Release PCSX ReARMed, with a new GPU


I tested Colin McCrae 2.0 (PAL version bin/cue) again today, on the newest version, and it runs perfectly for me. I think you might need to set specifically to use PAL settings to get it to work (IIRC), but it works great using the analgue controls!
That was it, I set it specifically to PAL and now it just runs! (Well, had to save the settings and restart the entire emulator fr it to work, so probably that's why I did not figure it out myself)Thanks a lot!


It is actually amazing how well everything runs with this emulator, apart from Colin McRae I have everything on a pretty standard setting at 650 MHz and it just works :)
 
Wow, I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, but boy am I looking forward to it! :D


Thanks for all your amazing work Notaz.
 
I tested Colin McCrae 2.0 (PAL version bin/cue) again today, on the newest version, and it runs perfectly for me. I think you might need to set specifically to use PAL settings to get it to work (IIRC), but it works great using the analgue controls!
That was it, I set it specifically to PAL and now it just runs! (Well, had to save the settings and restart the entire emulator fr it to work, so probably that's why I did not figure it out myself)Thanks a lot!


It is actually amazing how well everything runs with this emulator, apart from Colin McRae I have everything on a pretty standard setting at 650 MHz and it just works :)

if you save the configuration per game, you won't need to do that step again! Also, don't forget to change the controller to the analogue one for more precise turny goodness!!
 
@ Notaz and Exophase:


Is one of you currently working on the GPU plugin.


My Final Fnatasy VIII still crashes after loading (German version).


Can I hope for an update or do I have to play it non high res ;) .
 
Forget the gles plugin, I have tested it with that game and it's unusable. You can get some stability (with some glitches) but when entering a battle you will get huge slowdowns, graphics corruption everywhere and eventually it will crash almost for sure.
 
Final Fantasy VIII High res would be great.


I kmow it's unusable right now but may I hope to get an improvement for the FF games some time?
 
I have not much faith into this, specially after exophase explained it:

I looked at the OGL ES plugin a bit and it isn't surprising that its performance is very poor. It's basically doing a draw call for every triangle or quad, which will result in tens of thousands per second for a typical game. That's never going to perform well. Note that this is largely because it is based on old code meant for OGL 1.x, with triangles drawn using "immediate mode".. the way graphics are done has changed a lot since then.


Getting fast and reasonably correct (forget perfection) emulation with hardware acceleration/enhancement is challenging mainly due to two things: supporting PS1's texture formats and supporting reading back previously rendered-to VRAM as a texture for a later primitive. The texture format problem is usually solved by converting all PS1 textures to some standard format like 15bpp RGB. This requires a lot of careful tracking because the same texture data in VRAM can result in different textures if different palettes are used. So you have to match palettes with texture regions (which are defined by triangles) and cache every new combination that's used. Uploading new textures is expensive and this can end up using a lot more memory than the PS1's textures did.


The other problem is harder. You have to be able to merge the emulated display - which is a different format from the emulated VRAM, or at least that's the main point of using hardware, to enhance the original - with the original display. Reading back the screen output is very expensive. And since this happens a triangle at a time it can be expensive to determine exactly which parts to update. Usually games will render an entire large rectangular region (in the backbuffer in VRAM), but not always. Sometimes they will render "off the screen." Emulators like peops OGL1 handled this through a complex set of checks, heuristics, and hacks, and invoked software rendering over trying to get back the rendered display. But these old emulation techniques didn't have access to a lot of more advanced features like render to texture.


There may be other solutions possible with more complex caching strategies or utilizing fragment shading more to emulate things. But Pandora doesn't have a lot of fragment shading capability so who knows how much you can get on them..

I enjoy this emulator a lot and I'm very glad that it works as good as it does, the developers have done enough.
 
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Thanks for the answer asimov-solensan.


Final Fantasy 8 is also nice without high-res (but it would be even better with ;) ).

I realy love this emulator. i was playing Final Fantasy 7 all night and i figured i might need tv out cables :)

I have TV-out and used it one time with Final Fantgasy 7. Pandora looks much better.
 
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If got a bug: on Final Fantasy VII, when i go to the Wutai Region (once i just got the Tiny Bronko in Rocket Town), the Emulator seems to Crash and i have to restart the Pandora, its whit the new kernel, but i can remind i dit had the issue also whit old version of the firmware..


Final Fantasy VII is the PAL Version, i ripped it whit the Ubuntu Terminal by using a Terminal Comand, there are 3 .bin and 3 cue images one for each PSX CD.., so i think it cant be acording to the ripp..


It was from my own Final Fantasy PSX CDs, i just bought for the Pandora..
 
A savestate is needed to even look at something like that, which must be done before the game misbehaves.
 
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Ok, on the Weekend, when my work tomorow is over, i think i would ad a savestate file here in the topic, when i know which file this is..


Thangs in advance for the help :)
 
I can't seem to get it to work with 7z-files. It does list them and sometimes it even tries to boot, but then either nothing or I get the desktop back.


I think I'm on OS 1.5, not sure where to find 1.6 yet.
 
a 7z file is like a zip file and you need to decompress it with 7-zip or winRAR or similar.

I know what 7z-files are, but when I extract them I get about 40 files (bin + audio tracks) for each game. I'd rather have just 1 file for every game, either in zip, rar, 7z format and have it working, but it doesn't seem to work like that.
 
I know what 7z-files are, but when I extract them I get about 40 files (bin + audio tracks) for each game. I'd rather have just 1 file for every game, either in zip, rar, 7z format and have it working, but it doesn't seem to work like that.
zip, 7z, rar and similar are not suitable here because they are not seekable - whenever emulated game wants to read something from CD the emulator would have to decompress the whole file from the beginning until it reaches the requested sector each time, and games would take hours, if not days to load up. That's why there are no PSX emulators supporting these formats (and if there are, they uncompress everything on start, but that would still take long time on pandora).


There are special formats designed for this purpose - eboot, .cbn, .z, .bz, so you need to convert if you want single file. Note that some of those formats (or rather their converter programs) are lossy though - you may lose videos and music, or the game will no longer work.
 
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What about ripping them to bin/cue images in the first place?


I'm not sure, if the audiotracks will work, if you just put them within the same iso...
 
What about ripping them to bin/cue images in the first place?


I'm not sure, if the audiotracks will work, if you just put them within the same iso...

I did not rip the games myself, I downloaded the ones I own, but maybe it is a better idea to rip them myself anyway. At the moment I don't have them by hand, that's why.
 
I have a bug.


PAL TV-out.


I use the default settings with HW overscale.


When I enable it, the emulator doesn't even start.


Is this just for me?


I don't have the PND out at the moment.


Can someone please check it?
 
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