Hey bug, what’re you doing with your limited time on earth? Emulating Japanese Saturn SRPGs of course, silly.
(As seen in this badly lit picture.)
Because I have this i5 desktop PC hiding below my desk doing nothing, so I figured I might as well do something. At first I was shocked by stupidious amounts of input lag, but it turns out that that could be solved with some tweaking.
As many of you already know, PCSX2 and Dolphin are really good! I can see myself amulating some Dragon Quest 8 (for the faster loading) or Sin Punishment 2 (for the kbm controls). Though I probably need a better graphics card.
Saturn is still a bit messy, with the “recently” released mednafen core being my favorite. Gotta drag and drop those cue files though, haha. Dreamcast though, I haven’t found a way to run Shenmue without glitches yet. Demul gave me transparent Ryo hair edges and NullDC produced wonky black scanlines on environment textures. Oh well.
Btw, here’s the tweaking I did:
#windows 7
basic design (turn off aero)
#intel HD custom settings
anisotropic filtering application controlled
vsync application controlled
application optimal mode off
#yabause 0.9.15
activate frame limiter
fixed aspect ratio causes bugs in fullscreen
sett full screen resolution to monitor resolution
do not activate higher sound quality to prevent bomberman and gt24 sound bugs
activate sh2 dma timing to prevent shining force 3 freeze
#sff 012 beta R4
disable vsync
set the sound buffer lower
set games to use highest compatibility
disable VDP2 RAM Write Timing to save one extra frame of lag
#mednafen 0.9.39.2
video.glvsync 0
video.blit_timesync 0
#dolphin 5.0
Store EFB Copies to Texture Only Off needed in Sin & Punishment 2 but drop to 20fps
I always get the transparent Ryu hair in NulDC but not Demul.
The most recent version of Demul runs fine for me (it doesn’t allow internal resolution scaling at all anymore) but has the occasional audio glitch (when saving for example) if vsync is activated inside the app itself. Playing with the buffer size fixes it, but also introduces latency. The skyboxes are actually rendered properly this time around and the minigames at the arcade work.
Null isn’t getting updated at all anymore so it’s either Demul or unofficial builds of Reicast. You can get the Reicast core through Retroarch though. You can also run the Mednafen cores from there without having to drag and drop cues or create .m3u files for multi disc games.
You’re right, I totally mixed them up. But I’m using the lastest DEmul version too, and still get weird textures. I found a fixed version of NullDC optimized for Shenmue that seems to have less hair issues though, so that’s nice.
I tried RetroArch once on the Wii and I never want to try it again. But maybe I will, so thanks for the tip. Despite the drag and drop thing, I like Mednafen a lot.
That sucks about Demul. I was so happy that DC emulation was finally working for me, looks like it’s still a bit temperamental.
I love how simple mednafen is, but I don’t know how to add scanline filters without a GUI so I started using Retroarch.
Out of curiosity, have you tried streaming games over the network to your PS2 using OPL? Seems like such an elegant solution but I don’t have a slim or network adaptor to try it out
I think I just changed the ss.scanlines 0 line to ss.scanlines 50 for Saturn scanlines. I had a rough start with Mednafen too, until I started ctrl-F-ing mednafen.github.io/documentation/.
And I have not done such a thing as network streaming. I did get a tiny crossover cable to tie my PC and PS2 together for DVD games with terrible laser-eating loading habits, but then I got Suikoden Tactics and Tokyo Xtreme Racer to boot from USB and lost steam. Also I’m a bit OCD about energy saving and efficiency and having to run my PC in addition to my PS2 seems excessive, when I could just as well emulate my PS2 on my PC. PCSX2 seems really good! Maybe, just maybe, it is more fun to emulate, sometimes.
Has anyone seen a good fix or config for decals on PCSX2? I get what looks like bad depth testing and the decals flicker through the surface they’re applied to.
Yeah thanks, I double checked the mednafen github and found the relevant command line options after all of 30 seconds. I much prefer dealing it with it that way.
Once i’m done with Nocturne i’ll be done with all my physical PS2 releases so i’ll have to check back in with pcsx2. I’m looking forward to TXR Zero.
I’m mostly here to tell you all that Splatoon is perfectly playable and that you should play the single player even though there’s no reasonable way to emulate the gyro in Cemu unless you go through a bunch of stuff, most likely involving Steam
but I also messed around with those graphic packs, a thing Cemu does on a per game basis instead of, say, letting you pick a resolution for everything to be rendered at but also let’s you do fun stuff, like having packs that eliminate in-game AA solutions, adjust bloom or give better shadows
Splatoon at 1920x1080, internal resolution of 5120x2880 (and also I remembered to turn off forced 2X AA because who the fuck needs that when I’m downscaling from 5k)
and, uh, because I remembered I can set virtual desktop resolutions, a big ol’ 4k screenshot of MK8
recent versions of Cemuhook, an add-on/plug-in thing for Cemu with the blessing of the emu authors, actually can connect to SCP servers and through that, interface with controllers on your computer with gyros or other motion bullshit. odds are pretty good you already have Cemuhook installed if you have stolen played Breath of the Wild as the fence skip hack is a required thing to get the game running above 15 fps
I messed around with a server for the Steam controller and the one built in to DS4Windows. getting the Steam controller working, as it’s working through another piece of software on the way to Cemu, is a goddamn nightmare. sure, I could just tell Steam to send Xinput and that’s great, but two different things go badly: emulating the right stick and the gryo itself. now, the right stick stuff will probably be super subjective so I won’t dwell on that but holy shit getting the gyro to both do anything and not be super fucking finicky was a challenge, nevermind behaving like a proper Gamepad would
using a DS4, in comparison, was braindead and painless and it gets the feel right, to the point where it’s comparable to playing Splatoon 2 with a Pro Controller. you should probably do that.
did I tell you to play Splatoon? play Splatoon. with the motion controls. on your computer.
can I just copy the 1.6 patch files from the splatoon I downloaded over in place of the base game files in the other folder
every time I read a readme for some windows script kiddie thing and I see a reference to not copying stuff to program files to “avoid UAC” it makes my posix soul contort
