Only thing that brings up problems is the Take That CD on Singstar. So, if your biggest wish was to crank out some *Back for Good* at your next PCSX2 karaoke party you're out of luck.

 

[Nostaljaded]

Tested and I can confirm that it supports CD-Audio (wav+cue). Mounts mixed-mode (data + CD audio) images as well (bin + cue), but I can't test if they work, because it looks like all Win10-compatible players gave up on supporting such formats (old PC / PS1 / Saturn games) long time ago...

Are you sure it's really due to shitty Win10 dropping mixed-mode disc image support (and not because of your customized Windows settings)?

I've no issues on Win7 with my installed foobar (and also tested on the latest portable version with default settings) for both MDS/MDF & CCD mixed-mode disc images.

 

[aweigh]

Windows emulation on ARM making strides:

(i.e. running Windows through an emulator on your Android phone and playing Windows PC Games that way)

NXGZ

OP·1d

Oblivion (PC version, x86) with the mod NorthernUI enabled running on OnePlus 6T using Windows on ARM. Medium settings, bloom off, maxed draw distance. 20-30 FPS outside, 10-20 FPS in the city.

Using Oblivion's FPS counter. Renegade Project

 

[Puukko]

Ar Tonelico Qoga... I'll have thoughts about this that I'll note down in the relevant thread later, but I figured I'd share my experiences emulating it. Namely, I was really surprised to find out it's actually uncapped and runs really well. A PS3 game at a stable 160+ fps wasn't what I expected to see anytime soon. It's basically a PS2 game's older brother though, using prerendered backgrounds and whatnot. Unfortunately, the game has íssues with fairly frequent crashes with these settings and some area transitions/menus require changing the SPU and PPU settings, but that causes performance to absolutely plummet to the 20s in battle. I may continue experimenting, as that's basically required when most of what people have written down in the official forums is very old info by now.

 

[spekkio]

Metroid Dread got leaked yesterday. Works fine in Yuzu and Ryujinx other than some missing cutscenes. I've played 7 hours so far and I think it's pretty good, definitely better than the last game Samus Returns. There's a ton of exploration and items to find, and the map seems bigger than any of the other side scrollers in the series.

Can confirm. Except the "FMVs" and "Intro slides", game works fine on both Yuzu:

And Ryujinx (transfered first save from Yuzu without problems):

:gloriouspcmasterrace:

 

[Reinhardt]

Ar Tonelico Qoga... I'll have thoughts about this that I'll note down in the relevant thread later, but I figured I'd share my experiences emulating it. Namely, I was really surprised to find out it's actually uncapped and runs really well. A PS3 game at a stable 160+ fps wasn't what I expected to see anytime soon. It's basically a PS2 game's older brother though, using prerendered backgrounds and whatnot. Unfortunately, the game has íssues with fairly frequent crashes with these settings and some area transitions/menus require changing the SPU and PPU settings, but that causes performance to absolutely plummet to the 20s in battle. I may continue experimenting, as that's basically required when most of what people have written down in the official forums is very old info by now.

Waiting for more experiment reports. It was almost unplayable last time i tried it.

 

[Puukko]

On a related note, I just made a discovery(?) that was really just under my nose all along. Ryujinx (and apparently yuzu as well) have a way to uncap the framerate globally - just disable vsync. I guess I'm not sure what I thought that option did, but I had been under the impression the patches specifically enabled higher framerates when they probably just fix the issues caused by running the games outside spec. I briefly tested XBC HD again (it's my default test dummy) and its menus sped up with the framerate but I didn't notice anything else. Not the most practical game for this as I can hit 70 fps at best outside menus (the performance delta between native resolution and 2x seems to grow along with the framerate, however), but that does open up the possibility of just limiting the framerate via drivers to benefit from the occasional higher FPS during gameplay while mitigating the downsides. So not a universal wonder fix, but something to look at on a case by case basis.

That game has received another sizeable performance boost recently. I noticed regressions where the performance would drop to previous levels after a while when I last tested the game some 15 versions ago, but that no longer seemed to be the case with the newest version. Very enjoyable performance wise now, if my running-around-town test can be generalized to the rest of the game.

Metroid Dread hit 165 fps fine, but one comment mentioned some mechanics being tied to framerate so I have no idea if it is actually playable all the way through.

I'm mostly interested in SMTV in particular - this does mean I won't have to deal with 30 fps even at launch before anyone has had time to make patches. NMH3, another UE title, has patches for 60/240/unlocked FPS along with increased render distance which I'll interpret to mean that engine behaves quite well at higher framerates when emulated but still has enough issues to warrant a patch.

Very exciting stuff overall - I had been in the mindset that 60 fps emulation is about as good as it'll get, but seeing both PS3 and Switch games capable of going much higher shows that perhaps I should adjust my expectations.

 

[tet666]

Metroid Dread got leaked yesterday. Works fine in Yuzu and Ryujinx other than some missing cutscenes. I've played 7 hours so far and I think it's pretty good, definitely better than the last game Samus Returns. There's a ton of exploration and items to find, and the map seems bigger than any of the other side scrollers in the series.

Can confirm. Except the "FMVs" and "Intro slides", game works fine on both Yuzu:

Fixes for the intro video not showing picture are now live on both ryujinx and yuzu it was the only issue with this game as far as i know so the game is flawless in both emulators at release. Yuzu doesn't have upscaling yet so i recommend using ryujinx since the game is quite blurry at native resolution in docked mode (900p?) it looks pretty great in 4k. Game is pretty easy to emulate btw so most machines should be able to handle it just fine, Ryujinx also got a multi threaded shader compiler recently so shader stuttering is now bearable on modern CPUs.

 

[CyberWhale]

Neither emu is able to run the game consistantly at 60FPS on my end, but Ryujinx seems to stutter more obviously regardless of chosen resolution.

EDIT:

Solved it by:
- updating Ryujinx
- settings Async to On instead of Auto
- setting above normal priority in task manager

 

[Puukko]

Damn. The enhancement mod for NMH3 bumps up the resolution and framerate and optionally increases rendering distance, but also enables SSGI which is an UE feature. Pretty amazing that something like this can be done on an emulator.

On (1440p):



vs off:



My ol' 1070 can't get anywhere close to 60 fps at this resolution so next I'll try out 1080p.

Edit: 1080p is perfect. Nice.

 

[spekkio]

BROs,

I'm currently being punished by SMT - Strange Journey Redux. And since the original low-res fonts and textures were giving my eyes AIDS, I've decided to try the upscaled textures from the HD Texture Pack.

Initial impression was great. I mean new textures look "artificial" OFC, since they are AI-enlarged, but still, shit is much more readable now.

HD textures + 4x internal:

Vanilla textures + Native internal:

Generally speaking, UI looks great/ decent / not bad:

Problems start on the map, as you can see, some textures still look meh (originals were too small to be properly enlarged?):

And things get much worse in combat. "Transparent" enemy textures, animated during combat, look really bad:

Still, if you can deal with it, this pack can be useful at least for UI-related enhancements. Just don't try it on internal res lower than 3x, 'cuz it will look absolute dogshit:

Anyway, all Megaten 3DS games (except Soul Hackers) have their (WIP) HD Packs now. Links:

• SMT - Strange Journey Redux
• SMT 4
• SMT 4 Apocalypse
• SMT - Devil Survivor Overclocked
• SMT - Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker

 

[spekkio]

BROS, quick update. I think the best solution for SJR is to use the new textures for everything except the animated sprites.

In static image the difference between this (upscaled sprites):

And this (vanilla, so very pixelated sprites):

Can be debatable. But the old sprites look much better in motion than the new ones. Which is esp. visible for the "smaller" textures of our fags (right screen):

:notgreatnotterrible:

I think the originals were just too small to be properly upscaled (with transparency). And they can't be created from scratch, like UI icons.

What to do: after extracting the modified textures to the /load/textures/00040000001CD200 folder, (re)move "Demon Sprites" and "NPC Sprites" subfolders from the "Sprites" folder.

 

[Puukko]

An HD AI upscale is definitely a project I want to do. 3DS games are a pretty obvious case, though they require dumping and the games I am familiar with already have WIP projects. Hmm...

 

[Duraframe300]

An HD AI upscale is definitely a project I want to do. 3DS games are a pretty obvious case, though they require dumping and the games I am familiar with already have WIP projects. Hmm...

If you want a suggestion, how about Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time for PSP? There was an *attempt*, but that one went nowhere.

https://imgsli.com/MzI1MjM/6/7

Especially the full body portraits would benefit hugely.

 

[Duraframe300]

General Info:

DuckStation development slowed down quite a bit since around 2 months ago as Stenzek has been focusing on helping out PCSX2 (Where, among other things, he seems to be working on a new qt gui). That said for a 1+ year old emulator it's in a really good state and there are still several commits a month. Still, there are things I'd still like to see be done on Duckstation like a superior implementation of texture dumping/replacing:

https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/pull/2224

Because Beetle's kinda..... unstable.

 

[Puukko]

Ar Tonelico Qoga... I'll have thoughts about this that I'll note down in the relevant thread later, but I figured I'd share my experiences emulating it. Namely, I was really surprised to find out it's actually uncapped and runs really well. A PS3 game at a stable 160+ fps wasn't what I expected to see anytime soon. It's basically a PS2 game's older brother though, using prerendered backgrounds and whatnot. Unfortunately, the game has íssues with fairly frequent crashes with these settings and some area transitions/menus require changing the SPU and PPU settings, but that causes performance to absolutely plummet to the 20s in battle. I may continue experimenting, as that's basically required when most of what people have written down in the official forums is very old info by now.

Waiting for more experiment reports. It was almost unplayable last time i tried it.

Unfortunately I just had one of my HDDs die and while I thought there was nothing of real consequence in there, just old gameplay videos, I had recently moved my RCPS3 folder there which of course contained my saves. So uh, RIP. Now I was perhaps 2 hours in so it's totally fine for me to restart, but I could also spend that time on better games and just listen to the soundtrack.

I'm feeling like testing some more PS3 games though. Hmm...

 

[Puukko]

Lmao. Want to know how Persona 5 behaves when you set the vblank to 300? You get super smooth and nice 150 fps battles, but conversations and everything else tied to the UI gets sped up, and then the game crashes on a loading screen. Thus this is the definitive version of the game - the good bits are better, while you can completely skip Morgana and the game has the decency of sparing you from making the mistake of spending over 100 hours on it.

Back when I first played it, I had to use the debug tools to start and stop threads till the game would boot. It was like dealing with an old and moody car.

SOTC seems to run well, I was getting around 70 fps in the starting area though physics seem to be tied to the vblank, so the reins on the horse will start behaving like a glitched out necromorph corpse if it's too high. My 5600x was also basically maxed out and I think this is one of those games that will see meaningful benefits from extra cores. With regular games you really have to look at edge cases to see meaningful differences between the 5000 series, but RCPS3 gladly gobbles up moar cores.
The game's been on my backlog ever since I bought the collection years ago, so we'll see.

Now, Demon's Souls. A solid 120 fps and I think this game benefits wonderfully from the extra resolution, compared to the rest of the series which suffer from rather ugly blur and shimmer at times. Granted I grabbed a graphics tweaking mod as well as HD fonts so it's not pure vanilla. Booting the game up is a bit glitchy at high fps, the intros go by super quick and the main logo doesn't show but as soon as I got ingame it looked perfect. Next up, some Reshading...

 

[Perkel]

yeah rpcs3 went waaay ahead in recent years on speed and accuracy.

 

[spekkio]

Too bad that PS3 has almost 0 interesting exclusives. At least when compared to PS1 & PS2.

 

[spekkio]

BROs, I've tested another HD Texture Pack, for Devil Survivor - Overclocked this time.

Sadly, due to the weird way the game handles text display (generates textures "on the fly" - more info ITT), it's more of an mixed bag than the pack for Strange Journey.

I mean you get some pixelation no matter what you do.

Some dialogues won’t be upscaled unless your MC is named “Akira” (Akira Masaru). Likewise, some UI elements cannot be upscaled consistently, most notably part of the status screen, the fusion/auction menus and the help banner at the bottom of the screen.

First screenshot: vanilla textures, native internal, linear filtering
Second screenshot: HD textures, 4x internal, linear filtering

So, there's certainly some room for improvement when it comes to this shit, BRO Puukko.