Release Pcsx-Rearmed

[mvickers03]

Nice tip here for anyone with bad dumps. I couldn't get a good rip of Rayman so I had to download it, I'm sure thats legal as I own the original media, it was in ccd format, I just mounted it with Daemon tools and made an image of the virtual drive with alcohol 120% to BIN/CUE format and viola,

That shouldn't be necessary, since CloneCD generates the same files you get with BIN/CUE. When you rip a game with CloneCD you get 4 files: CCD,IMG,CUE,SUB. The IMG is the same as the BIN file of CDRWIN's BIN/CUE format. the same goes for the CUE file itself. Sometimes the CUE-file is missing, which can be a problem if there are some audio-tracks in the IMG/BIN-file. If this is the case, you have to generate a CUE-file yourself. You can use redump.org as a resource for this.

Thanks very much for that, Is it as easy as just renaming the file? The process only takes about 30 seconds to re rip. Not sure which is easier.

 

[god_at_hell]

jup ... just that .. and if you have a cue-file, you then want to edit this one to (just change the name of the binary). But the cue file should not be necessary if the game consists only of one big Mode2 track.

 

[johnmy]

@Notaz - thanks for the work on this emu - have been enjoying playing Wipeout 3 at what seemed like full speed to me with CD audio!

Also Wild Arms seems to run now which it didnt before

Have sent you a donation....

 

[Loon]

Really pleased to report that Dodonpachi NTSC-J works like a charm, it's a classic manic shump that really should be played if you're at all interested n the genre.

IIRC You can rotate the screen by selecting TATE mode in the options. You should probably then remap the controls using the emulator menu.

Have updated the compatibility list.

 

[god_at_hell]

Notaz ... i had an idea. Would it be feasible to implement a stretch/crop Option for FMV sequences? Quite a lot fmv scenes are in 16:9 which results in a fairly small picture (if we have a 640x480 4:3 picture, this would mean the fmv diplays in 640x360). It would be nice if for those fmvs there's an option to crop the black bars from the top and the bottom of the fmv and stretch the x and y direction by a factor of 1.3. The resulting picture would be 832x468 anf fill the pandora screen quite nicely.

 

[Barnaby]

Niiice, seems more games are running well now. Although I seem to be having a problem with the frame limiter, some games like Alundra and MGS (especially Alundra), when not much is going on screen, speed up too fast despite the frame limiter being on. Other games, like Megaman X4 and Wipeout 3, work perfectly.

FFIX is so tantilisingly close to fullspeed, I'm so looking forward to r6. Keep up the great work!

 

[Schnatterplatsch]

Wow, we're at r5 already? Notaz, thanks so much for working on this!!!
Can't wait to get my pandy back. (Will it be next week?)

How is Alundra 2 performing?


....and also thanks to those who keep the compability list updated!

 

[notaz]

Notaz ... i had an idea. Would it be feasible to implement a stretch/crop Option for FMV sequences? Quite a lot fmv scenes are in 16:9 which results in a fairly small picture (if we have a 640x480 4:3 picture, this would mean the fmv diplays in 640x360). It would be nice if for those fmvs there's an option to crop the black bars from the top and the bottom of the fmv and stretch the x and y direction by a factor of 1.3. The resulting picture would be 832x468 anf fill the pandora screen quite nicely.

Can be done but it's messy because hardware scaler doesn't allow the image to go outside of screen borders (not sure if this is driver or hardware limitation), and I don't want to do additional software scaling at the moment.

Niiice, seems more games are running well now. Although I seem to be having a problem with the frame limiter, some games like Alundra and MGS (especially Alundra), when not much is going on screen, speed up too fast despite the frame limiter being on. Other games, like Megaman X4 and Wipeout 3, work perfectly.

It's not a problem with the limiter, it's emulation timing in general is messed up. I plan to deal with this in r7.

FFIX is so tantilisingly close to fullspeed, I'm so looking forward to r6. Keep up the great work!

r6 will probably be another bugfix release because it looks like I fooked up some things, for example frameskip of builtin gpu broke in r4 and xa became noisy in r5.

 

[DynaMight]

R5 increased compatibility thats for sure. Resident Evils all work perfectly now! Only game that's causing issues for me (same in previous releases too) is Fifa 05, the commentary repeats itself almost like a jumping record, plus some small missing textures, I dont know if its related. It works perfectly on PSX4Pandora but the menu system is hard work to use!

 

[OilySalmon]

FFVIII (PAL): When entering a random battle, the game freezes, except for the battle music. No other sounds are heard, and the music plays smoothly.

Platform: PCSX-reARMed r5, Hotfix 4 and 5.

Settings: all GPU plugins tried, builtin and PSX4ALL had same result (above), openGLES plugin blackscreened upon starting game. All other settings default, clock speeds from 600-850MHz. Varios advanced options tried, but no difference was made.

FMVs pause every few seconds, including sound, with a small, glitched repeat of the last ~.5 seconds of audio before the pause occurred when the FMV resumes.

 

[Titcher]

Compatibility using BIOS implementation is very good. I once read that BIOS implementation is less efficient speed-wise than HLE, is this true? And will you be making efforts to improve the compatibility of the HLE?

 

[Barnaby]

Only game that's causing issues for me (same in previous releases too) is Fifa 05, the commentary repeats itself almost like a jumping record

FMVs pause every few seconds, including sound, with a small, glitched repeat of the last ~.5 seconds of audio before the pause occurred when the FMV resumes.

It did this in Metal Gear Solid too - to solve it, go into the [BIOS/Plugins] menu, go into "Configure built-in SPU Plugin", and change SPU IRO Wait to ON. Worked for MGS, so hopefully it'll work in other games with the same issue too. I dunno if you should turn it on for all games though, so any game that's having this issue, turn it to ON and use "Save cfg for loaded game", so it doesn't change the settings for every single game .

It was mentioned a couple of pages back.

 

[martin]

Has anyone tried out Capcom vs SNK Pro? If so, can you confirm if it is working on this emulator or not. Thanks!

 

[notaz]

FFVIII (PAL): When entering a random battle, the game freezes, except for the battle music. No other sounds are heard, and the music plays smoothly.

Must use real BIOS for this; if you have a savestate with HLE BIOS you have to replay from beginning too.

Compatibility using BIOS implementation is very good. I once read that BIOS implementation is less efficient speed-wise than HLE, is this true?

It depends on how much the game relies on BIOS but usually differences are negligible.

And will you be making efforts to improve the compatibility of the HLE?

While I like the idea of HLE BIOS it's real lot of work to fix it's issues, so maybe after I'm happy with other things.

 

[DynaMight]

Only game that's causing issues for me (same in previous releases too) is Fifa 05, the commentary repeats itself almost like a jumping record

FMVs pause every few seconds, including sound, with a small, glitched repeat of the last ~.5 seconds of audio before the pause occurred when the FMV resumes.

It did this in Metal Gear Solid too - to solve it, go into the [BIOS/Plugins] menu, go into "Configure built-in SPU Plugin", and change SPU IRO Wait to ON. Worked for MGS, so hopefully it'll work in other games with the same issue too. I dunno if you should turn it on for all games though, so any game that's having this issue, turn it to ON and use "Save cfg for loaded game", so it doesn't change the settings for every single game .

It was mentioned a couple of pages back.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried it but no luck.

 

[Johannes]

About plugins, there is only one at the moment but standard psemu plugin interface is supported, so any PC plugin can be recompiled and used.

That's great. I want to use the Eternal SPU plugin so bad but cannot find the source. It's a shame that we're isolated with our ARM architecture. Plenty of good software but no source -> no recompilation -> no usage So I thought about the hard way. notaz, what about reverse engineering? What do you think, is there a realistic chance to decompile the plugin and get then a working one for Pcsx-Rearmed?

 

[notaz]

About plugins, there is only one at the moment but standard psemu plugin interface is supported, so any PC plugin can be recompiled and used.

That's great. I want to use the Eternal SPU plugin so bad but cannot find the source. It's a shame that we're isolated with our ARM architecture. Plenty of good software but no source -> no recompilation -> no usage So I thought about the hard way. notaz, what about reverse engineering? What do you think, is there a realistic chance to decompile the plugin and get then a working one for Pcsx-Rearmed?

Possible but difficult, it's considerably more work than fixing PEOPS sound that's used now.
Could you explain in detail what's wrong with that Music game? Perhaps make a savestate that shows the problem.

 

[Johannes]

Thanks for the quick response. The thing is that the above mentioned plugin is the only one that can handle everything correct for this game. For this reason I fear there's some uncommon requirement Music 2000 has for the sound emulation. I think I'll make a video to demonstrate the issue.

 

[OilySalmon]

FMVs pause every few seconds, including sound, with a small, glitched repeat of the last ~.5 seconds of audio before the pause occurred when the FMV resumes.

It did this in Metal Gear Solid too - to solve it, go into the [BIOS/Plugins] menu, go into "Configure built-in SPU Plugin", and change SPU IRO Wait to ON. Worked for MGS, so hopefully it'll work in other games with the same issue too. I dunno if you should turn it on for all games though, so any game that's having this issue, turn it to ON and use "Save cfg for loaded game", so it doesn't change the settings for every single game .

It was mentioned a couple of pages back.

This does help with the stop-start of the FMVs, but it does replace that bug with another one: with this setting on, there is a constant crackling coming from the right speaker/headphone. Very strange and oddly specific problem.

FFVIII (PAL): When entering a random battle, the game freezes, except for the battle music. No other sounds are heard, and the music plays smoothly.

Must use real BIOS for this; if you have a savestate with HLE BIOS you have to replay from beginning too.

Unfortunately this didn't work for me. I restarted the game with default settings, except for setting my clock to 800Mhz and using the real bios. Same result. I'm not sure what the problem could be, other than the fact that I'm using the PAL version of the game. I have the American copy somewhere around here. Maybe I'll try that one out too.

EDIT: I've gotten the NTSC version of FFVIII to work nearly perfectly with the following non-default settings:
BIOS: SCPH1001.bin
GPU plugin: gpuPCSX4ALL.so

non-default spu settings:
Reverb: On
Interpolation: Gaussian

Advanced options:
Rootcounter hack: ON (not sure if this is needed)

The game will run fullspeed at 600MHz (except for menus and some of the flashier battle moves, those drop to around 30-40 FPS. The battle moves likely dip even lower. With these settings, FMVs now have a split-second pause in music every ten seconds rather than every three or so. The game runs flawless so far except for that single FMV bug.

 

[Johannes]

Ok, I've made the video for a comparison of the sound messed up with the P.E.Op.S. SPU plugin and how it should sound when everything is fine (second part in video). It's the same demo song that was played back but the different results are remarkable! You can notice that there're still some sound samples which aren't corrupted but I'm not able to spot what this is dependent on. Hope this helps to find the bug!