Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[spekkio]

Yabause is still a piece of shit despite being updated much more regularly than SSF.

Quality argumentation...

I think you might need a new rig though. I checked a few of those games like Blazing Heroes (US version of Mystaria) and there was no slowdown. Tried in both SSF and Yabause, same performance with no framerate dips.

So, I got slowdowns in game A and you didn't in game B = I need a new comp.

Also bilinear is an absolute eyesore, embrace the pixels. It's like taking an image, upscaling it, downscaling, then upscaling again for the hell of it. So ugly and blurry.

100% personal preference, nobody sane gives a fuck. In my case it was most likely caused by using Zsens and VGS for years and these were using bliniear filtering by default.

tl;dr

Thread declined.

 

[Excidium II]

You use bilinear filtering, expect to be looked down upon.

 

[A user named cat]

Quality argumentation...

What? Quality? This is a matter of compatiblity. Yabause is no way nearly as usable or refined as SSF. The only thing it offers over it is save states and many more glitches.

So, I got slowdowns in game A and you didn't in game B = I need a new comp.

As I said in parenthesis, Mystaria = Blazing Heroes: http://www.gamefaqs.com/saturn/375835-blazing-heroes/data

Since I'm not a peasant, I play the proper manly NTSC versions of games except for rare circumstances (i.e. Prince of Persia for Mega Drive has more levels than Genesis release). So either way, it's the same exact game with the same exact performance. The only slowdown with the 3D is due to how it played on the original Saturn hardware. It's a steady 60fps in both gay Yabause and majestic SSF, except in Yabause the audio fucks up because it's a terrible emulator. Haven't you ever played Grandia through an accurate emulator like Mednafen or Xebra? The game chugs just as it did on the original console too, but it's still being emulated at a proper 60fps.

tl;dr

Thread declined.

You declined it by posting blurry pictures then defending them with the opinion card. Apologize to Excidium at once and come to the light side of non-filtered emulation. That is the first thing I disable in every emulator. Even MAME tries to rape your eyes with that Trent Oster shit because we really need to be reminded of cheap 1980's televisions that you had to pound with your fists whenever the picture got screwy.

 

[spekkio]

As I said in parenthesis, Mystaria = Blazing Heroes.

Oops, I somehow read it as "the game with firefighters" (Burning Rangers).

 

[Ivan]

Mother 3

After playing for some 7 hours I feel like the tutorial is over. The soundtrack is somehow greater than Earthbound's. Lovin' it

 

[flyingjohn]

Using pcsx2 as a example of a functioning emulator has to be a joke right?
Almost every single game has some form of bugs and graphical glitches in hardware mode,just look at the rogue galaxy pcsx2 wiki page.
And software mode is too demanding to be considered useful.
You may get some 2d games functioning perfectly but even that is a stretch.
And it doesn't help that they consider games like ace combat and ratchet series to be playable in hardware mode when they are a mess.

 

[Hirato]

Using pcsx2 as a example of a functioning emulator has to be a joke right?
Almost every single game has some form of bugs and graphical glitches in hardware mode,just look at the rogue galaxy pcsx2 wiki page.
And software mode is too demanding to be considered useful.
You may get some 2d games functioning perfectly but even that is a stretch.
And it doesn't help that they consider games like ace combat and ratchet series to be playable in hardware mode when they are a mess.

PCSX2's hardware renderer is built on this speedhack called the "texture cache", and this cache makes it super difficult to support graphical features, the main stinker is how the PS2 implements mipmapping.
Mipmapping is a thingie in which distant textures are downsampled ahead of time to optimise draw times, as well as to filter them ahead of time to avoid nasty artefacts.
PC hardware and PS2 hardware also implement this in completely different ways.

How does this affect Ratchet and Clank? It just means distant objects have a tendency to use a bad texture coordinates, so their texture ends up somewhat mangled.


Now let's see just how "unplayably glitchy" Ratchet and Clank is.

It's so horribly broken, how can anyone possibly stand to play it!?

Settle down Bethesda, the "most technically inept developer of the year" award isn't going to you this time!

If you want to whine that Ratchet and Clank is unplayable, Muh Graffix is the dumbest argument you could possibly make for it.
There are far bigger issues that actually impact playability adversely, such as the megaturret glove being completely broken in R&C2 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/354

 

[flyingjohn]

I can find a great picture of every game running perfectly on pcsx2,doesn't mean anything.
Just google ace combat pcsx2 and you will find picture perfect versions of the game,start running the game and you can see green lines on the floor and you can fall through the floor as well.(unless using software renderer)
Pictures are not game play,and i can bet my ass there is more then the bomb glove thing breaking the game.
I don't know why anybody would defend pcsx2,its been years since the emulator came out and this is what you can expect with it:
1)game runs but there are graphical glitches(severe or not),this is the best case scenario
2)Game runs and game has game breaking glitches or save breaking issues
3)Game has neither but runs horribly
4)game has no glitches whatsoever and you can run it quickly,this is rare.
5)You have a 4.5ghz cpu and can run it perfectly in software mode(not a lot of people have that kind of power)
Compare it to dolphin or even ds emulators and you will notice a big difference.
Hell just look at the new ps2 emulator play, its slow as hell but making steady progress.
Usually emulation developers went for either accuracy or speed,pcsx2 has neither.

 

[Duraframe300]

Double post

 

[Duraframe300]

Lol because Dolphin plays every game perfectly right?

Name a random gamecube game and you will find issues with it as well. It does make steadier progress, but mostly on wii games and it had a much larger team than pcsx2 forever. Except when pcsx2 started to be the first emulator of its generation to work. Dolphin was started up again after, but till then it was way worse shit.

 

[spekkio]

Pointless bitching

I lub you, guys.

 

[Dreaad]

Pcsx2 is pretty shit. To this day it can't emulate nocturne or front mission 5 without fucking see through walls, fucked up shadows, white lines, fucked blinking screen etc etc.

The only redeeming factor is that it works and most games are playable.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Haven't got any issues with Nocturne except for ladder bug in Kaiwan's labirynth which is skippable by turning some option off.

Pcsx2 is so 'shitty' or is it just a PS2 a hard machine to emulate? Anyway...

Hell just look at the new ps2 emulator play, its slow as hell but making steady progress.

U mean Neutrinosx2 or something newer?

 

[flyingjohn]

[/QUOTE]

U mean Neutrinosx2 or something newer?[/QUOTE]
No i mean the newest ps2 emulator being in development for pc and android:
http://purei.org/
Some youtube videos:


Its a work in progress and there doesn't seem to be any fully playable games yet.
But who knows what the future holds.

 

[SCO]

Use the opengl renderer guys.

 

[A user named cat]

If you guys are wondering why PCSX2 still has so many graphical issues, supposedly the author of the GSDX plugin bailed long ago leaving PCSX2 coders with little to do except continue tweaking and finding workarounds in the emu itself. I recall one of them mentioning the GSDX code itself is so crazy and complex they can't even work on it to improve much. So PCSX2 is always going to have bugs until they write an entirely new gpu plugin or perform a miracle. I'd say just suck it up and if the quirks bother you that much, then run in software mode at native res.

Personally I have little problems with the emulator and it runs great too. If anything, N64, Dreamcast and Jaguar emulation is where the garbage has piled up for far too long. Talk about having ages to have perfected them. They need to do something about Dolphin's shader generation too, even with Ishiiruka's build there are still problems and random hiccups. PPSPP is pretty finnicky too. I had to set up a custom refresh rate because the vsync doesn't work right in it and the timing is slightly off. Desmume standalone sucks too and isn't smooth whatsoever compared to how it runs in RetroArch. So all things considered, PCSX2 is a wet dream compared to many other emulators out there.

 

[A user named cat]

After doing a little digging, I just found out something pretty interesting. GSDX author is actually none other than Gabest. You may or may not recognize the name. He also happens to be the author behind the awesome Media Player Classic. Probably the best vid player there is. It also appears that he returned to the scene back in July: http://pcsx2.net/271-july-august-2015-progress-report.html

In more exciting news, the creator of GSdx, Gabest has showed up once more and already begun fixing bugs or speeding up things, we hope he'll stick around more this time. Welcome back!

I also found these forum posts for anyone interested:

I think nobody except for him adds additional video renderer options.

Gabest arrives out of nowhere appoximately once a year. By luck he will implement something if he is interested.

I think to get gabest implementing new stuff is very easy: Buy him the cpu/gpu that has such new stuff implemented. I always have the feeling that he likes to implement new stuff. So if he gets a new gpu/cpu he implements a new feature. That is the reason you see him once a year. He doesn't have enough money to buy parts even more often

 

[Duraframe300]

Gabest shows up in general from time to time. This has happened before.

Never stays long though.

Edit: Ah, didn't read the quotes. Nevermind.

 

[Great Deceiver]

A lot of problems that people complain about with PCSXR are related to the graphics plugin; switching over to software mode fixes a vast majority of the issues. Of course, some people might not think that's an acceptable compromise or might not have a powerful enough CPU to have a playable framerate; a couple of years ago I played through King's Field 4 entirely in software mode and it was totally fine.

I would much rather play through PS2 titles through an emulator now - even though it's not perfect - than going back to the actual console, which was very prone to hardware failure.

 

[Nikaido]

If you guys are wondering why PCSX2 still has so many graphical issues, supposedly the author of the GSDX plugin bailed long ago leaving PCSX2 coders with little to do except continue tweaking and finding workarounds in the emu itself. I recall one of them mentioning the GSDX code itself is so crazy and complex they can't even work on it to improve much. So PCSX2 is always going to have bugs until they write an entirely new gpu plugin or perform a miracle. I'd say just suck it up and if the quirks bother you that much, then run in software mode at native res.

Personally I have little problems with the emulator and it runs great too. If anything, N64, Dreamcast and Jaguar emulation is where the garbage has piled up for far too long. Talk about having ages to have perfected them. They need to do something about Dolphin's shader generation too, even with Ishiiruka's build there are still problems and random hiccups. PPSPP is pretty finnicky too. I had to set up a custom refresh rate because the vsync doesn't work right in it and the timing is slightly off. Desmume standalone sucks too and isn't smooth whatsoever compared to how it runs in RetroArch. So all things considered, PCSX2 is a wet dream compared to many other emulators out there.

There are certainly worse emulators out there, but then there are things like Nestopia, Higan, Mednafen (its ps1 bit), Exodus, MAME, Gambatte, recently mGBA etc, all of which aren't as reliant on game specific hacks and emulator configuration as the ones you cited. There's also some hope for the N64 if Cen64 development picks up.
PCSX2 and Dolphin are of the same breed, that of which often requires specific fiddling (change of emu configuration) depending on the game you're trying to run. They're only good for lack of better alternatives.

 

[Rahdulan]

http://www.pcgamer.com/why-you-should-play-your-ps2-classics-on-pc-not-ps4/

Why you should play your PS2 classics on PC, not PS4

Gee, thanks PC Gamer, pcsx2 has only been out for a decade now.

World must be going crazy for a mainstream site to acknowledge emulation as such.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Back in a day I was emulating NES and SNES shit on Pentium 200 MMMX / 32 MB RAM, now Nestopia requires 800 MHZ to run properly, wtf? Can we point out lightest emulators of each platform for low end PC?

RockNes (at least old versions) run even on 486 but required Pentium to decent fps rate.
ZSNES was much faster than Snes9x back then, it could be run even in pure DOS.

How about Genesis, PSX, GBA... ?

 

[spekkio]

Genesis: Gens+
PSX: pSX
GBA: VBA

All these are old, obsolete and inferior to the newest emus / forks available in Retroarch.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Callus for CPS1 emulation - it loaded unpacked roms so demaned MUCH less RAM than its Kawaks competitor.
Now I'm wandering if NESticle wasn't even lighter than Rocknes.
There was also a nice GB emulator with min. sys. req. of 386 CPU.

 

[Excidium II]

There was also a nice GB emulator with min. sys. req. of 386.

no$gmb? Played many pokemans on it.