revisiting things with a bit more research than the other day
TOTK runs without issue when using Citron (currently the most notably updated Yuzu fork) with a sufficiently powerful PC, but only with non-RDNA3 cards - anything RDNA3 has the little shader artifacts i mentioned in my last post in various places in the game. supposedly there’s a fix coming soon via AMD driver update, but the latest AMD driver currently does not fix it. this issue affects Citron, Ryujinx, Suyu, and Sudachi… but for whatever reason not the last Yuzu early access build (people have speculated that having your exe named “yuzu.exe” flags something in the AMD driver that only applies the fix for that executable, but i haven’t tested it yet). Edit - no, this doesn’t work, the issue still persists even if you rename citron or w/e to yuzu.exe
anyway, i started going down the rabbit hole of TOTK mods. 60 FPS works pretty well, and you can also upscale and improve shadow resolution, among other enhancements
^ this is the pack i’ve been using, and it works fabulously.
brief instructions:
set up emulator (install keys, install firmware, any desired title updates)
ensure TOTK is ready to play (visible in the games list), then close the emu
open optimizer
click Executable: Browse
browse and select emulator .exe, e.g. yuzu.exe
configure desired settings
click Apply
click Launch
browse and select TOTK game file
to recap based on my testing on two PCs thus far:
if you have AMD RDNA3 graphics, use TOTK Optimizer 2.1.3 + Yuzu EA build 4176 (and probably something like this: Download : Clean Interface + Blackscreen Fix + Controllers UI [The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom] [Mods] to get rid of an issue where the screen blacks out during quick item swaps when over 30 FPS)
for non-RDNA3 graphics, use TOTK Optimizer 2.1.3 + Citron (or your choice, but i like Citron a lot)
after some futzing, i’ve got TOTK running smoothly in 60 FPS in Yuzu, and it’s quite impressive. as the shaders start to settle down, it really starts cooking
Smash Ultimate has the most shaders of everything. every pokemon and item and character and stage has unique shaders. set the game to an infinite length 8 player cpu battle with items on high and you’ll save yourself a lot of stuttering in-game later
similar thing with MK8DX - just let the attract mode run for 30-60 minutes and you’ll have cached a huge amount of the shaders for the game
metroid dread runs great as far as i saw. and has very few shaders to compile so it doesn’t even really stutter
Welcome to the introduction of a collection of the handheld LCD shaders that emulates the colorspace and LCD metrics from the offical handheld gaming consoles. Ranging from Gameboy Color to the PSP being the main focus for emulating the displays from their colorspace to specified gamma and color temperatures.
re: totk: i determined that the glitchy purplish lines issue still does actually occur in yuzu EA (most easily visible at the crest of waterfalls) but it is much less prominent and generally not noticeable, so not a big deal.
re: smash ultimate: this works but i learned that 1-4p models are not the same as 5-8p models so you need to do this for both 4p and 8p battles or else you’ll still be missing half the character/move shaders ;_;
this game literally has tens of thousands of shaders lmao.
oh my god i’ve been looking such a resource (games that aren’t exclusive but have major benefits on a specific platform) for so long, i didn’t know it was just a page on the emulation.gametechwiki.com thing
Is XEMU as much a headache as it sounds? Looking at their FAQ it only takes a specific kind of iso not xbe or redump or chd at this point as soon as I need to track down a specific kind of rom to play anything I’m out.
Not sure how I even tracked down bios for cxbx-reloaded.
oh man i was on this page the other day, im trying to find some sort of Dreamcast RPG that I swear was ported to the GBC. It’s not on here. I gotta keep looking.
Oh shoot, thanks to this list I just remembered Galaga Legions existed, I gotta play that again sometime!
This is a trailer for DX but I remember preferring the original Galaga Legions more, though I don’t remember why. Looking it up, it even got a 3DS port? I had no idea…
the 3ds game also has a port of pacman championship edition (though sadly only vanilla, not dx), and is one of few 3ds releases that’s cartridge-only. i think ridge racer 3d also was.
crazy taxi 3: high roller - let it run through the attract mode a couple times to compile/cache a bunch of shaders or whatever it is doing (it doesn’t tell you about shader compilation progress like e.g. RCPS3). the game starts out stutter-y but seems to eventually run smooth as butter.
ninja gaiden black - some initial stutters, otherwise perfect
sega gt 2002 - 2 issues - transitions are broken (you get little yellow lines over the screen, e.g. when un/pausing or changing camera views in replays), and the photo mode is totally busted (reminds me of framebuffer issues in n64 emulation). i didn’t look at whether or not you can fix this with configuration or not, but it’s still quite playable
the emulator is just a smidge more finicky than others i’ve been using recently, but the compatibility and performance are also very good in my estimation. worth it imo
bangai-o hd: missile fury - great! didn’t see any issues in a brief play
geometry wars retro evolved 2 - same as above!
goldeneye 007 (xbox 360 xbla remake) (codename “bean”) - also great! pretty impressive if you haven’t seen it. it does the “switch to original graphics with a button-press” thing that halo ce anniversary did later on. cool
earthworm jim hd - not playable. lots of corrupted sprites
sega rally online arcade - great!!
import tuner challenge (shutokou battle x) - you need to patch the game to get it to work without black-screening after the first race i think. supposedly working if you do that. the first race did work pretty well
performance is very impressive for the games that work
edit: patching games is super simple using xenia manager, you can just right click a game > Patches > Download Patches and it will show you available patches for your game. very nice
