Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[spekkio]

use dark mode

negro please

 

[Grauken]

what kind of monster uses dark mode in an emulator?

 

[felipepepe]

what kind of monster uses dark mode in an emulator?

It looks nice with the cover gallery :3

 

[Jack Of Owls]

On an OLED display, believe me, you want to use dark mode on anything you can get to work with it. Which reminds me, off-topic but I found a nice extension for FF (I think there's one for Chrome too) that forces dark mode on all websites, with some of them pre-configured for the "best" results. It's called Dark Reader.

 

[Lutte]

thanks for the flashbang, asshole. pls use dark mode

If you can't handle the white man's mode it just means your backlight levels are too high (probably to compensate for the misery of low contrast dark modes).

Here's a flashbang I dedicate to you:

 

[flyingjohn]

thanks for the flashbang, asshole. pls use dark mode

Chrono trigger avatar afraid of the light.
Falksi proven right again.

 

[Baron Dupek]

That bump reminded me to try Primal and Scarface again after jumping ship to Win10 awhile ago.
Both works fine now on default setting. People didn't report any issues, but that wasn't the case for me.

Might change them later when I get better CPU, my old i7 4790 seen better days...

 

[soutaiseiriron]

If you can't handle the white man's mode it just means your backlight levels are too high (probably to compensate for the misery of low contrast dark modes).

this is called contrarianism btw
even at 1% brightness the pure #ffffff that native qt UIs use is fucking terrible. no.

 

[Morenatsu.]

That bump reminded me to try Primal and Scarface again after jumping ship to Win10 awhile ago.
Both works fine now on default setting. People didn't report any issues, but that wasn't the case for me.

Might change them later when I get better CPU, my old i7 4790 seen better days...

omg i have that cpu too thats epic we should start a band

 

[Lutte]

contrarianism

Doesn't mean what you think it means. #ffffff is the default background of text fields in most light mode UIs. It's the background of the icon view of most file managers out there. It's the default background of most high traffic websites. Never heard of anyone complaining google search was blinding. Dark mode is the contrarian fad.

Having a monitor backlight set at 100% while in the darkness of mom's basement can cause issues though. Backlights need to match the lighting levels of a room.

 

[flyingjohn]

I don't know if this was posted before, but here is a collection of code wheels you will need for specific older computer games:
https://archive.org/details/code-wheels

 

[Unkillable Cat]

4 gigs of code wheels?!?

 

[Endemic]

4 gigs of code wheels?!?

Quarter of that is taken up by a few animated ones. I guess the scans are super high resolution as well.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I took at look at the code wheels. They're htm-files, with some psd-files thrown in.

The thing is, my browser crashes every time I try to load one.

Suggestions?

 

[flyingjohn]

I took at look at the code wheels. They're htm-files, with some psd-files thrown in.

The thing is, my browser crashes every time I try to load one.

Suggestions?

What browser?

 

[Don Peste]

I don't think we have a proper Android megathread, so...

idTech4A++, DOOM III/Quake 4/Prey(2006) for Android
https://github.com/glKarin/com.n0n3m4.diii4a

• multi-threading renderer
• png/dds texture image
• jpeg/png/bmp format of screenshot
• obj format static model
• dae format static model
• shadow with shadow-mapping
• OpenGLES2.0/OpenGLES3.0
• OpenAL(soft) and EFX Reverb
• no-lighting rendering and no-lighting material
• translucent stencil shadow
• DOOM3 mods: The Lost Mission; Classic DOOM; Rivensin; Hardcorps; Overthinked; SABot-a7x; HexenEOC; Fragging-Free
• Quake4 and Raven's idTech4 engine
• Prey(2006) and HumanHead's idTech4 engine

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

What the heck is that Resident Evil game there? I wasn't aware there was a RE game on mobile devices that looked like that. IIRC, the only ones that played like the console titles were some weird JPN-only old mobile games.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Looks like a modded Jill on Doom 3's famous bathroom.

 

[Puukko]

AMD + OpenGL + emulators = less than optimal experience.

melonDS has it the worst. As long as you stay in full screen, it's smooth sailing. If you attempt to go back to windowed, there's maybe a 25% chance it'll crash. If not, the window will appear frozen, even if the game is actually still running. So you go back to fullscreen, at which point it unfreezes but HDR breaks and there goes half the brightness and color. So you exit fullscreen to try and fix it and it crashes.



Citra was much the same, though there at least you have the option for Vulkan. Assuming the texture corruptions don't get you. I used both for FE Echoes and which one worked better seemed to depend on the emulator version. So uh, forget alt tabbing. I guess that helps with focus.

 

[flyingjohn]

AMD + OpenGL + emulators = less than optimal experience.

Not on Linux. Also opengl performance is still not optimal on amd for windows.

Vulkan

Unfortunately Amd screwed that too.Older cards have broken Vulkan drivers and newer drivers have missing Vulkan features that Nvidia has.
But there is no difference on Linux.

 

[Rincewind]

I searched the thread and didn't find any mention of it, but AmigaVision (previously MegaAGS) is a game-changer for Amiga. It comes with a 4GB pack of Amiga games, all pre-configured to run as best as possible on FS-UAE, MiSTer, Analog Pocket and others: https://amiga.vision/

The installation process is simple (if poorly explained), and once it's done you just double-click on a shortcut and it takes you to a launcher with all games sorted into multiple categories, lists and curated packs:

It doesn't have the full library (I noticed some gaps like Captive 2), but it's very extensive and it's an open-source project, still in development.

It's nice, and I'm happy to see any effort that tries to preserve the Amiga legacy. Anything is better than letting those Amiga games slowly fade into oblivion.

However, they still only support WHDLoad converted games, which is objectively a worse experience for many titles than playing them in their original, unadulterated, uncracked form on an emulated A500 or HDD equipped "big box" Amiga (e.g., an A2000 equivalent machine with Kickstart 1.3 and a turbo card). Of course, if you never played these games on original hardware in their original form, it's impossible to tell the difference...

By definition, WHDLoad conversions of any game that uses disk-based protection must be cracked. You must put a lot faith into the people doing the cracking... Even cracks aside, many games have various issues when converted to WHDLoad if you poke around on their issue tracker a bit: http://mantis.whdload.de/. And that's just stuff that gets reported (like I didn't bother reporting many things I found because I simply stopped using it out of frustration).

One glaring problem is the WHDLoad of the original Lemmings game still locks up randomly after 20-30 mins of gameplay. That's just a bad crack, and it's been unfixed forever. And don't assume the crackers do a full playthrough test of all 40-50-60 hours+ RPGs they touch... They don't, and issues remain unfixed for a long time and/or they don't get reported. Generally, few crackers care about RPGs, adventures, and strategy games that account for a small percentage of all Amiga games. And that absolutely shows in the quality of cracks and WHDLoad conversions of those games. From my own research:

- Adventure - 13.4%
- Strategy - 5.5%
- RPG - 3.1%

So the remaining roughly 75% which are the arcade/action games get a lot more attention. Like it or not, the Amiga was more known for its action games (regardless that I personally don't care much about them).

My upcoming Amiga pack will fix that; 99% only uncracked originals, HD installs where the game itself supports it (and only then), and no WHDLoad in sight. As true to playing the original games on a real Amiga as it can be in WinUAE.

All bundled with my WinUAE shader setup out-of-the-box. Stay tuned.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Originally posted in the old Monster Hunter vs. new thread, but also relevant here:

I hadn't realized that the complete translation patch for the 2nd generation Monster Hunter on PS2, Monster Hunter 2 Dos, was released this year. I've been looking forward to it a lot. I've tested it and it works perfectly. They've translated absolutely 100% of everything, very impressive work.

https://break-arts.com/projects/mh2dos/

MH2 Dos has a lot of "simulationist" aspects that were completely abandoned in later entries such as seasons that affect hunts. The economy is also a lot tighter and you really do feel like you're scraping by trying to make ends meet as a hunter, at least early on. The control scheme for this game is similar to the first PS2 title and it's little clunky at first (attacking on the right analog stick), but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Anyway, the translation effort definitely goes beyond a simple script dump. Here they talk about some of the bespoke tools they built specifically for this project:

https://break-arts.com/posts/mh2_re/

It's even possible to play MH2 online on custom dedicated servers (also works with PCSX2):

https://mholdschool.com/viewtopic.php?t=216

Here's a detailed guide:

https://mholdschool.com/viewtopic.php?t=120

 

[Rincewind]

From the AmigaVision collection's home page:

We take special care to run every game at the correct aspect ratio and CPU speed.

Um, I took a look at their master CSV file they generate the configs from, and about 80-90% of the NTSC titles are wrongly displayed with the PAL pixel aspect ratio. The guy also seems to be quite confused as he talks about some weird special "Jim Sachs aspect ratio". WTF? He was simply one of the American devs doing the graphics for NTSC. There were many others, basically all North American studios fall into the same bucket. Just NTSC, there's nothing special about it.

Setting up PAL for 16:15 pixel aspect ratio is also questionable. Anyway, won't go into details now, but I prefer 1:1 PAR for PAL. Generally, that's more correct, but it can be a bit random, yeah. I will extend my article with info on this.

He seems to be a Swedish guy, but he should know better about NTSC games. I will contact him at some point about these mistakes, we'll see how he reacts.

About correct CPU speed—well, he uses WHDLoad conversions, so there goes the correct speed out of the window for many titles. But whatever.

PS: I wasn't looking for "errors", I was hoping to get a nice database of game releases, each correctly marked as PAL or NTSC. That would be helpful for me too. But so many obviously NTSC titles are marked as PAL that I simply cannot take it seriously.

 

[Arthandas]

Why the fuck no one told me you can download PS3 games with all updates and DLC directly from Sony servers for free?!!!

 

[CyberWhale]

Any ideas on how to configure Half-pixel offset option on the new/Nightly PCSX2 GUI (or outside of it)? Useful for resolving bluring from a double image, but can't seem to find it and can't seem to find an answer anywhere on the internet either.