Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[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.

 

[Don Peste]

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

Spoiler

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

Fatal Frame (Project Zero) is now considered Playable.

The Xbox port should be the best version, since it "featured graphical upgrades, new ghosts to fight, a redesigned interface for the camera, bonus costumes for Miku, and a new "Fatal" difficulty mode. Completing the game on this difficulty unlocked an art gallery".
https://web.archive.org/web/20220429211851/http://www.tecmo.co.jp/product/ff/

 

[abnaxus]

Ran nullDC for the first time in 6 years

It froze during intro movie

 

[flyingjohn]

Ran nullDC for the first time in 6 years

What year is this?

Try redream or flycast. They should work.

 

[Don Peste]

Fucking finally


Bonus

 

[Cromwell]

I need some help. I started using or rather trying to use pcsx3. The Games I tested run fine as long as I dont do anything with them, when I apply some patch from their database like unlocking 60 fps or change anything the emulator will freeze when trying to start a game. The only way I found to work around that is to restart my computer which mostly makes the games start again but not reliably. I have no fuckign clue what the issue here could even be

 

[abnaxus]

 

[Duraframe300]

Not 100% sure, but I think Stenzek has lost it again and thrown all his toys out. (Deleted all his open PR's for PCSX2)



Edit: Yep, got overly paranoid again. Dude needs some serious help.

 

[Arthandas]

What are you talking about?

 

[Puukko]

Was about to write a tl;dr column about my recent yuzu experiences, but let's keep it short. They introduced some audio fixes in a recent EA that made Fire Emblem Three Copes boot and immediately wipe the floor with Ryujinx in terms of performance. The latter was just too stuttery. Yuzu EA now has Vulkan as its default renderer while Ryujinx still has it tied to some dev builds. I've been using it on yuzu since last year and it's made strides, though graphics corruptions are still to be expected.

Consequently Xenoblade 2 no longer suffers from audio crackling. The vast majority of graphical glitches have also been fixed compared to last time I played it, though I have managed to spawn some digital horrors a couple times. Minimum performance hasn't really changed so I don't think there's hardware out there that can make proper use of the 60 fps patch yet, seeing as my 5600x still drops a bit below 30 at times. Next gen hardware at 1x, maybe.

I'm curious where 3 will fit in. DE was a bit toned down in terms of fidelity which made it run quite a lot better than 2 on top of having a usable fps patch. To 2's credit, it's probably been the easiest adjustment to 30 fps for my pampered high framerate ass.

 

[Don Peste]

Fucking finally

It's outttttt: https://gbatemp.net/threads/zettai-zetsumei-toshi-3-translation-project.368872/
If you want it just ready to play, get it from CD<3.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I finally managed to emulate GBA games on my 3ds, well emulating should not really be the word because inside the 3ds it's the entire gba hardware. Twilight++ only worked for DS games but not GBA but i just tried open GBA Open GBA Github and works fantastic, will play FE 6 now and after it probably Battle Network.

 

[Rincewind]

New Hatari version is out:

https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/news.html

Changelog:
https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/doc/release-notes.txt

 

[Wunderbar]

Anyone here use a keyboard when emulating?

I've been experiencing a strange issue when using a keyboard - sometimes it stops working, but not entirely. Only the character keys don't work, the rest of them (like shift, ctrl, numpad, etc) continue working just fine. It happens randomly when I alt-tab from emulator's window, and then it somehow gets resolved by itself, without me doing anything particular.

I've encountered this problem in Dolphin, in PCSX2, and now currently suffering it in Duckstation.

 

[Hirato]

Anyone here use a keyboard when emulating?

I've been experiencing a strange issue when using a keyboard - sometimes it stops working, but not entirely. Only the character keys don't work, the rest of them (like shift, ctrl, numpad, etc) continue working just fine. It happens randomly when I alt-tab from emulator's window, and then it somehow gets resolved by itself, without me doing anything particular.

I've encountered this problem in Dolphin, in PCSX2, and now currently suffering it in Duckstation.

Basically the Alt key gets stuck. (ditto goes for shift if you did alt+shift+Tab).
Even though you're not holding it, the emulator thinks you're pressing ALT+whatever.
You can fix it by just tapping that alt button again.

 

[somerandomdude]

RPCS3 actually runs very good frame rates on the few games I tried. Demon's Souls, Dragon's Crown, and the Tales games that never got PC ports. Even on a paltry Ryzen 5 1600x. Frame rates comparable to similar types of games on PCSX2.

RPCS3 doesn't officially supposed any sorta frame limiter removal (for speed boosts), not unless they implemented it on a newer version, but you can use cheat engine's speed hack to increase the speed by 2-3x. In any of those games I was able to increase the speed hack by x2-x3 without reaching a peak. If your CPU power is of course too low, it won't give you a speed increase by the specified amount, so I had plenty of CPU power to spare even with an old CPU, enough to double or triple the game speed. Any of these latest Ryzen laptop CPUs, 5600U, 5800U, etc crush a desktop 1600x on emulation.

Some games on Yuzu/Ryujinx don't run full speed on a 1600x, in fact nothing I tried on Ryujinx runs full speed, I'm told you need at least a Ryzen 5 3600x or comparable Intel CPU to get full speed on Ryujinx, if it can even run full speed on that specific title with any current specs. So, RPCS3 is less demanding than the Switch Emulators for sure.

Triangle Strategy on Yuzu ran full speed on a Ryzen 5 1600x (with Vulkan, not OGL), but it was prone to crashing periodically. OGL was more stable, so if you got a better CPU, I'd use OGL on that game for sure.

 

[Puukko]

Xenoblade 3 is a bit more rough than I was expecting when it comes to emulation. The best method currently seems to be Yuzu under OpenGL. Vulkan consistently crashed before the main menu and Ryujinx consistently crashed after the first cutscene. The game's locked to 30 fps (I am interested to see if a DE style dynamic patch will be possible) and neither emulator can currently scale it properly. It actually looks worse at 2x compared to 1x and only looks somewhat better at 4x, but that's not feasible due to performance. So an unstable 720pish experience it is, for the time being. Quite the adjustment after I got XB 2 looking so nice.


In related news, I've been trying out mobile 3DS emulation and it's been an interesting experience to be sure. You don't want the version of Citra from the app store, rather Citra MMJ off Github:

https://github.com/weihuoya/citra

I tried Pokemon USUM and Fire Emblem Echoes and managed to install both texture packs and gameplay mods fine. Moving and unzipping all these files around with a mobile file manager is a bit of a hassle, though. I'm on a Oneplus 8T (SD 865/8GB) and while it can push the frames no problem, stutter is still a bit of an issue with these texture packs. Whatever caching is present seems to have the memory of a goldfish. What's neat is that you can freely move and disable individual on screen buttons as well as the screens themselves, so it's easy to tweak them on the go. There are also cheat patches included which to my knowledge the desktop version doesn't come with and I was positively surprised by how well the 60 fps patches for these games worked. I was expecting the games to just run at double speed but in Pokemon, only movement and animations were sped up (which is nowhere near as jarring as it may sound and is actually welcome) while FE seems to work completely fine. That zoom in when a battle animation starts seems faster to me but again, not a bad thing. I run both games at 3x resolution.

Where it got bumpy was when I tried to combine all this with my Dualsense controller. It's supposed to have official support on Android - in practice, a laundry list of devices, including mine, fail to bind some buttons on 12, which means I have to make do without my circle button or right bumper. Haven't had a chance to test out L3/R3 (do 3DS games have these?) or the right stick but I basically had to substitute those buttons. What a mess. I got so close to a really comfy experience.

Anyway, have a couple screenshots.

 

[somerandomdude]

Live A Live works good on Yuzu, but you gotta use OGL, not Vulkan. Vulkan crashes on this particular title. Setting the CPU accuracy to "unsafe" is fine for a lot of games I played if you need a slight frame rate boost and your CPU is a bit under performing, but some games don't like it (I heard Xenoblade games in particular). There were a few spots I got dips in that weren't related to shader building, and lowering the accuracy evened those out so I got full frames. Vulkan is always faster and smoother when it works, and with considerably faster load screens as well, but it's got stability issues. If vulkan works with no crashes, there's literally no reason to touch OGL.

 

[spekkio]

Puukko

Heh, seeing Echoes' screenshots immediately made me smile. What a great game / one of the best Emblems evar.

 

[Puukko]

Xenoblade 3 got me to try out something I hadn't really considered before, which is manual graphics patches for Switch games. The folks at GBATemp are already hard at work reverse engineering the config files (while others are having retarded personal arguments over tiny graphical differences in their toys, or failing to grasp the basics of English - something about this series, I swear...)

There are instructions and other information in the first post, but if you just want something that werks, grab the emulator version of this preset:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/xenoblade-chronicles-3-graphics-settings.615901/post-9891927

And place the files in your mods folder for the game, following this folder structure:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/xenoblade-chronicles-3-graphics-settings.615901/page-3#post-9889185

Note that the ips patch needs to match your game version, "16F4915DF864674DFD6BE2EB7298E3FC25ABBBA4000000000000000000000000.ips" being the one for 1.1.0 which is already out. Then make sure the mod is ticked under game properties, leave resolution at 1x and go.

Some shots from chapter 2:

Spoiler

Now, there are caveats. The game has serious memory leaks and will likely crash if you don't take some measures. It'll eat up your pagefile, RAM and VRAM. The first two can be mended to a degree.

- Grab Memreduct and set it to clean the RAM every x minutes, I set mine to 15:

https://www.henrypp.org/product/memreduct

This seems to have no adverse effects after several hours of play, it just prevents crashes due to lack of memory. It'll happily gobble up 32gb in a single session otherwise.

- Set Windows pagefile size to something silly. I set mine to a maximum of 100GB and it's sitting at a comfortable 45GB now.

As for VRAM, you really should have 8GB if you plan on using these enchancements, by the looks of it.

This is all with Yuzu OGL in mind - others have opted to use Vulkan under Ryujinx, which can be grabbed here (it hasn't been merged into mainline yet):

https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/pull/2518#issuecomment-890255424

 

[Baron Dupek]