I thought it might be better to show, not tell, on the stuff I played in Dreams, but without any editing it’s kinda boring. Still, uh, feel free to skip around?
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I accidentally chose the option I guess to start an affair with this lady because I was just trying to keep her from getting ousted for being a Catholic or something. I told her she should dress and act poor so her prying neighbors will pity her, and I guess that made her love me. And, now it looks like every outcome for my relationship with her seems to involve me being deceived by her? Regardless, I’ve already obtained her letter of recommendation.
i’ll scry instead
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I want to report that I hate retroarch 70% less since I switched to the ozone UI and am beginning to understand its quirks a little better. setting up psx emulation was simultaneously frustrating and confusing but still less frustrating and confusing than setting up a standalone emulator. all I had to do was grab a BIOS and figure out where to stick it and fiddle with some cue files. it was really nice not having to configure plugins or anything and just launch with a vanilla PSx emulation experience. especially because the crt shaders I had set up before carried over seamlessly. this is how things should be!
like with psx emulation in particular, it’s always felt like a pain to set up and then once you run it it’s a further pain to get things looking right and working well. some of it might be mednafen, which I had no idea existed till now? like I swear I was emulating chrono cross (which to be fair is like one of the hardest psx games to emulate) less than a year ago and poked around for any new standards in emulation and the consensus still seemed to be epsxe which I have always hated. but it still feels like a step up to have to go through annoying configuration steps but then you’re able to just start playing.
ANYWAY I’m playing final fantasy VI and I feel like all my childhood qualms with it have evaporated. like… the end game used to annoy me with how aimless it felt and how a lot of the sections have generic character dialog, etc. but playing this game with a fresh perspective (and especially coming fresh off of ffV) and I really feel like the world of ruin is brilliant for what it is.
also like… everyone talks about aerith’s death in vii but I guess adulthood is realizing that celes’s suicide attempt scene is far more arresting and moving. like it hits way harder than any other scene in the series. it’s honestly kind of a shame that it’s optional, but I imagine most people will encounter it on their first playthrough.
I should note that I’m playing a “woolsey uncensored” patch that preserves the original localization as much as possible while patching in parts from the gba translation that improves errors in content or tone. I highly recommend it, because it’s just as punchy as the original and a lot of story beats that were weird or confusing before make a lot more sense now.
I just watched the original translation of the suicide scene and I had forgotten – in fact, maybe never really realized until now – how much woolsey lampshaded the whole thing, probably because of nintendo of america’s decency standards or whatever. and that’s really a shame because I feel like it’s some of the strongest writing and direction in the game. really in the whole series. I really recommend playing this game with this patch!
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off your tales of easy psx emulation may make me finally break and get retroarch
Wow okay Im gonna have to play that. I read between those lines as a kid and was pretty stricken. Ill have to put this on my phone
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I nerded out last night and checked out a literal translation of the original japanese for that scene, too… it’s even more brutal than the gba retranslation.
yeah I used that patch for a playthrough of the GBA version at one point and I was very happy with it
some determined copyeditor indeed to try to reconcile the two localizations, even though I still feel like FFVI doesn’t set up a lot of its plot beats well enough for its tone; many things Just Happen like in IV but it doesn’t scan to me half the time. I actually like it better on a small screen for this reason as it seems like they’re actually chafing against something that’s not the SNES.
epsxe was absolutely not the most straightforward way to emulate the PS1 for the past twelve years but I get that part of the reason the retroarch discourse seems revisionist to me a lot of the time is because people just… didn’t know this.
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I sure had no clue till like two days ago
the only playstation emulators I’ve ever used are retail bleem! and epsxe.
i tolerated the annoying flickering at the top of the screen in Suikoden I and II using pSX because I got sick of fucking with ePSXe every time I wanted to play a different game. I think I wound up having to play a portion of Suikoden II in either ePSXe or PCSX, anyway, because if I recall correctly, the portion with the mist dragon locked up or something, so I had to load my save up in another emulator, play past that point, then save, and then load it back up in pSX. Suikoden II, or maybe it was I, or maybe both, had an issue where inputs would occasionally go in twice, which got pretty annoying.
in hindsight, i should’ve just fucking reconfigured ePSXe.
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pSX always seemed like an incomprehensible choice to me because its compatibility was so terrible and its bugs were so frequent and off putting. The sound emulation was also unbearable, could not imagine why someone would use it or recommend it even over the horror shows of epsxe and pcsx-reloaded.
I tended to use xebra and noca$h psx until retroarch’s cores were mature enough and then switched over and never looked back.
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This seems like the best time and place to bitch about Crystalis (across the board every way I’ve seen the NES rom played) having a weird flickering thin inch or two of pixels around an area of the gear/status screen (as in the one always at the bottom).
There’s other quirks I can phase out but that remains constant and I know it’s not there on old cartridge. Once I can get over this, stoked to experience the retranslation.
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pSX was fine if the game worked immediately (i believe i played all of King’s Field II and III that way), but otherwise yeah xebra/arbex was my go-to until the rise of mednafen/beetle psx retroarch cores
epsxe and project64 are forever nightmarish and i just straight up refuse to ever use them
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I believe enabling overdraw cropping in retroarch’s core settings/quick options helps with this, and I believe overdraw cropping can be adjusted if you need to be extra harsh towards the game.
Most emulators have hacks/tweaks to fix that. Often its in a section for “game specific” hacks. But not always.
If I recall I think some old 8 bit games used flickering pixels on the screen edge to somehow aid in calculations for fancy rendering tricks or something, and this was done on the assumption that most televisions’ overscan would crop this out either way.
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not having to fuck around with configurations when I wanted to swap between different games was the primary reasoning behind my using pSX. it was just convenience, and i was tolerating the annoyances for the sake of convenience, but in hindsight, it wound up being a bigger inconvenience than just learning to save some fucking cfg files for different games. another big thing for me was that pSX’s screenshots always came out clean and perfect, whereas I frequently had issues with screenshots in ePSXe.
Crop overscan addressed that one defect on NES emu (sometimes Gameboy I think, maybe others) when certain uncolored or monochrome-ish areas bleed in, after you move enough in a certain direction for the whole screen to shift. Unfortunately, iirc this was a small isolated area flickering, far enough up from the bottom that more cropping would be cutting a significant part off.
I messed around with other settings and research for a good hour, dug up someone wondering if it’s just the widespread NA rom dump. Sounds possible???
Interesting, I was playing this in April and I remember a tinge of annoyance but I thought I fixed it. I’ll check again tonight.
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I think this video has the problem you are describing?
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