Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[aweigh]

boosts up to 3.8ghz, idles at 2.8ghz

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

boosts up to 3.8ghz, idles at 2.8ghz

That's what I thought; you're right on the edge for being able to use mednafen at all for Saturn emulation. Minimum is a Core i5 with a base clock of 3.4 Ghz! Multi-core usually gets you nothing with emulation; it's all about the single-core raw speed. The reason YabaSanshiro is working for you in this case is because it's less accurate but in return demands fewer resources. This could continue to pay off (recommended emulator for that specific patch is SSF per the group itself) or it could bite you in the ass in the form of an uncompletable game at any point. It's all with how much of a gambling man you are.

 

[aweigh]

i'm not a fan of cycle-accurate emulators mostly because they have too-beefy cpu requirements, whereas i just want the game to run and to be able to increase resolution and pretty-fy the graphics via filters or shaders or polygon correction, which are amenities those kind of emulators rarely offer. i can do these things on yabasanshiro, but cannot on RA's mednafen saturn core, and that's really all I care about.

point remains that if you want to play SF3 then the best choice is yabasanshiro and that was what i wanted to get across with my original post. i tried all the other emulators and had no joy until i tried that one so i wanted to let y'all know.

EDIT: also from what i understand savestates and the saturn virtualized memory (i.e. what games save to) can be passed around between the different SS emulators, so there's that as well.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

EDIT: also from what i understand savestates and the saturn virtualized memory (i.e. what games save to) can be passed around between the different SS emulators, so there's that as well.

Thanks, I actually didn't know that particular bit.

 

[glass blackbird]

I remember SF3 working fine in SSF back when I tried it, but that was probably about a year ago and it's possible the emulator has been updated in some way or it's hardware reliant. Saturn emulation generally is not nearly as developed as Playstation emulation, sadly, and there's a lot of problems with it. And SSF (which for ages was the Best Saturn Emulator) is closed source from what I remember so the emulator devs can't even share corrections with eachother that might normalize quality.

I've never heard of YabaSanshiro but it's good someone is updating Yaba since it's the only one with higher resolution rendering.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I just tried Reicast for the first time (downloaded the last beta release), but I was able to play only some games that not require the analog controller. The problem is that I was not able to map the analog on the keyboard or mouse (it is trivial to do that on Demul or any other emulator for any other system I know.) Am I missing something obvious? (I play on a laptop and I don't want to mess with any xbox or PS4 controllers.) Thanks for the help.

 

[HansDampf]

HD Mode 7 mod, for bsnes v107.1, beta 1

Normal Mode 7

HD Mode 7

 

[samuraigaiden]

I don't get the appeal of HD mode 7.

 

[tet666]

I don't get the appeal of HD mode 7.

Well it just doesn't look like a pixelated mess, what's not to get about that?

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

I don't get the appeal of HD mode 7.

Well it just doesn't look like a pixelated mess, what's not to get about that?

It totally still looks like a pixelated mess. Just a slightly different one. The way most MODE7 was utilized, I'm not sure there's enough visual information there to meaningfully enhance; it was mainly used to convey shit like world maps or abstracted landscapes viewed from a significant height (F-Zero and Pilotwings being the well-known poster children for the latter, of course). This entire thing strikes me as a fool's errand.

It's like crowing that you've made a Rand-McNally Road Atlas "high-definition".

 

[aweigh]

uhh, it looks a ton better?

look at how clean this shit looks

 

[aweigh]

shit looks amazing in motion:

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Look at those huge pixels!

 

[Tarrant]

People who don't see the difference between mode7 and HD mode 7 should be studied in a laboratory. Immediately reminded me of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxf9X0WNhog

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

People who don't see the difference between mode7 and HD mode 7 should be studied in a laboratory. Immediately reminded me of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxf9X0WNhog

Like I said, an HD Rand-McNally road atlas doesn't look that different from one in standard definition. You're crowing about ever-so-slightly cleaner pixels (and I do mean slight).

 

[Vorark]

My dudes, Citra is insane. Decided to try Monster Hunter XX on my humble notebook powered by the majestic Intel HD 620 and it's PLAYABLE at 3x the original resolution. Hoooly shit! Can even hook up my DS4.

Is there a custom build for MHXX or latest Canary is good to go?

 

[Perkel]

I don't get the appeal of HD mode 7.

Well it just doesn't look like a pixelated mess, what's not to get about that?

Look at that F-Zero. In pixelated mode you have depth more or less, with mode 7 whole think looks flat.
Also pixelated mode is not actually supposed to look like that in first place.

pixelated mode is something we get when you use LCD screens instead of CRT as LCD have pixels and almost no black space between pixels and that black space is very much part of artstyle.

This is how pixelated game looks like on LCD

And this is how "pixelated" game looks like on CRT

 

[glass blackbird]

The mario kart one looks shitty cause the background is still huge pixels and it ruins the effect

 

[Rahdulan]

Also pixelated mode is not actually supposed to look like that in first place.

pixelated mode is something we get when you use LCD screens instead of CRT as LCD have pixels and almost no black space between pixels and that black space is very much part of artstyle.

I get why people who emulate these games today, and weren't there when said games were new, either abhor filters to embrace raw pixels or go overboard with hq4x and smother everything in the process. Because modern logic is display games in higher resolution with cleaner output at all costs. They don't fully realize what you said about this intentional obfuscation being an integral method to get the visuals they were aiming for. I wonder if this is where the entire misguided "indie pixel scene" comes from.

 

[samuraigaiden]

I think HD Mode 7 looks stupid. The blurry mess gave space for your mind to fill in the blanks, the "HD" look makes a perfectly visible bunch of nothing. Some 2D geometrical shapes laying down, totally still. Why do you want to see that in HD? It doesn't even look like Mode 7 anymore.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

I think HD Mode 7 looks stupid. The blurry mess gave space for your mind to fill in the blanks, the "HD" look makes a perfectly visible bunch of nothing. Some 2D geometrical shapes laying down, totally still. Why do you want to see that in HD? It doesn't even look like Mode 7 anymore.

Same problem Perkel and others try to elaborate on. Some simply can't (or won't) see.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I think this article has some good points about the problem of this HD fetichism for 2D graphics. I see the same fetichism applied also to retro 3D graphics, such as the PS1 graphics, when it is pumped up to 4K or more. There is an equilibrium, you can increase the resolution of old games up to a certain point (for my taste is about native x 2, but it depends on the specific game), after that the graphics quality decrease and the game looks worse than with the lower original resolution.

 

[samuraigaiden]

There's definitely something to be said about how the source material does or doesn't lend itself to modification.

Recently I've experimented a lot with PPSSPP's high resolution, antialiasing, texture filtering, etc., with very decent results. However, PSP games have PS2 level 3D models, or pretty close. The much simpler 3D models from PS1 and N64 games do not look good in HD.

 

[Taxnomore]

wow you use graphical wow you suck games are to be played the way they were always meant to be without filters on your 55inch LCD.

Fucking idiots.

 

[HansDampf]

You could argue, the high resolution Mode 7 clashes with the big pixels of the sprites.
I never got the appeal of scanlines though. They can look good on a few games (Super Metroid), but most of the time they are too strong and, like other crappy filters, look like an unnecessary veil put over the image. If you really wanted an authentic retro console experience, you'd also have to deal with different color palettes, add some NTSC filter with color bleed effects, and simulate the curvature of CRT screens. Basically a whole lot of effort to make the game look worse.