Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[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.

 

[Puukko]

Damn, that's a really good job with the character art there.

 

[spekkio]

Yup. Esp. considering that the base texture is 256x256:

Which looks like this enlarged to 1024x1024:

*Edit: it looks that I should test DS2 next:

 

[Duraframe300]

Yup. Esp. considering that the base texture is 256x256:

And 1024x1024 looks like this:

Charachter art tends to scale up really well. Same with the Growlanser example I posted on the last page.
It makes sense too if you think about it. Straightforward work for an Upscale.

 

[Viata]

Those boobs also scale up quite well.

 

[Puukko]

Alright, let's go.



Looking good. It's a WIP so the UI hasn't been touched yet.



I see nothing wrong here.

(don't try using Citra's own filters along with custom textures is the message I'm getting here, not that you'd really need to)



A bit of sharpening, forced AF and color correction and you're good to go. I seem to notice most games look washed out to me these days... is this like with salt except I need to keep bumping up the colors?



Bonus: I've got 32gb, so you bet I'll use it.

 

[spekkio]

^
Yeah. Initially I did what the HQ packs authors suggest - enabled "Preload Custom Textures" in Citra. Sadly, emu just raped over 12 GB of RAM and then crashed.



And I'm not buying additional 16 GB just for emulation.

 

[Duraframe300]

I'll still lament that yuzu basically raped Citra's development and there's (again) zero competition in the 3DS emulation space.
I mean I'm glad there were quite a few commits in recent weeks, but to say development is going slow is an understatement.

And it's not like Citra is exceptional regarding compatibility, even with popular games.

 

[spekkio]

Well, on the other hand, we have two very good emus for the "current-gen" console, for the first time in history. And for the console with some decent exclusives, too.

Also: this is what you get when normies can support emu devs with patreon money: they support the projects they're the most interested in.

I still remember innocent days of Callus95, UltraHLE and VGS, when nobody was making money off emulation. But that was over 20 years ago, the times they are a-changin'.

 

[Viata]

Nobody was making money off emulation because there was no patreon back then. That is the truth.

 

[Duraframe300]

Well, on the other hand, we have two very good emus for the "current-gen" console, for the first time in history. And for the console with some decent exclusives, too.

Also: this is what you get when normies can support emu devs with patreon money: they support the projects they're the most interested in.

I still remember innocent days of Callus95, UltraHLE and VGS, when nobody was making money off emulation. But that was over 20 years ago, the times they are a-changin'.

That's not exactly true, is it?

A: VGS was a commercial emulator. So they did make money off of it.

B: Several early emulators were sold as shareware with payment to unlock the full version even then.

 

[spekkio]

Yeah, but the big companies were fighting against such horrible things like emulators fiercely (see VGS' case), while now Yuzu / Ryujinx guys can make some money more or less legally.

So maybe I should've put it differently: nobody was making an easy (?) money off emulation.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Didn't No$GBA advertise itself basically as a free GBA emulator? And a whole bunch asked for donations IIRC. Not to mention there was Bleem!, even if Sony sued them into bankruptcy.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

In the few last years I played way more games on emulators than natively on PC. Through emulation I discovered an universe of games that I missed when they came out.

Even now, if there is a native version for PC, I am still tempted to play the game via emulators, for convenience alone: no drm, easy keeping (the game is just a single file you can put an run where you want, without installation), simple cross-games configurations for video/sound and controllers (if the PC game is a port of some console game, chances are that the keyboard+mouse configuration is abysmal in the native version), flexible graphics upscaling, savestates (modern games seems to have abolished the old PC save everywhere feature for some reason, but I love when I can stop playing and resume the game exactly where I left, even in the middle of a cutscene), etc., etc.

 

[lightbane]

Sadly it doesn't seem to be possible to use savestates for Yuzu and Riujinx, the emulators for the Switch.
Speaking of: I tried Metroid Dread and it seems it works well, although the button disposition is a bit odd, but it's a matter of getting used to. However, I noticed the game drows FPS during cutscenes, but gets at 60 during regular gameplay. I suppose that's normal, right?

 

[Viata]

In the few last years I played way more games on emulators than natively on PC. Through emulation I discovered an universe of games that I missed when they came out.

Even now, if there is a native version for PC, I am still tempted to play the game via emulators, for convenience alone: no drm, easy keeping (the game is just a single file you can put an run where you want, without installation), simple cross-games configurations for video/sound and controllers (if the PC game is a port of some console game, chances are that the keyboard+mouse configuration is abysmal in the native version), flexible graphics upscaling, savestates (modern games seems to have abolished the old PC save everywhere feature for some reason, but I love when I can stop playing and resume the game exactly where I left, even in the middle of a cutscene), etc., etc.

Being able to change framerate speed is the reason I go for emulator always. I can't play JRPG anymore if I can't increase the speed of framerates.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Sadly it doesn't seem to be possible to use savestates for Yuzu and Riujinx, the emulators for the Switch.
Speaking of: I tried Metroid Dread and it seems it works well, although the button disposition is a bit odd, but it's a matter of getting used to. However, I noticed the game drows FPS during cutscenes, but gets at 60 during regular gameplay. I suppose that's normal, right?

Yeah, Metroid Dread cutscenes run at 30fps.

 

[Puukko]

Men, I've gotten off my ass and finally begun an HD texture project. This had been an intention of mine for a fairly long while, but I hadn't settled on a game. Well, now I've found one - Etrian Odyssey Untold. I'm beheading three FOEs with one katana swing - I've never played an EO game before (yes, I know - very odd considering what an SMT buff I am), this particular game has a mod to add the story mode exclusive stuff to the classic mode (two new classes and the bonus dungeon) which means I will be able to dump the vast majority of textures during one regular playthrough, and third, 3DS games are about as easy as it gets when it comes to texture replacement on top of benefiting from it greatly. Just dump the textures, upscale, and put them back in.

This particular game seems well-behaved too - the fonts are dumped just like any texture, as well as the FMVs (at least the intro) which is just a series of PNGs. The only oddity so far is that the automap pen generates a new texture for every imaginable scribble you can draw so there's no real way to work with it, but this doesn't really even matter as it wouldn't benefit from upscaling anyway.

I spent most of the day studying how the game behaves to make sure I was catching all textures as well as combing the FEE HD pack to see how it was structured and what kind of texture sizes it was using, on top of installing all the tools (proptip - install Python 3.9.7, not the newest one) and figuring out how they work. The GUI I went with was Image Enhancing Utility.

What I've got to present to you are preliminary results for the character portraits. Nothing else in these screenshots has been upscaled and I am not using reshade for sharpening etc (the very first shot has different color balance since it was what I had on hand, ignore that). The originals are 256x256, and the model I used was 4x_FArtDIV3_Blend_4x_Unholy_FArt_interp_035.pth + 2x_Waifaux-NL3-SuperLite_latest_G.pth - that is, those first two models interpolated with a 0.65 focus on Unholy FArt, and then the result was further upscaled with a Waifu2x clone for ESRGAN. The resulting files are 2048x2048 which I believe is a good balance.

This is what the portraits look vanilla (click to enlarge):





And here's my party after upscaling:

Spoiler

Breddy gud, if I do say so myself.

Now, this is all still 'beta' for all intents as purposes and as I keep experimenting I may find a model I find works better, and naturally I will have to do this process for each category of textures since what looks good for anime styled portraits won't work for grass, or UI elements, or fonts. I am open to suggestions but the #1 goal of this project is to get it done - HD projects dying or staying in indefinite WIP status is the rule rather than the exception and while I'm not going to pretend this isn't a possibility for my project as well, I'm going to do what I can to avoid it and that means keeping the amount of work reasonable. I'm not going to try dozens of different models to endlessly fine tune the result.

 

[flyingjohn]

Anybody got some recommendation for etrian series mods?
All i found that seems "decent" are these two for 3:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EtrianOdys...trian_odyssey_iii_balance_patch_beta_testers/
https://viocar.github.io/mod.html
Edit:Found a doc with some inforamtion including mods:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m5G-ZQvXsmM68TCrSv2bWfKz2SfSc7xq-REfMXMhAEc/edit

 

[Puukko]

This is what I'm using:

https://github.com/Tildehat/EOU-Classic-Mod

 

[tet666]

Sadly it doesn't seem to be possible to use savestates for Yuzu and Riujinx, the emulators for the Switch.

Yeah save states just don't work very well for more modern console emulators (ps3 and up).
Put simply, a save state is a dump of all the RAM and what's used at the moment you create the save state (correct me on that one). Old hardware like the Snes used something like 128Kb of RAM, which is nothing. Modern consoles however have more than 4GB of RAM.

It is simply not doable in the near future, you can't just instantly dump a multi gigabyte file and load it later like this. Even if you are willing to wait, say several minutes for it to do that, it also adds difficulty with emulation, stopping and starting with multiple threads running that might not all be in the same state of completion.

 

[Puukko]

Alright, that's one full day of ESRGAN shenanigans behind me. I certainly learned a lot, so here are my observations.

The best parts are when some asset just behaves well. Try a few different models, pick the best one and the results are clean.

Case in point. Original background texture:



4x upscales:







Very nice. It shouldn't come as a surprise that clean, pixelated art is easy to work with.

Now, the polar opposite - cases where no model seems to produce even passable results. So far, UI elements with text included have been the most difficult. I split UI related textures into three quite rigid categories - fonts/clean text, UI elements with text, and just UI elements without any text. The first and third took some work, but I got satisfactory results in the end. Nothing would beat a proper high definition hand made font of course, but there are models for even tiny fonts. Combining both text and UI elements in one texture though, oh boy. I must have gone through 15 different models and was not happy with any of them. It's likely I'll have to manually edit the least terrible one to remove artifacts and the like.

Likewise, two other types of textures posed a problem - blinking characters, and the four character framed portraits used in the menus.
Both have splits which cause seams after scaling and require manual editing. I joined the upscaling discord with low expectations to ask for help, and got a step by step tutorial how to do it in GIMP. Damn.

Maybe I'll actually get to play the game tomorrow...

 

[CyberWhale]

Looks amazing, but you should also add those tutorials, finding and rest of helpful information in this thread (you can always use spoilers) in case somebody else decides to do an upscaling project.

Not sure how exactly these retextures work, but I would recommend you to stop acting like a full blown autist and go with the option that is barely acceptable for the least amount of work and then simply publish your mod (raw data and packaged alike) so people can play and enjoy it. Perfectionism is more often a flaw rather than a virtue and the main culprit behind overambitious and unfinished projects. Most Codextards like to make fun of any little unpolished detail in commercial games, but if anyone actually tried to meet those standards most games would never see the light of day. Good luck either way.

 

[Puukko]

Looks amazing, but you should also add those tutorials, finding and rest of helpful information in this thread (you can always use spoilers) in case somebody else decides to do an upscaling project.

Not sure how exactly these retextures work, but I would recommend you to stop acting like a full blown autist and go with the option that is barely acceptable for the least amount of work and then simply publish your mod (raw data and packaged alike) so people can play and enjoy it. Perfectionism is more often a flaw rather than a virtue and the main culprit behind overambitious and unfinished projects. Most Codextards like to make fun of any little unpolished detail in commercial games, but if anyone actually tried to meet those standards most games would never see the light of day. Good luck either way.

Oh yeah, don't worry. Like I wrote above, completion is the main goal. That said, I am learning as I go so taking shortcuts will end up doing more harm than good in the long run. The more I learn during this project, the easier future projects will be since I'll have the tools and knowledge already.

On that note, I upscaled the intro FMV. I am happy with the results, but there are... caveats. I have no idea how the original video is packed, but Citra dumps it as a series of PNGs like everything else. This makes the original video about 390MB once dumped, and after 4x scaling, the folder is 3gb for a video that's maybe a bit over one minute long. On top of that, it (nor the OG video) won't play at full speed reliably, so loading custom textures into RAM is the only option. Which results in... this:

So needless to say, I won't be including the upscaled FMV in the pack. And I don't even know if there are more - could be there's an FMV cutscene in there, or an outro. What I will do is upload it to Youtube instead since that's by far the most reasonable option. I've been meaning to install OBS and learn how to use it anyway since Shadowplay has been very unreliable for me for months.

I will write down the steps I took and tools I've been using, but not while this whole thing is still in its baby steps.

 

[Puukko]

Here's how it all looks like together so far. If you're curious which bits I wasn't happy with, take a closer look at the status screen texts.