Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Morpheus Kitami]

Looks very cool and has a flair of nostalgia.
Do you know if there will be a translated version?

Has anyone ever released a fan translation of a magazine? I've never seen something like that at any point browsing through these old gaming magazines online.

 

[Endemic]

Just use an OCR tool (eg Capture2text) to read the characters.

 

[Lutte]

I don't know about emulators... but Windows 10 has removed support for 16 bit executables, which basically breaks everything from the era of "too new for DOS".

That's always been the case since 64-bit was a thing.

Far as I'm aware, there was no such thing with Windows 7, and 8.1.
It was removed in Windows 10 due to security issues with the feature that microsoft didn't bother to fix.
It was similarly disabled on Linux for 4 or so years, but it's reenabled now and modern wine can run those
executables just fine (e.g. Win95 version of HoMM2)

WRONG

There are some limitations which apply to Windows XP Professional x64 Edition:

• NTVDM and Windows on Windows were removed, so 16-bit Windows applications or native MS-DOS applications cannot run.[22] Some old 32-bit programs use 16-bit installers which do not run; however, replacements for 16-bit installers such as ACME Setup versions 2.6, 3.0, 3.01, 3.1 and InstallShield 5.x are hardcoded into WoW64 to mitigate this issue. The same is true with later 64-bit versions of Windows.[21]

64-bit versions of Windows do not support 16-bit components, 16-bit processes, or 16-bit applications (microsoft.com)

The x64-based versions of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating systems and Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition do not support 16-bit programs, 16-bit processes, or 16-bit components. However, these 64-bit versions of Windows may recognize some 16-bit installers and automatically convert the 16-bit installer to a 32-bit installer.

There is no, and has never been, any real 16 bit support in 64 bit versions of windows, period. There was however a workaround to make game installers work.

There is, by the way, a version of wine ported specifically to run 16 bit stuff on 64 bit windows :
GitHub - otya128/winevdm: 16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows

You always needed the 32 bit version of windows to be able to run 16 bit programs without external tools. Finally, the last version of windows that could run 16 bit programs is Windows 10, because there is no 32 bit version of 11.

 

[Duraframe300]

New PCSX2 Progress Report covering the end of last year

https://pcsx2.net/blog/2022/q4-2021-progress-report/

Q4 2021 Progress Report
Authored By: RedDevilus
Co-Authored By: TellowKrinkle, refractionpcsx2
Published: May 10, 2022
Introduction #
Looks at the date and notices something.. Yes, my dear readers (or glancers) Q1 2022 should’ve been published 2 months ago and this is the predecessor to that. Sorry for the delay but there have been several reasons to this almost half year delay. Some of those reasons being the process of making the progress reports:

• Publish on private forum thread who has access
• Needing it to be HTML without a working preview
• Having multiple middlemen to check, update and publish on preview site
• Finally go mad at how inefficient the process was that 80% of the time was spent on making sure that all the Pull Requests are listed and pointed correctly instead of actual writing

Ok, moving on to better news is the the fantastic work from everybody involved in making sure that PCSX2 doesn’t cave into a lesser program. In case you didn’t notice we have a new site that brings PCSX2 from 2002 to 2022 as PCSX2 is reborn, and besides, seeing that amazing animation on the homepage is something that you have to decide for yourself on how you feel about it.

So all around we will improve all aspects of the emulator and have better progress reports that cater to the technical, light-hearted or the changelog oriented people. There are also a ton of pictures in this edition of the progress report and I’m sure that quite a few of you readers are waiting on the new look of the Qt GUI, but that will still take a while to see in fruition to the public.

Here is a glimpse of what to expect:

Happy Reading!

Core Improvements #
CDVD #
#4839 CDVD: Implement Correct SpindleCtrl Handling By refractionpcsx2

Fixes some more videos not playing like Digital Devil Saga and fixes texture issues on Shadowman.

#4853 CDVD: Fix Possible Uncaught Exception in CheckDiskTypeFS By stenzek

#4860 CDVD: Implement Disc Swapping By refractionpcsx2

Disc-Swapping has always been a highly requested feature for multi-disc games which may ask you to swap to the second disc half-way through the game.

Others that use it as more as an addendum to unlocking more items in games such as Dynasty Warriors 5. Another game like Alter Echo which requests to put the original disc back when you eject the game even though it has only 1 disc. Surprisingly the SingStar series might handle this the best as it can swap songs via disc-swapping and sure there is a button to do disc-swapping but it correctly handles swapping without it.

As you see, there are multiple behaviors possible when you are using the disc-swapping functionality (e.g. ejecting games) ranging from quite a few games being fine and nothing happening until it requires new data and thus likely crash to giving you error messages or simply freezing.

#4871 CDVD: Time Reads by Sectors per Second Instead of Bytes + Some Rotational Latency By refractionpcsx2

Another refinement on how the disc emulation handles reading and latencies which again improves the timing which the PS2 so desires.

#4881 CDVD: Simulate 1 Sector Read Ahead By refractionpcsx2

Queues 1 sector from a future read as ready which fixes Star Ocean 3 stuttering and Winning Eleven 8 crashing.

#4913 CDVD: Reset VM on SceCdPowerOff Writes By F0bes

Instead of forcefully ‘pulling the cord’ when you reset or press the power button on a real console once, it will send a signal to reset. So it acts more like how the console worked.

#4927 CDVD: Buffer Up to 16 Sectors By refractionpcsx2

Buffers up to 16 sectors on a DVD from its current position.

Documentation from developers shows that the DVD drive will always read 16 sectors as a minimum, so this means if it reads in advance, it can buffer up a bunch of sectors to be read off quickly by the DMA.

#4992 CDVD: Set the Correct RTC Year When Input Recording By xTVaser

Changes how the date is handled for input recording as some games like Metal Gear Solid 3 are sensitive about the date for time-based events.

#5056 CDVD: Adjust DMA Timing Based on PS1 Timings. By refractionpcsx2

The DMA timing calculations were changed to be based on the PS1 DMA timings, but with the difference in bus widths considered, leading to closer DMA timings for CDVD which in turn fixed SpongeBob Lights, Camera, Pants.

#5142 CDVD: Fix Some Read Timing Logic By refractionpcsx2

Improves the timing of read times when buffering sectors but also corrects the status of the CDVD when running certain commands.

#5174 CDVD: Some Error Handling, Status+Ready Flag Changes and Fix CdStop By refractionpcsx2

Corrects some of the statuses and IRQ reasons available to the CDVD, correcting the status of the CDVD controller in certain games. In turn it fixes certain games that were spinning eternally in a black screen or seem to just freeze on the spot like Spyro, Aberenbou Princes, Evergrace and more.

#5182 CDVD: Check File Actually Opened Before Proceeding By stenzek

VU #
#4901 COP2: Simplify Reg Allocation By refractionpcsx2

#4907 Fix Unparenthesized Macro Input By tellowkrinkle

#4910 MicroVU: Use Uncached Reg When Clamping for FMAC Instructions By stenzek

This was causing broken lighting in 64-bit mode, due to the larger number of registers available. Ft gets loaded and cached, but then the FMAC instructions clamp it in all modes except none, which disturbs the cached value (mismatched with the VU state). Jak happens to rely on this value not being clamped, so it was “okay” in 8-register mode because it had to be reloaded.

#4917 Savestates: Add Missing Things From Savestates By refractionpcsx2

Makes savestates more robust by giving more information so as to lessen the chance of breaking the game.

#5048 MicroVU: Preserve XGKick Cycles in Delay Slot By refractionpcsx2

Preserve XGKick cycles calculated when there is a memory write in a delay slot, also added handling for xgkick sync on single instructions.

Previously there was no handling on single instructions (evil blocks) so that’s sorted. The other problem was if there was a mem write in a branch delay slot, it would add the XGkick cycles it needed to run, then erase them! causing the sync to go out, this resolves it.

SPU2 #
#5027 SPU: Fix Videos in Stolen By Ziemas

#5183 SPU2: Add Cubeb Backend, Remove Portaudio and SDL2 Backends By stenzek

The current stable (1.6 as of writing) had multiple back-ends namely Xaudio2, DirectSound, PortAudio, WaveOut. DirectSound was being a buggy mess to maintain, WaveOut wasn’t much better, PortAudio was fine and Xaudio2 was de facto standard on the Windows side. Now Cubeb replaces PortAudio as its successor and keep Xaudio2 as a back-up. Keep in mind in Cubeb the latency slider states 100ms in the GUI but isn’t exactly true as it automatically uses a very low latency automatically based on your system:

Best Case:

(Cubeb) Minimum latency: 10.00 ms (480 audio frames)

Worst Case:

(Cubeb) Minimum latency: 25.00 ms (1200 audio frames)

If it’s above 25.00 ms you either have a computer issue like corrupt drivers or your computer is far too weak.

Xaudio2 can’t handle the same low latency that Cubeb has without bad skipping and warping even on better systems. I hope you guys like the sound. How time-stretching actually works is that you see the first video frame and the sound comes after the targeted sound latency, which for years was defaulted to 0.1 seconds of latency.

#5238 Rename ConfigSoundtouch.cpp to ConfigSoundTouch.cpp By xantares

PAD #
#4809 GUI(linux): Abort ‘Set All Buttons’ & Fixed Window Size By JosephLees

#4985 Create a Shared Pad Header, Get Rid of the Originals, and Do Some Cleanup. By arcum42

USB #
#5032 USB: Gametrak/RealPlay By Florin9doi

This Pull Request made the last non-working game work and looks more like a current Linus Tech Videos about VR with all those wires than a PS2 accessory. I’ll stick to my Black Nintendo Wii instead of this seemingly weird copy-cat.

#5184 USB: Sony DPP-MP1 Printer Emulation By Florin9doi

Most users won’t see any usage with this and that is fine but the goal of emulating the endless USB and PAD devices do scare me, here is a small subset of still needing to be emulated: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/4763

DEV9 #
#4421 Convert DEV9 Config Dialog to WxWidgets By tellowkrinkle

#4933 DEV9: Fix Windows Config Saving/Loading By TheLastRar

#4940 DEV9: DNS Logger Crash Fix By TheLastRar

#4960 DEV9: Don’t Shadow Return Value of GetAdaptersAddresses (Pcap) By TheLastRar

Shadowing dwStatus for the return value of GetAdaptersAddresses will prevent the return value of second call from being inspected in the following if statement.

If the user had a large amount of network adapters, this would prevent the code from getting the adapter information of a the selected pcap adaptor.

The equivalent TAP adapter code is already correct.

#5074 DEV9: Enable Pcap Non-Blocking By TheLastRar

IPU #
#5173 IPU: Overhaul DMA Transfers By refractionpcsx2

Changes how DMA Transfers are handled for example some games like them to be in a specific order.

Fixes https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/5168 (Top Trumps).

Fixes https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/4063 (Phase Paradox). Improves the moving billboard quality in Test Drive (Master has corruption).

Fixes video hang in Eggo Mania/Egg Mania - Eggstreme Madness (patch no longer required).

Fixes Smackdown Shut Your Mouth Titantrons.

Fixes Gladiator - Sword of Vengeance videos (patch no longer required) Partial https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/3489 .

Fixes https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/4360 (Flipnic UFO mission hang).

Debugger #
#4865 Debugger: Fix Goto in Disasm Option for Memory View By F0bes

#4885 Debugger: Separate Symbol Maps for EE and IOP By Ziemas

Adds a new member function to the DebugInterface for retrieving the symbol map for the CPU and uses this where relevant instead of accessing the map directly.

Previously there was only one symbol map, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This prepares for future work on IOP symbol detection.

#4926 Debugger: Support Multi-Line Assembling By F0bes

When multiple lines of opcodes are selected, the ‘Assemble Opcode(s)’ context menu and M-key shortcut will in turn reassemble all of those opcodes.

#4974 Debugger: Initial Memory Search Implementation By F0bes

Now you can finally go into a search for specific memory address or string instead of scrolling just like in cheat engine.

• I think Fobes needs a hug for this secretive message.

#4983 Debugger: Make the Register List DPI Aware (Windows) By F0bes

Fixes the debugger view for registers when the system DPI is not the default 100%.

#4997 Debugger: Reset Breakpoint Skip on Savestate Load By F0bes

#5003 Debugger: Fix Breakpoint Edit Window on Linux By F0bes

#5016 Debugger: Allow Access to All of 0xBXXXXXXX By F0bes

Not sure why certain memory was blocked from being modified, this will alleviate all memory restrictions.

#5031 Debugger: Make Memory Dialog Transparent By F0bes

#5050 Debugger: Format Search Hits With Proper Specifier By F0bes

Make sure certain text doesn’t hard-crash the search. (Print size_t with %zu instead of %d)

Input Recording #
#4945 Input-Rec: Use a Constant RTC for Power-on Recordings By xTVaser

Gives a specific date for input recording (speedrunning).

Miscellanous Core #
#4861 Config: Fix Folder Memory Cards Initial Load By stenzek

Folder memory cards weren’t recognized as a memory card being plugged-in unless you opened the config dialog.

#4914 CI: Retain Workflow Artifacts Permanently via Github Releases By xTVaser

This pull request has brought permanent downloadable (pre)releases on GitHub itself instead of just using Orphis which will not make everything more central but makes it easier to tag commits that are made outside of a pull request and just force-pushed the changes to the project. stares at certain people that have been naughty.

If you want to see more details, Vaser has written an essay-like detail on it - https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/4914

So it will pre-compile working versions of the nightlies/dev and future stable versions on GitHub forever instead of only temporary on GitHub or what was used in the past being AppVeyor (nickname: Slowveyor) which took easily 10-20 minutes per build.

The nice thing about actions is that it can do multiple builds in parallel for free and can also publish these now permanent builds which are again linked on pcsx2.net as GitHub requires you to have an account in addition to being logged in so you have enough options.

GS Improvements #
GS #
#3577 GS: Merge Assembly Files in GS By tellowkrinkle

#3642 Convert GS Settings Dialog to Use Wxwidgets By arcum42

#3940 GSVertexTrace::FindMinMax Improvements By tellowkrinkle

This PR contains the following changes:

• Prevents clang from optimizing out our denormal-removal shuffles (10x faster than before for people who compile with clang!)
• Run divides on four elements at a time instead of two elements and two useless numbers
• Remove inaccurate stq
  • With the above division improvements, on processors with partially-pipelined division (Ivy Bridge and later, Bulldozer and later), accurate stq is actually faster (according to both IACA of inaccurate vs accurate and LLVM MCA). On older CPUs expect performance to be about 2/3 of the old algorithm before taking into account improvements from not double-checking vertices.
  • There seems to be a check of accurate_stq when the OGL backend is deciding whether to use geometry shaders to process sprites.

In the end, ignoring clang issues, GSVertexTrace::FindMinMax goes from taking about 3% of MTGS thread runtime to 1.5% on my computer. (Most of the time was spent doing OpenGL things so if you have a more efficient OpenGL driver it might make more of a difference for you)

#4094 GS-Hw: Fix Burnout Games Black Sky. By iMineLink

Burnout games weren’t emulated correctly due to the texture cache being the biggest pain in the GS side, which you can avoid by switching to the Software renderer and then switching to HW. The game downloaded the texture and then modified it to finally draw it on the CPU side.

Now no more shenanigans in having to switch or ignore the sky issue, there is another game that has a similar issue a shooter called ‘Black’ (A recurring theme that PS2 game title names fit with their badly emulated issues). Black hasn’t been fixed yet, perhaps in the future.

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#4346 Spin Before Sleeping Threads to Reduce Thread Sleeps/Wakes By tellowkrinkle

“Drawing triangles is super easy to parallelize! GPUs are super parallel, and it should be nice and easy to spread a software renderer across lots of CPU cores!” is probably what most people think. And this is generally true, if you’re trying to software render for a normal PC graphics API like OpenGL. But we’re emulating a GS. That’s okay though, it’s still a just bunch of triangles, right? PCSX2 has a software renderer, and it lets you set the number of cores it used, so we can see how well it scales. And if you messed with that number, you’d generally find that going above 3 worker threads didn’t help much. In some games, like Hitman Blood Money, you’d get the best performance with 0 worker threads. What?

The culprit is thread synchronization. But why would you need to synchronize worker threads when drawing a bunch of triangles? It turns out some PS2 games like to use the result of a previous draw as the texture for another draw. Whenever a game does this, one thread could need pixels drawn on another thread, so we have to sync them all up. PC games do this too, but they’ll usually only do this a few times per frame, rendering an entire image before reading it. When processing effects, PS2 games like to do this on small parts of images at a time, resulting in huge numbers of thread synchronizations. Ratchet & Clank, which previously saw speed start to die off at around 3 worker threads, requires about 500 synchronizations to draw a single frame. Hitman Blood Money, whose title screen’s FPS previously ran in the single digits, sees a whopping 10,000 synchronizations in a single frame, or 600,000 per second! Ouch!

So what went into one of these synchronizations? Before this PR, the control thread would see the need for synchronization, go to the first worker thread, see that it was still running, and go to sleep. When that worker thread finished its work, it would wake up the control thread, which would then go through the rest of the worker threads, checking that they were finished as well. While this was happening, the worker threads would each see that they have no work to do, and go to sleep themselves. Then, the control thread would decode the image they just rendered into the format worker threads can read, at which point it would submit the next piece of work for the worker threads to process, and go through and wake all the worker threads back up.

Sleeping and waking threads is pretty fast, but it’s not that fast. One round trip seems to take around 5-10 microseconds on most computers. Which seems pretty fast, until you compare that to the average time one of the threads spends rendering a pixel: 5-10 nanoseconds. So in the time all these threads spent going to sleep and waking up, a single thread could have rendered 1000 pixels! Another way to look at it is how much time Hitman Blood Money spends watching its threads sleep and wake rendering a frame: 50-100ms. That’s like 10-20 fps, and we haven’t even rendered anything!

So how do we solve this? Well you could say “just sync less”, and we are working on that (some of the more recent autoflush PRs have helped here), but that’s not an especially easy solution. The easy solution is “just don’t go to sleep”. In the new implementation, threads keep spinning, staring at the status variable, for up to 50 microseconds before going to sleep. Maybe not the best use of CPU time, but it brings the time for one round trip communication from 5-10 microseconds down to just 0.2 microseconds, or 200 nanoseconds, an over 10x improvement. With this, using multiple threads manages to not be slower than 0 threads on even Hitman Blood Money, though it isn’t much faster either. For less sync-intensive games, the falloff point for increasing threads has increased and is now usually in the 4-5 thread area (assuming you have that many cores on your CPU), bringing PAL R&C3’s FPS from having dips into the mid 30s to a smooth locked 50 on a Ryzen 5 5600X.

#4348 Replace Cached GSOffset With Live Calculations By tellowkrinkle

The way the PS2’s GS stores images in memory is a bit special. If you took a piece of memory and just read it like normal, your image would look like a scrambled mess. The GS actually has a different scrambling for each of its image formats, often referred to as swizzles, which allowed devs to do more effects on the shader-free GS. As a result, PCSX2 has to deal with a lot of different possible swizzles.

Calculating swizzled offsets for every pixel of an image every time you read it would be pretty slow, so GSOffset was created to work around this. A GSOffset stored a list of memory offsets from the top left pixel in an image to each pixel on the left edge, and a list of offsets from a pixel on the left edge to each pixel not on the left edge. This took up 16kb, but it allowed PCSX2 to go from some pixel coordinates to the memory address of that pixel with two table lookups and two additions. Since a GSOffset was only valid for a specific combination of texture format, texture size, and texture starting address, a new GSOffset was generated for each unique combination of those a game used.

For most games, this worked fine. But a few games, including MLB Power Pros, Remote Control Dandy SF, and Ultimate Spider-man, liked to throw garbage data at the GS register that describes the information for the current texture. For for each piece of garbage data, PCSX2 would create a new 16kb GSOffset, filling up a 32-bit application’s 4GB address space and running out of memory in just 40 seconds. (Sure, 64-bit has access to more memory, but if it filled up 4GB in 40 seconds, even a computer with 64GB of ram wouldn’t last long…) So why not just clean up unused GSOffsets and free them? GSOffset was clearly not made with this in mind. It didn’t provide anything to help with actually using its data, so any code that wanted to use it had to do all the calculations manually. Some code pulled pointers from the GSOffset and threw them all over the place. Cleaning all that up for liveness tracking would have been a pain, and the lack of nice methods for using its data was also annoying, so we instead opted for replacing GSOffset entirely with a new class that didn’t require any runtime allocations (and therefore had nothing to track).

The new GSOffset takes advantage of the fact that the table of offsets from a pixel on the left edge to any other pixel doesn’t actually depend on the texture size or starting address, only on the texture format. One of these tables is created for each of the PS2’s supported texture formats by the compiler, which is possible because there’s a fairly small number of them. The rest of the calculations (e.g. the left edge calculation) are done whenever they’re needed, taking advantage of the fact that images are usually read left to right, top to bottom, so while a 512x512 texture has about 260 thousand pixels, reading it using the GSOffset would only run the slightly slower left edge pixel calculation 512 times. In the end, this slightly slower calculation was offset by the reduction in time it took to look up and create GSOffsets, resulting in no performance regression from this change.

#4385 GS: Simulate Scan Mask (Fix Transparency in MGS2 & MGS3) By Sergeanur

For what feels like forever, transparency didn’t work correctly for Metal Gear Solid 3 and other games such as Gran Turismo 4.

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#4757 Improved Stats Printout From Sw Renderer By tellowkrinkle

If you want to printout your stats from the SW renderer, it doesn’t look as readable as it was badly aligned and has no header.

#4850 GS-Hw: Don’t Write Clamped Depth Test Value to Depth Buffer When ZMSK Is Enabled. By lightningterror

Fixes broken shadows from Kingdom Hearts Re-Chain which produced lines.

#4859 GS: Cleanup Ini Ranges for Some Values. By lightningterror

#4863 GS: Fix OSD, Shade Boost Slider Values Not Showing. By lightningterror

#4887 Gs-Tc: Propagate Texture Shuffle Format on Readback By tadanokojin

Due to the way some effects work on the GS and how our Texture Cache handles it, sometimes the wrong texture format can be remembered, which will cause it to get stored in an incorrect memory format when it is saved back to the real GS memory for downloading to the EE core. This PR corrected this behaviour and properly fixes the flashlight in the Silent Hill series:

#4891 GS: Revert Be7e1163b4f7e3fe19876462fb26cd082ffb3ab4 By lightningterror

This PR reverts an older commit from 2013 (1.2 era) which had wrong assumptions on texture region repeating and how the clamping is handled along with it. Multiple games were affected on the visual side or even performance-side.

Test Drive Limited (Blue roads):

Kaan Barbarian Blade (Black Character Model):

The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Heat Haze Effect of the fire):

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#4906 GS: Use Stream Buffer for Vertices/Indices/Uniforms By stenzek

This will certainly help AMD GPUs on Windows but it does help NVIDIA GPU users too as the default behaviour was to stall (essentially wait and stop for new instructions) which caused bad performance.

These charts below lists 3 different systems that will give you an easier way to tell how much it could help:





#4919 GS: Gsstate (The Old Gsdx One) Cleanup By tadanokojin

#4941 GS: Use Custom Allocator for SW Renderer By tellowkrinkle

This new behavior improves the software renderer quite drastically in a good way and handles it more specifically in certain situations. I would even state that the software renderer has never been this fast even compared to the older stable versions as I always tried to play True Crime NYC and never got full speed in the software renderer and now it’s handling it with ease.

#4952 GS: Further State Cleanup + Fixes for Older Dump Compatibility By refractionpcsx2

#4965 GS: Let Draw Happen Even if Invalid, Log Invalid Draws By refractionpcsx2

In some scenarios, the ZBUF or FRAME values may get set to invalid data, but on draws where they are not getting used. Before this would completely ignore the draw which caused problems, however this lets it continue since the data it needs is valid.

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#4966 GS: Fix Up CLUT Offset Handling in 32bit I8 Mode By refractionpcsx2

This pull request fixes several games with the wrong colors, which depended on the CLUT (Color Look-up table) which basically is a value corresponding to a color palette an example being the RGB values (255, 0, 0) which means full red color, for example. The issue arose around the fact that the 256 colour palette is split in to 16 chunks of 16 colours and it can update it at any one of these chunks, unfortunately memory writes only really worked if it was updated on either chunks 0, 3, 7, 11 or 15, others would break down. Further to this the behaviour when it was asked to update the end of the buffer only was incorrect (The dirt in GTA: San Andreas relied on this!), which has now been corrected.

A few examples but not limited to:

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#4980 Miscellaneous Fixes for MacOS By tellowkrinkle

#4993 GS-Ogl: Remove Device, Driver Checks in GLLoader. By lightningterror

#5000 GS:SW: Fix Fog on X64 Avx2 By tellowkrinkle

Fixes a bug where ‘f’ would be incorrect for the blue channel when fogging was enabled on the rendering of a sprite on avx2 x64.

Like you see this purple grass on Hitman which everybody should agree isn’t realistic and is a bug:

#5006 GS: Only Reload Auto MIPs on TEX Base Change By refractionpcsx2

The handling of MTBA was previously not handled very well and was somewhat of a mystery, we have since discovered the correct behaviour for when it can be triggered through restrictions in texture sizes and formats, which this PR attempted to correct, enough to fix Parappa The Rapper 2 and Ape Escape 3.

What his PR missed but we discovered later is that the formula for updating the MIP addresses was incorrect, but also the pending draws needed to be flushed if these new MIPMAP values were different. It does remain that hardware mode has difficulty handling mip-maps.

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#5013 GS: Fix Half Pixel Offset and Half Screen Fix Config Swap By tellowkrinkle

#5024 GS SW: Handle Flat Prims Without Float Conversion By refractionpcsx2

Large floats are not handled very well in the software renderer due to the range being limited by signed integers but also some precision is lost by being single floats which only have a precision of 24bits. This PR makes it so flat triangles are treated like sprites and the Z values are passed as integer so no precision is lost, which fixes games which use flat triangles to draw UI/2D screens.

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#5026 GS-Gui: Change Blending Option From None to Minimum. By lightningterror

#5029 GS/OpenGL: Use Shader+draw for CopyRectConv By stenzek

#5035 GS: Improve FixedTEX0 Accuracy By refractionpcsx2

The calculation of how to handle texture sizes wasn’t perfect and would cause graphical issues when upscaling such as Final Fantasy X.

#5054 GS-Hw: Adjust/Minor Optimization on SW Blend Shader a Bit By lightningterror

#5061 GS-Hw: Improve How We Handle AA1 Draws By lightningterror

In the last progress report (Q3 2021) there have been improvements to how Edge Anti-Aliasing works for the software renderer (lines and triangles type), this time the hardware renderer has also been improved for several games such as Doko Demo Issho series, FIFA 2002 and other unknown games.

However it has only been fixed on the lines type but not the triangles type which is used a ton for a game like Final Fantasy X. Hopefully in the future we can get feature parity with the software renderer which handles both types correctly and while the issue on hardware renderer is about the same it will be look worse in the severity factor.

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#5064 GS-D3d11: Properly Set Afix in EmulateBlending. By lightningterror

#5067 GS/OpenGL: Use CreateRenderTarget() for Temp HDR Target By stenzek

#5072 GS-Wx: Fix Some Gui Interaction. By lightningterror

#5087 GS: Unify HW Texture Caches By tellowkrinkle

#5088 GS-Glsl/Fx: Split Color Clamp/Wrap in It’s Own Function. By lightningterror

#5098 GS Debugger: Fix Length of Dump. By lightningterror

#5103 GS-Hw: Sample Depth on Green Channel By lightningterror



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#5110 GS-Hw: Try to Use a Mix of HW/SW Blending in More Situations. By lightningterror

This will improve the blending behavior on default settings. Blending affects many things such as the lighting, shadows and more.

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#5128 GS-Ogl: Optimize Fragment Shader Uniform Buffer. By lightningterror

#5135 GS-Hw: Optimize Pabe (Per Pixel Alpha Blending) By lightningterror

#5138 GS: Replace Separate HW Renderers With Single Shared Renderer By tellowkrinkle

In the past all the hardware renderers like OpenGL, Direct3D11 all had their own code locations which causes a lot of duplicated code and if someone made an improvement to one they shouldn’t forget improving the other hardware renderers which causes code debt if they do.

Now they all will share more code with each other.

#5139 Fix Broken Resources By tellowkrinkle

#5154 GS: Check CLUT Dirty Write on Vertex Kick By refractionpcsx2

#5180 GS: Fix Looping Over Pages of Textures With Massive Strides By tellowkrinkle

#5194 GS/OpenGL: Add a Shader/Program Cache By stenzek

#5196 GS: Move Afix Check to High Blend Level By tellowkrinkle

#5197 GS-Hw: Fix Recent Alpha Max Check. By lightningterror

#5198 GS: Unify Constant Buffers Between Renderers By stenzek

#5208 GS: Add Missing Override Specifier to a Few Files By stenzek

#5213 GS-Hw: Extend Blend Mix to Work When Alpha Is Higher Than 1. By lightningterror

#5223 GS-Hw: Mirror Anisotropic Filtering Behavior on Direct3D11 Like OpenGL, and Allow It to Run on Nearest Texture Filtering By lightningterror

Misc Improvements #
GUI #
#4451 Allow Relative Elf File Paths on Command Line By Ziemas

Instead of the absolute path C:/User/Documents/PCSX2/ELF/test.elf, you can do things like ELF/test.elf instead.

#4468 IPC: Rename to Pine By GovanifY

IPC is a generic name for this function so PINE was chosen as it’s replacement. Especially when it’s already useful for RPCS3 and other potentially other emulators or programs.

#4747 Savestates: Small Refactoring By MrCK1

In the times always knoweth, there lies an evil power known as entropy but one angry kot has arisen to the challenge to bring order to chaos. Okay, maybe not as epic as the first sentence makes you believe but CK1 made sure to automatically bring a subfolder per-game instead of one blob (root) of savestates inside the ‘sstates’ folder.

What does it solve you wonder? Well, my dear reader if you do have several games and you make a lot of savestates in multiple slots (Don’t look at me) you will gain the ability to have an easier overview which ironically kinda mimics how a real memcard structure works. If you want to compare it, just save normally on your memcard save and make sure it’s a folder memcard to see the differences and similarities.

#4867 WX: Fix GS Hotkeys Losing Values After Reboot By stenzek

Makes sure that the hotkeys still retain their function after rebooting.

#4876 Fix Memory Card Saving and Trace Log Setting Loading/Saving By stenzek

#4882 GUI: Remove Presets 4,5,6 By Mrlinkwii

Preset 4,5,6 (Preset 1 is bad too to be fair) were removed as they only brought specific improvements for specific hardware and it wasn’t good in most cases anyway as it just did some random EE cyclerate and cycleskip.

PCSX2 shouldn’t obfuscate with mostly useless settings that will only appeal a minority.

Personally there should be only 3 modes for people:

• Preset 2 which are the default settings (good for weaker computers that don’t have enough cores)
• Preset 3 which is just Preset 2 + MTVU (it is free performance for the taking for good hardware)
• Custom global and custom per-game settings (any other situation that does not benefit the other two above ones)

#4883 GUI : Remove EE Cycle Skipping 3 By Mrlinkwii

Since all these major timing changes, this isn’t really useful and broke more often than not. More often than not downclocking the EE Cyclerate will give better results for the more lower-end hardware.

Though even in it’s current state Cycleskip 1 and 2 will have decent results for Shadow of The Collosus which didn’t run full speed on the ‘PlayStation 2’.

#4888 Add the Current Profile to the Status Bar. By arcum42

The main window will now say what preset you are using.

#4896 GS Debugger: Show “D3D11 HW” Only on Windows. By lightningterror

#4905 Replace GSWnd With GL Context Wrappers, Remove PDsp By stenzek

This is preparation part 2 to bring in the new Qt GUI.

#4931 Core: Few More Warnings Fixup. By lightningterror

#4975 Add “Clear Missing Files” Option to Recent ISO List By italodirenzo93

If you moved or renamed your ISOs, you either had to nuke the recently played list, ignore it or set it back how it was before. More granular control on how you want to handle latest games played.

#4986 PCSX2-GUI: Fix GUI Inconsistencies By RedDevilus

While not as exciting as a new fix for a game, increased performance on better compatibility this will make the text more aligned with the rest of the windows. Though it did have a meaningful change that the maximum audio latency is now 200 instead of 750.

The default is still 100 ms (0.1 seconds of audio latency) on Xaudio2 but technically lower with Cubeb if you read that section and if you really need 750 ms (0.75 seconds of audio latency) then it’s unlikely you will have a good experience on PCSX2. You may want to consider upgrading your computer in that case.

Can you spot the differences?

#4989 WX: Fix PxExplore on MacOS By tellowkrinkle

#5030 GUI: Bring Back F6 String (Aspect Ratio) By RedDevilus

Doesn’t need much explaining as it was gone by accident to show the keybinding for aspect ratio. Emulation development can have it fair share of regressions.

#5134 Rebase More De-Wx-Ifying From Last Month By stenzek

#5220 GSDumpDialog: Cache Length Instead of Querying Every Packet By stenzek

GameDB #
#4768 GameDB: Typo Cleanup By RedDevilus

#4868 GameDB :Add ‘SingStar ABBA’ Entry By Mrlinkwii

#4869 GameDB: Add VU Clamping to Monster Rancher 3 By Mrlinkwii

#4877 GameDB: Add Missing Entry By Mrlinkwii

#4935 GameDB: Add ‘VUKickstart’ to ‘Maken Shao’ Games By Mrlinkwii

#4981 GameDB: Add and Fix SingStar Entries By RedDevilus

#4984 GameDB: Add and Fix Power Pros Series By Tokman5

#4991 GameDB: Add EE Clamping to ‘Shadow of Zorro’ and ‘Evil Twin - Cyprien’s Chronicles’ By Mrlinkwii

#5004 GameDB: Add Nearest Rounding to ‘Hitman - Contracts’ and Various Fixes By Mrlinkwii

#5007 GameDB: Add ‘GIFFIFOHack’ to ‘Gunfighter 2 - Legend of Jesse James’ By Mrlinkwii

Before
After
#5020 GameDB: Add EE-Rounding and VU-Rounding to Various Entries By Mrlinkwii

#5023 GameDB : Add Various Fixes for Various Games and Remove Not Needed Patches By Mrlinkwii

Before
After
#5049 GameDB : Add Fixes for Various Games By Mrlinkwii

#5057 Gamedb: Remove the Patch for Virtua Fighter 4 By Mrlinkwii

#5058 GameDB: Purge Patches for ‘Knockout Kings 2002’ By Mrlinkwii

#5060 GameDB: Fix Fuuraiki 2 Patch By Mrlinkwii

#5073 GameDB: Add Fixes for ‘Shadow Man - 2econd Coming’ and ‘Ghosthunter’ Games. By Mrlinkwii

#5093 GameDB: Add ‘VIFFIFOHack’ to ‘Men in Black II: Alien Escape’ By Mrlinkwii

#5097 GameDB: Add ‘VUKickstartHack’ to ‘Crash Twinsanity’ By Mrlinkwii

#5106 GameDB: Add Patches to the ‘K-1 World’ Series Games Add EE Clamping Full to ‘D1 Professional Drift Grand Prix Series’ By Mrlinkwii

#5114 GameDB: Add EEclamping Full to ‘Shinobido Takumi’ By Mrlinkwii

#5116 GameDB: Add VU Clamping to ‘MVP Baseball 2003’ By Mrlinkwii

#5118 GameDB: Add EEtiminghack to ‘MGS2’ and Change VU- And EE-Rounding for ‘Primal’ and Add Missing Entries By Mrlinkwii

#5145 GameDB: Add Patches to the ‘Netsu Chu!’ Series and ‘Samurai 7’ Series By Mrlinkwii

#5148 GameDB: Add EE-Clamping to ‘Chou Saisoku! Zokusha King B.U.’ By Mrlinkwii

#5150 GameDB: Add EE-Clamping to ‘Dark Cloud 2’ By Mrlinkwii

#5153 GameDB: Add Patches to 2k Games By Mrlinkwii

#5158 Add “Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2009” to GameDB By Tokman5

#5166 GameDB: Add More 2k Games Patches By Mrlinkwii

#5172 GameDB: Add Gamefixes to ‘Titeuf Mega-Compet’ and Patch ‘Yamiyo Ni Sasayaku - Tantei Sagara Kyouichirou’ Series By Mrlinkwii

Before
After
#5178 GameDB: Add EE Clamping to ‘Digimon Battle Chronicle’ and Fixes to Other Games By Mrlinkwii

#5185 GameDB: Change VU-Clamping on “Sled Storm” By Mrlinkwii

#5187 GameDB: Add VU-Clamping to “Ultimate Spider-Man” and Fixes to Other Games By Mrlinkwii

The game had wrongly colored eye textures (yellow/blue) but are now correctly white:

#5199 Merge the Qt Branch: Part 1 By stenzek

The new GUI is moving along very well, but is not at feature parity as the current WX-Widgets GUI is. Please be patient when it will be released to you guys.

#5234 GameDB: Remove Patches for ‘Neo Contra’ and Add EE Rounding and Clamping By Mrlinkwii

Maintenance #
#4140 Remove WxString ↔︎ Std::string Implicit Conversions By tellowkrinkle

#4709 GS Include Cleanup By tellowkrinkle

#4786 Remove Configuration Coupling to GUI By stenzek

#4818 Add Partial LTO to CMake By tellowkrinkle

#4822 EE: Fix JIT Exits on 64-Bit Windows By stenzek

#4855 Fix Some Compile Warnings Spewed by MSVC X64 By stenzek

#4872 FreeBSD Fixup By tadanokojin

#4908 Remove 30-Day Artifact Retention on Windows Builds By tellowkrinkle

#4929 Remove GTK Dependency on MacOS By tellowkrinkle

#4938 Fix Compilation With LTO on GCC By Ziemas

#4970 Actions: Create Automatic Controller Db Updating Workflow By xTVaser

#4973 Actions: Cleanup Discord Embed Links and Add Release Body By xTVaser

#4978 Create AppRun Hook to Handle Variables By qurious-pixel

#4982 GHActions: Don’t Shallow Clone Submodules By tellowkrinkle

#4994 Actions: Increase Max Linux Build Times as Well Until Cache-Hit Rate Is Reliable By xTVaser

#4999 CMake: Always Default CMAKE_BUILD_PO Off By tellowkrinkle

#5010 Update Libchdr By orbea

#5033 Update the FAQ, as Well as Some General Cleanup. By arcum42

#5039 3rd Party: Update Rogue File to Correct BSD License By refractionpcsx2

#5040 Build: Remove Old Unused Cheatscpp.h File By refractionpcsx2

#5043 GitHub: Update and Add New Issue Template for Non-Game Related Bug Reports By xTVaser

#5051 3rdparty: Upgrade Soundtouch Lib to 2.3.1 By MrCK1

#5052 3rdparty: Upgrade Xbyak to 6.00 By MrCK1

#5059 Actions: Only Announce Pre-Release Releases By xTVaser

#5077 Fixes to CMake and Version Upgrade With CMake By kenshen112

#5083 Bump Mathieudutour/Github-Tag-Action From 5.6 to 6.0 By dependabot

#5084 Bump Actions/Cache From 2.1.6 to 2.1.7 By dependabot

#5090 Readme : Update Links By Mrlinkwii

#5091 GHActions: Fix Mac Build By tellowkrinkle

#5099 GameDB / Memcards - Replace Yaml-Cpp With Rapidyaml By xTVaser

#5100 Linux and Windows CMake Builds: Change Output Executable to Lowercase By F0bes

#5108 VS: Add Some Missing Vcxproj Filters By tellowkrinkle

#5115 Only Pass C++ Flags to C++ Files. By arcum42

#5132 Make Native Builds Default on Linux When Using Build.sh. Remove Unused Switch. By arcum42

#5152 CMake: Remove Gio Dependency on MacOS By tellowkrinkle

#5161 VS: Fix Location of Shaders in Project By refractionpcsx2

#5215 FreeBSD: Fix Compilation By shiorid

#5219 GHActions: Fix Game Controller Db Updater By tellowkrinkle

Other #
#4843 PGIF: Remove Force Fifo Clear on GP1 (00-01)

#4856 Common/StringHelpers: Fix Printing of 64-Bit Pointers By stenzek

#4890 IOP Recompiler: Fix BIOS Trace Logging on 64bit By Ziemas

#4900 Common: Fix AT&T Mixup in FastJmp Code By refractionpcsx2

#4920 Config: Fix Zoom/Stretch Options Not Updating on Apply By stenzek

#4943 Misc: Fix More Warnings. By lightningterror

#4972 EE JIT: Backup Shift on LDR/L if Rs==rt By refractionpcsx2

#4979 CI:Add Build Date to Program Log of Nightly Builds By Mrlinkwii

#5001 Pad-Linux: Update to Latest Controller Database By github-actions

#5019 VSProps: Set MultiProcessorCompilation in CodeGen Props By stenzek

#5037 GIF: Modify Fifo Read Behaviour By refractionpcsx2

#5141 EERec: Remove Zero-Distance Jmp in Full Fpu Mode By stenzek

#5164 Common: Fix GetWorkingDirectory on Unix By tellowkrinkle

Metadata #
See you in our next progress report that is the first quarterly of 2022.

Q4 2021: (dev1838 to dev2185) (2021-10-01 - 2021-12-31)

 

[Don Peste]

Conker: Live & Reloaded is currently marked as Playable on xemu: https://xemu.app/titles/4d530051/#Conker-Live-Reloaded

Other exclusives like Dino Crisis 3, Galleon, Raze's Hell or Voodoo Vince are supposed to be Playable too.

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[Puukko]

Valkyrie Profile 2 has been a troublemaker for emulation but it finally seems to be in a good spot thanks to a texture project that is bundled along with a preconfigured build. Excuse the reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/udcarf/a_fanmade_4k_remaster_of_valkyrie_profile_2/

The extracted size is 21gb (lol) but oddly the patch file lacks the 'sharp' codes, listed under "additional patches" here: https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Valkyrie_Profile_2:_Silmeria

I just manually added those to the provided patch file and I highly recommend it, it makes all the difference.

The most apparent issue with the pack has to do with the fonts. Not all text is upscaled, and upscaled text has single letters lacking bolding as well as those fancier ones at the beginning of some sentences being completely absent. Really weird.







Added sharpening/vibrance/clarity.

 

[flyingjohn]

Dolphin drops support for windows 7.Gonna throw a coin flip soon and see if i go Win10 or Linux in da future.
Also for anybody wondering,the weird multi system byuu emulator passes most accuracy test for n64:
https://ares-emu.net
Some form of compatibility list here:
https://github.com/ares-emulator/ares/issues/143

 

[Duraframe300]

 

[flyingjohn]

Why do i have a feeling this will make the vram problem even worse?

 

[Duraframe300]

PCSX2 QT builds are out (Features Auto-Updater)

https://pcsx2.net/downloads/

Get ITTT.

Edit2: Auto Updater is fixed. Also their discord is getting bombarded.

refraction — Today at 10:25 PM
@everyone I know everybody is excited for the new Qt interface and the auto updater, it's all super fun, but please give us chance, it's literally just gone live, we're going to have problems, we are working through them, please be patient. Bombarding the channels/github with issues isn't going to get it fixed any quicker, we are aware, give it a day or two for us to sort out and all will be peachy. Thank you

 

[Great Deceiver]

Duraframe300 the QT build is great. Is there any way to automatically scrape some website database to download cover art? I remember an old frontend I used to run did that (PCSX Bonus I believe it was called).

 

[Wunderbar]

 

[Modron]

Testing PS5 emulation on a rig that isn't good enough to emulate the PS3 isn't really that informative.

 

[Duraframe300]

Duraframe300 the QT build is great. Is there any way to automatically scrape some website database to download cover art? I remember an old frontend I used to run did that (PCSX Bonus I believe it was called).

Stenzek isn't a fan of implementing it, because of legal reasons (Same reason why he hasn't done so on Duckstation). He's not preventing anyone else from doing it though so it may happen down the line for PCSX2, but in the meantime chances are bigger that someone releases a script for a scrapper or even a utility to prepare covers automatically.

Personally, I use Launchbox, so I just took all the covers that were downloaded from there and then bulk renamed them to match the names of my CHD's, threw the result in the covers folder and PCSX2 picked them up automatically.

Used https://www.advancedrenamer.com/ for the renaming.

That's the best I can tell you.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I suspect that the PS4 and PS5 will be easier to emulate than the PS2 and PS3.

 

[deuxhero]

Duraframe300 the QT build is great. Is there any way to automatically scrape some website database to download cover art? I remember an old frontend I used to run did that (PCSX Bonus I believe it was called).

Stenzek isn't a fan of implementing it, because of legal reasons (Same reason why he hasn't done so on Duckstation). He's not preventing anyone else from doing it though so it may happen down the line for PCSX2, but in the meantime chances are bigger that someone releases a script for a scrapper or even a utility to prepare covers automatically.

Personally, I use Launchbox, so I just took all the covers that were downloaded from there and then bulk renamed them to match the names of my CHD's, threw the result in the covers folder and PCSX2 picked them up automatically.

Used https://www.advancedrenamer.com/ for the renaming.

That's the best I can tell you.

For the record, Dolphin doesn't have to worry about this because almost every physical GC and Wii game has its own internal banner on the disc.

 

[Duraframe300]

Duraframe300 the QT build is great. Is there any way to automatically scrape some website database to download cover art? I remember an old frontend I used to run did that (PCSX Bonus I believe it was called).

Stenzek isn't a fan of implementing it, because of legal reasons (Same reason why he hasn't done so on Duckstation). He's not preventing anyone else from doing it though so it may happen down the line for PCSX2, but in the meantime chances are bigger that someone releases a script for a scrapper or even a utility to prepare covers automatically.

Personally, I use Launchbox, so I just took all the covers that were downloaded from there and then bulk renamed them to match the names of my CHD's, threw the result in the covers folder and PCSX2 picked them up automatically.

Used https://www.advancedrenamer.com/ for the renaming.

That's the best I can tell you.

Speaking of which

https://github.com/LouiseSulyvahn/PCSX2_Cover_Downloader

That was fast.

 

[Derringer]

Bloodborne emulator.

 

[felipepepe]

Speaking of which

https://github.com/LouiseSulyvahn/PCSX2_Cover_Downloader

That was fast.

Do not recommend it, the covers it grabs are washed out, distorted or those ugly "Greatest hits". :/

 

[spekkio]

BROs, there was some minimal testing...

I've decided to play Tactics Ogre - LUCT (PSP) and despite me hating scalers / shaders most of the time, I think for this game using a "Natural Colors" (with blur) PPSSPP's shader is a good idea.

Comparison:

a) 1x internal

Blurry & jaggy:

b) 4x internal

Sharp, but pixelated:

c) 4x internal + "Natural Colors" shader (which adds some blur as well)

Perfection (not really, but decent):

"Dialogue font" & menus are IMO much more readable now:

Sadly, it looks that people complaining about "too much shit added in this remake" weren't exaggerating. I mean:

 

[Tehdagah]

I want to play this but my notebook is shit



There's also the original for Xbox

 

[Duraframe300]

Speaking of which

https://github.com/LouiseSulyvahn/PCSX2_Cover_Downloader

That was fast.

Do not recommend it, the covers it grabs are washed out, distorted or those ugly "Greatest hits". :/

It's being improved constantly to be fair. Latest commit is a quality improvement for the covers as well.

Of course, not everything's perfect. But does the job.

 

[flyingjohn]

I want to play this but my notebook is shit

There is a psp doa volleyball game that you could easily emulate.

 

[Tehdagah]

I want to play this but my notebook is shit

There is a psp doa volleyball game that you could easily emulate.

Nice. It runs even on my cellphone.