Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Great Deceiver]

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.

Half-pixel offset has to be enabled on a per-game basis.

Right-click the individual game you want to fix in the PCSX2 QT UI, go to Properties->Graphics on the left, select the Rendering tab, tick the "Manual Renderer Fixes" box. This will enable additional tabs, including "Upscaling Fixes", which is where Half-Pixel Offset is.

[edit] Removed broken image links

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[Puukko]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least. Vulkan doesn't boot and d3d11 only gives picture on Beetle and Beetle HW, the latter complaining it can't find a hardware renderer. The rest boot to a black screen with audio. The reason I think this might be driver related is because I didn't really touch RA for months and didn't change anything that might affect it. Never had this kind of an issue before.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

retroarch is pretty fiddly and fragile a lot of the time, things like a single crash or bad exit have caused mine to stop working. or something like your shaders might not play nice with some core settings.
have you tried wiping your retroarch.cfg? i personally always copy mine somewhere else when i know i have a working cfg, and if something breaks i just copy it over to my RA directory again and overwrite.

 

[flyingjohn]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least

Typical retroarch. Yeah, when I switch to anything hardware related it just simply crashes on the beetle cores, swanstation works though. But you shouldn't be using retroarch for psx anyway. The original beetle core is outdated and the hw version is hacky mess. Swanstation is just a worse version of duckstation.
Use mednafen or duckstation instead. Crt filters aren't worth the headaches with all the retroarch bugs when it comes to psx.

 

[flyingjohn]

EMU DEVS:
"INSTALL DA LATEST OS AND UPDATOOOOS"
MICROSOFT:
"
AMD and Intel users running Windows 11 suddenly started having their hardware completely incapable of launching any games while using Vulkan. The reason is something none of us expected at all, Microsoft… And Mesa! Please lower those pitchforks.

Microsoft decided to roll out an install of this package, which allows incapable hardware to run the mentioned APIs if no proper driver was provided from the hardware vendor, or just if the hardware is incapable of running it."

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. Hope windows 12 doesn't do anything to ruin da switch patreon bucks.

 

[Athena]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least. Vulkan doesn't boot and d3d11 only gives picture on Beetle and Beetle HW, the latter complaining it can't find a hardware renderer. The rest boot to a black screen with audio. The reason I think this might be driver related is because I didn't really touch RA for months and didn't change anything that might affect it. Never had this kind of an issue before.

There are two different settings related to hardware renderers (a very RA thing). One from the core you're using, the other is from the global rendering settings found in Settings > Video > Output. Check the latter is set to vulkan, sometimes it likes to set itself to glcore after a crash or similar. I've found that having a core-specific and a global setting mismatch tends to work badly. But I'm on linoox so your experience may vary.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

Shiren 4's translation patch finally got released
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7175/

 

[spekkio]

BROs, need some help from fags familar with playing Game Boy Advance games on real hardware. In the past I was always using just "basic" video output of the VBA emu. But now I plan to replay Metroid - Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion, using Retroarch - mGBA Core. And shaders. To get the graphics closer to the "original look".

So, I need some info about this "original look", since YT videos can't be trusted.

Below, there are sets of 3 images, each of them using specific settings:

1) Default Retroarch + mGBA values. Oversaturated + blurry image. Ultra-low internal res (240x160) certainly doesn't help...

2) gba-color shader applied. IMO it's slightly brighter than the "Color Correction" setting of the mGBA core. Colors are too washed-out IMO, but I dunno - maybe it actually looked like this on "early models" of GBA (no-backlight)?

3) gba-color + retro-tiles shaders applied. Tested all "lcd-like" shaders in the "handheld" subfolder, this one looks the best for me. OFC it's totally subjective.

Click the images for their full 1920x1080 glory (esp. important for the 3rd image with the "lcd grid").

Metroid - Zero Mission

Metroid Fusion

Tactics Ogre - Knight of Lodis

So:

• which one is better and why?
• which one looks closer to the original hardware?

To quote the classic:

DISCUSS!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

So:

• which one is better?
• which one looks closer to the original hardware?

To quote the classic:

DISCUSS!

I am not sure which one is more closer to the original hardware, I don't own a GB, but I prefer the less color saturated options. I suspect these are also the more closer to the original display.

I don't know why nowadays everything has to be hypersaturated to be appealing. Probably because people are too used to see the real world through their dopamine generator smartphone.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

A closer to hardware at the time, C looks best.

 

[Hellraiser]

spekkio, hard to say with metroid if the color shader is correct. I would need to fire up mGBA myself with F-Zero MV to tell you for sure how authentic the colors are (the backgrounds on the queen cup tenth zone east track, or the 3rd stark farm circuit background from the second cup are distintively too bright in emulators, on the ds lite or the on a gamecube gameboy player via GBi played on a CRT, even with the GBA color matrix in the last case) or advance wars (grass shade of plain tiles is more green/natural than the bright yellowish VBA for instance shows).

If you ask me it might be a bit too de-saturated.

The LCD grid is fine and actually you should check how it looks with just it enabled, as it should darken the image a bit.

Also bear in mind that while the OG GBA did look that dark and some games (F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and Advance Wars definitely) were designed with that screen in mind and thus looked oversaturated/garish on a PC monitor or more modern handheld, while some fucked it up by not caring how dark the art looks on the actual GBA screen since the bulk of the dev work was done on PCs with CRTs anyway (castlevania: circle of the moon, which got criticized in reviews for being fucking dark, also the official port of Doom) or aimed for the GBA SP's lit screen (the SP was announced very fast). Thus the "no color shader" look with an LCD grid to me would absolutely fine apart from a few cases of earlier titles where developers cared about it.

Metroid Fusion, Warioland IV and Castlevania Aria of Sorrow are three cases where I honestly don't know if they were aiming for the SP's lit screen or not. Things got muddy later on since some people had OG GBAs and some SPs (and a few GB Players), few games had a brightness setting/mode.

Having said all of that I prefer my DS lite's screen (I think I have the IPS one, apparently they made some with those, but it's a lottery) for pretty much everything apart from F-Zero Maximum Velocity, those track backgrounds just look wrong there.

 

[spekkio]

It's weird fucking thing for sure. In most tested GBA games, "default" colors look oversaturated.

The LCD grid is fine and actually you should check how it looks with just it enabled, as it should darken the image a bit.

I mean games look like this with only "retro-tiles" shader applied:

Spoiler

But the "color-corrected" output is too washed-out (see above, "retro-tiles" + "gba-color" applied).

Some weaker color correction would've been better IMO.

Anyway, more testing.

Castlevania CotM

Color-corrected output looks like ass:

Fire Emblem 7

Color-corrected output looks much better than vanilla, almost perfect (?):

Since I'm playing Vandal Hearts 2 (Playstation 1) ATM, I also tested some CRT and Scanlines shaders. Almost all CRT ones look like complete ass, but to my surprise, simple "scanlines\scanline" shader looks p. decent:

Verdict: it's probably both per-game and per-user problem / solution.

 

[Hellraiser]

2) Fire Emblem 6. Color-corrected output looks much better than vanilla, almost perfect (?):

That fire emblem screen with color correction showing Lynn and the sepia looks quite close to how I remember it looking on my GBA. Same for the one with the tactical battle in FE7, the grass is the right shade and I think the title was indeed blue like that. It's the same developer as advance wars so it makes sense they also took care with it looking as it should on the actual hardware when designing the art.

Yeah, as I mentioned, it will be a very per game thing. For instance Sonic Advance also looks IMO better/correct on my DS Lite screen (not over-saturated), as does Kuru Kuru Kururin. Now Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a matter of taste, it is a bit too bright maybe.

 

[Hellraiser]

BTW as for CRTs TV shader it really depends what you were used to - what cables you used and what kind of tube you had as well as the console. Something like Atari, Famicom (and famiclones) over RF will need a different one for an authentic noisy image versus say playing a megadrive using component cables with their lower noise but still inherent blur (where that damn vertical dithering in games like Earthworm Jim or the Lion King looks like ass with RGB cables that have sharp as hell image). Finally RGB is weird to describe, its very sharp with accurate colors, but also smooth and not as pixelated as raw on LCD/emulated upscaled image. S-video is close to RGB but not as good regarding color and sharpness.

Personally I do prefer RGB for everything and got such cables, despite the dithering in some western megadrive games. Although the authentic look from my youth would be RF or component.

Scanlines are a bit of a mythical creature, you do get them but they are only really visible on very big tubes or tubes with high TLV (like PVMs). My 21" trinitron meanwhile show something closer to the LCD grid of the GBA if you look close enough, between the actual blank scanlines the CRT gun skips and the columns of phosphor RGB strips on the surface (naturally you'll have one color darker than the other 3, which is why you see the vertical "scanline").

Naturally looks way better IRL, but despite the color bleed the phone photo shows well what I mean by the LCD grid. There's really no substitute for CRTs at the moment, not until 8k screens and shaders to fully emulate the way the shadow masks or aperture grille looked like.

FYI The fabulous colors on alucard's cape are from a saturn-version only item in SOTN that changes colors.

EDIT: some people use a raspberyy pi with RGB output via scart to a TV for emulation, that's probably the "cheapest" authentic displauy option for arcade/console games, if you have a decent enough CRT TV somewhere.

 

[spekkio]

Sony Trinitron for lyfe! Our fucker lasted ~20 years (1991-201x - watched 9/11 attacks on it for sure) and my parents replaced it with LCD only because it died a sudden death...

---

"scanlines\scanline.slangp" shader is IMO p. decent for Snes as well. I mean...

notbad.gif

 

[Hellraiser]

Yeah it looks fine for Super Metroid, quite close to how I remember it looked when I played it last year.

 

[Jermu]

 

[Melmoth]

nintendo is a freeware pc developer now. they should be grateful to yuzu for helping them transition

 

[flyingjohn]

This will be a nice patreon bux bump.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So.... download yuzu Mainline Build - 120358cf6 (15 hours ago) now just to be sure? You know how fucking assholish Nintendo is. Fucking shitting down or threatening everyone. Fucking Nips. Maybe they need a hydrogen B downloaded on their HQ.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Even if it is illegal, how can you stop sharing an open source project?

 

[Perkel]

For people wondering why out of nowhere Nintendo sued them and not for example ryujinx.

I dug up a bit and apparently some angry patreon member who had Windows7 did this. He was mad at them for dropping support for Win7 despite his $$$. He gathered internal discord chats and other things that were clear proof of devs using nintendo stuff along with examples of devs using nintendo ip to promote stuff and sent them directly to nintendo.

Companies are scared to sue emulators because due to last emulator spat emulators became pretty much perfectly legal (Aside from few rare circumstances) and it is predicted that next ruling will shut down even those avenues leading to emulators being completely legal from a to z.

So them suing devs means they have some strong case.

Even if it is illegal, how can you stop sharing an open source project?

It's not about sharing. But developement. You can't share something that doesn't exist.

 

[flyingjohn]

For people wondering why out of nowhere Nintendo sued them and not for example ryujinx.

It wasn't out of nowhere. Zelda TOTK promotions were the red line.And switch 2 launching soon also didn't help.

I dug up a bit and apparently some angry patreon member who had Windows7 did this

I have my doubts that Nintendo lawyers would even give a damn about some random schizo or his evidence. Yuzu used Zelda images to promote the emu and one of the patreon locked builds was specifically designed to play Zelda TOTK on launch which led to huge patreon bux.
This is all public.

Companies are scared to sue emulators because due to last emulator spat emulators became pretty much perfectly legal

Well, that didn't help Bleem. And connetix was a different type of case.

So them suing devs means they have some strong case.

They are going for this:
-Specifically targeting the yuzu devs for promotion and profiteering of piracy
This is easy to prove.
-If that fails, then put them in a prolonged legal battle until their funds run out. Like what Sony did with Blem.

There is a reason Ryujinx isn't being targeted.This ain't about emu legality, but emu patreon bux gotten from enabling piracy while promoting copyrighted material to promote said piracy.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Shit, don't you have to be online now for consoles to even work now? The old days of plug n play are fucking gone.