Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[flyingjohn]

AMD + OpenGL + emulators = less than optimal experience.

Not on Linux. Also opengl performance is still not optimal on amd for windows.

Vulkan

Unfortunately Amd screwed that too.Older cards have broken Vulkan drivers and newer drivers have missing Vulkan features that Nvidia has.
But there is no difference on Linux.

 

[Rincewind]

I searched the thread and didn't find any mention of it, but AmigaVision (previously MegaAGS) is a game-changer for Amiga. It comes with a 4GB pack of Amiga games, all pre-configured to run as best as possible on FS-UAE, MiSTer, Analog Pocket and others: https://amiga.vision/

The installation process is simple (if poorly explained), and once it's done you just double-click on a shortcut and it takes you to a launcher with all games sorted into multiple categories, lists and curated packs:

It doesn't have the full library (I noticed some gaps like Captive 2), but it's very extensive and it's an open-source project, still in development.

It's nice, and I'm happy to see any effort that tries to preserve the Amiga legacy. Anything is better than letting those Amiga games slowly fade into oblivion.

However, they still only support WHDLoad converted games, which is objectively a worse experience for many titles than playing them in their original, unadulterated, uncracked form on an emulated A500 or HDD equipped "big box" Amiga (e.g., an A2000 equivalent machine with Kickstart 1.3 and a turbo card). Of course, if you never played these games on original hardware in their original form, it's impossible to tell the difference...

By definition, WHDLoad conversions of any game that uses disk-based protection must be cracked. You must put a lot faith into the people doing the cracking... Even cracks aside, many games have various issues when converted to WHDLoad if you poke around on their issue tracker a bit: http://mantis.whdload.de/. And that's just stuff that gets reported (like I didn't bother reporting many things I found because I simply stopped using it out of frustration).

One glaring problem is the WHDLoad of the original Lemmings game still locks up randomly after 20-30 mins of gameplay. That's just a bad crack, and it's been unfixed forever. And don't assume the crackers do a full playthrough test of all 40-50-60 hours+ RPGs they touch... They don't, and issues remain unfixed for a long time and/or they don't get reported. Generally, few crackers care about RPGs, adventures, and strategy games that account for a small percentage of all Amiga games. And that absolutely shows in the quality of cracks and WHDLoad conversions of those games. From my own research:

- Adventure - 13.4%
- Strategy - 5.5%
- RPG - 3.1%

So the remaining roughly 75% which are the arcade/action games get a lot more attention. Like it or not, the Amiga was more known for its action games (regardless that I personally don't care much about them).

My upcoming Amiga pack will fix that; 99% only uncracked originals, HD installs where the game itself supports it (and only then), and no WHDLoad in sight. As true to playing the original games on a real Amiga as it can be in WinUAE.

All bundled with my WinUAE shader setup out-of-the-box. Stay tuned.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Originally posted in the old Monster Hunter vs. new thread, but also relevant here:

I hadn't realized that the complete translation patch for the 2nd generation Monster Hunter on PS2, Monster Hunter 2 Dos, was released this year. I've been looking forward to it a lot. I've tested it and it works perfectly. They've translated absolutely 100% of everything, very impressive work.

https://break-arts.com/projects/mh2dos/

MH2 Dos has a lot of "simulationist" aspects that were completely abandoned in later entries such as seasons that affect hunts. The economy is also a lot tighter and you really do feel like you're scraping by trying to make ends meet as a hunter, at least early on. The control scheme for this game is similar to the first PS2 title and it's little clunky at first (attacking on the right analog stick), but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Anyway, the translation effort definitely goes beyond a simple script dump. Here they talk about some of the bespoke tools they built specifically for this project:

https://break-arts.com/posts/mh2_re/

It's even possible to play MH2 online on custom dedicated servers (also works with PCSX2):

https://mholdschool.com/viewtopic.php?t=216

Here's a detailed guide:

https://mholdschool.com/viewtopic.php?t=120

 

[Rincewind]

From the AmigaVision collection's home page:

We take special care to run every game at the correct aspect ratio and CPU speed.

Um, I took a look at their master CSV file they generate the configs from, and about 80-90% of the NTSC titles are wrongly displayed with the PAL pixel aspect ratio. The guy also seems to be quite confused as he talks about some weird special "Jim Sachs aspect ratio". WTF? He was simply one of the American devs doing the graphics for NTSC. There were many others, basically all North American studios fall into the same bucket. Just NTSC, there's nothing special about it.

Setting up PAL for 16:15 pixel aspect ratio is also questionable. Anyway, won't go into details now, but I prefer 1:1 PAR for PAL. Generally, that's more correct, but it can be a bit random, yeah. I will extend my article with info on this.

He seems to be a Swedish guy, but he should know better about NTSC games. I will contact him at some point about these mistakes, we'll see how he reacts.

About correct CPU speed—well, he uses WHDLoad conversions, so there goes the correct speed out of the window for many titles. But whatever.

PS: I wasn't looking for "errors", I was hoping to get a nice database of game releases, each correctly marked as PAL or NTSC. That would be helpful for me too. But so many obviously NTSC titles are marked as PAL that I simply cannot take it seriously.

 

[Arthandas]

Why the fuck no one told me you can download PS3 games with all updates and DLC directly from Sony servers for free?!!!

 

[CyberWhale]

Any ideas on how to configure Half-pixel offset option on the new/Nightly PCSX2 GUI (or outside of it)? Useful for resolving bluring from a double image, but can't seem to find it and can't seem to find an answer anywhere on the internet either.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Any ideas on how to configure Half-pixel offset option on the new/Nightly PCSX2 GUI (or outside of it)? Useful for resolving bluring from a double image, but can't seem to find it and can't seem to find an answer anywhere on the internet either.

Half-pixel offset has to be enabled on a per-game basis.

Right-click the individual game you want to fix in the PCSX2 QT UI, go to Properties->Graphics on the left, select the Rendering tab, tick the "Manual Renderer Fixes" box. This will enable additional tabs, including "Upscaling Fixes", which is where Half-Pixel Offset is.

[edit] Removed broken image links

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[Puukko]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least. Vulkan doesn't boot and d3d11 only gives picture on Beetle and Beetle HW, the latter complaining it can't find a hardware renderer. The rest boot to a black screen with audio. The reason I think this might be driver related is because I didn't really touch RA for months and didn't change anything that might affect it. Never had this kind of an issue before.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

retroarch is pretty fiddly and fragile a lot of the time, things like a single crash or bad exit have caused mine to stop working. or something like your shaders might not play nice with some core settings.
have you tried wiping your retroarch.cfg? i personally always copy mine somewhere else when i know i have a working cfg, and if something breaks i just copy it over to my RA directory again and overwrite.

 

[flyingjohn]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least

Typical retroarch. Yeah, when I switch to anything hardware related it just simply crashes on the beetle cores, swanstation works though. But you shouldn't be using retroarch for psx anyway. The original beetle core is outdated and the hw version is hacky mess. Swanstation is just a worse version of duckstation.
Use mednafen or duckstation instead. Crt filters aren't worth the headaches with all the retroarch bugs when it comes to psx.

 

[flyingjohn]

EMU DEVS:
"INSTALL DA LATEST OS AND UPDATOOOOS"
MICROSOFT:
"
AMD and Intel users running Windows 11 suddenly started having their hardware completely incapable of launching any games while using Vulkan. The reason is something none of us expected at all, Microsoft… And Mesa! Please lower those pitchforks.

Microsoft decided to roll out an install of this package, which allows incapable hardware to run the mentioned APIs if no proper driver was provided from the hardware vendor, or just if the hardware is incapable of running it."

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. Hope windows 12 doesn't do anything to ruin da switch patreon bucks.

 

[Athena]

Could anyone on AMD and the latest drivers test Retroarch for me? I can't get hardware renderers to work, on PSX emulators at least. Vulkan doesn't boot and d3d11 only gives picture on Beetle and Beetle HW, the latter complaining it can't find a hardware renderer. The rest boot to a black screen with audio. The reason I think this might be driver related is because I didn't really touch RA for months and didn't change anything that might affect it. Never had this kind of an issue before.

There are two different settings related to hardware renderers (a very RA thing). One from the core you're using, the other is from the global rendering settings found in Settings > Video > Output. Check the latter is set to vulkan, sometimes it likes to set itself to glcore after a crash or similar. I've found that having a core-specific and a global setting mismatch tends to work badly. But I'm on linoox so your experience may vary.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

Shiren 4's translation patch finally got released
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7175/

 

[spekkio]

BROs, need some help from fags familar with playing Game Boy Advance games on real hardware. In the past I was always using just "basic" video output of the VBA emu. But now I plan to replay Metroid - Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion, using Retroarch - mGBA Core. And shaders. To get the graphics closer to the "original look".

So, I need some info about this "original look", since YT videos can't be trusted.

Below, there are sets of 3 images, each of them using specific settings:

1) Default Retroarch + mGBA values. Oversaturated + blurry image. Ultra-low internal res (240x160) certainly doesn't help...

2) gba-color shader applied. IMO it's slightly brighter than the "Color Correction" setting of the mGBA core. Colors are too washed-out IMO, but I dunno - maybe it actually looked like this on "early models" of GBA (no-backlight)?

3) gba-color + retro-tiles shaders applied. Tested all "lcd-like" shaders in the "handheld" subfolder, this one looks the best for me. OFC it's totally subjective.

Click the images for their full 1920x1080 glory (esp. important for the 3rd image with the "lcd grid").

Metroid - Zero Mission

Metroid Fusion

Tactics Ogre - Knight of Lodis

So:

• which one is better and why?
• which one looks closer to the original hardware?

To quote the classic:

DISCUSS!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

So:

• which one is better?
• which one looks closer to the original hardware?

To quote the classic:

DISCUSS!

I am not sure which one is more closer to the original hardware, I don't own a GB, but I prefer the less color saturated options. I suspect these are also the more closer to the original display.

I don't know why nowadays everything has to be hypersaturated to be appealing. Probably because people are too used to see the real world through their dopamine generator smartphone.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

A closer to hardware at the time, C looks best.

 

[Hellraiser]

spekkio, hard to say with metroid if the color shader is correct. I would need to fire up mGBA myself with F-Zero MV to tell you for sure how authentic the colors are (the backgrounds on the queen cup tenth zone east track, or the 3rd stark farm circuit background from the second cup are distintively too bright in emulators, on the ds lite or the on a gamecube gameboy player via GBi played on a CRT, even with the GBA color matrix in the last case) or advance wars (grass shade of plain tiles is more green/natural than the bright yellowish VBA for instance shows).

If you ask me it might be a bit too de-saturated.

The LCD grid is fine and actually you should check how it looks with just it enabled, as it should darken the image a bit.

Also bear in mind that while the OG GBA did look that dark and some games (F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and Advance Wars definitely) were designed with that screen in mind and thus looked oversaturated/garish on a PC monitor or more modern handheld, while some fucked it up by not caring how dark the art looks on the actual GBA screen since the bulk of the dev work was done on PCs with CRTs anyway (castlevania: circle of the moon, which got criticized in reviews for being fucking dark, also the official port of Doom) or aimed for the GBA SP's lit screen (the SP was announced very fast). Thus the "no color shader" look with an LCD grid to me would absolutely fine apart from a few cases of earlier titles where developers cared about it.

Metroid Fusion, Warioland IV and Castlevania Aria of Sorrow are three cases where I honestly don't know if they were aiming for the SP's lit screen or not. Things got muddy later on since some people had OG GBAs and some SPs (and a few GB Players), few games had a brightness setting/mode.

Having said all of that I prefer my DS lite's screen (I think I have the IPS one, apparently they made some with those, but it's a lottery) for pretty much everything apart from F-Zero Maximum Velocity, those track backgrounds just look wrong there.

 

[spekkio]

It's weird fucking thing for sure. In most tested GBA games, "default" colors look oversaturated.

The LCD grid is fine and actually you should check how it looks with just it enabled, as it should darken the image a bit.

I mean games look like this with only "retro-tiles" shader applied:

Spoiler

But the "color-corrected" output is too washed-out (see above, "retro-tiles" + "gba-color" applied).

Some weaker color correction would've been better IMO.

Anyway, more testing.

Castlevania CotM

Color-corrected output looks like ass:

Fire Emblem 7

Color-corrected output looks much better than vanilla, almost perfect (?):

Since I'm playing Vandal Hearts 2 (Playstation 1) ATM, I also tested some CRT and Scanlines shaders. Almost all CRT ones look like complete ass, but to my surprise, simple "scanlines\scanline" shader looks p. decent:

Verdict: it's probably both per-game and per-user problem / solution.

 

[Hellraiser]

2) Fire Emblem 6. Color-corrected output looks much better than vanilla, almost perfect (?):

That fire emblem screen with color correction showing Lynn and the sepia looks quite close to how I remember it looking on my GBA. Same for the one with the tactical battle in FE7, the grass is the right shade and I think the title was indeed blue like that. It's the same developer as advance wars so it makes sense they also took care with it looking as it should on the actual hardware when designing the art.

Yeah, as I mentioned, it will be a very per game thing. For instance Sonic Advance also looks IMO better/correct on my DS Lite screen (not over-saturated), as does Kuru Kuru Kururin. Now Mario Kart: Super Circuit is a matter of taste, it is a bit too bright maybe.

 

[Hellraiser]

BTW as for CRTs TV shader it really depends what you were used to - what cables you used and what kind of tube you had as well as the console. Something like Atari, Famicom (and famiclones) over RF will need a different one for an authentic noisy image versus say playing a megadrive using component cables with their lower noise but still inherent blur (where that damn vertical dithering in games like Earthworm Jim or the Lion King looks like ass with RGB cables that have sharp as hell image). Finally RGB is weird to describe, its very sharp with accurate colors, but also smooth and not as pixelated as raw on LCD/emulated upscaled image. S-video is close to RGB but not as good regarding color and sharpness.

Personally I do prefer RGB for everything and got such cables, despite the dithering in some western megadrive games. Although the authentic look from my youth would be RF or component.

Scanlines are a bit of a mythical creature, you do get them but they are only really visible on very big tubes or tubes with high TLV (like PVMs). My 21" trinitron meanwhile show something closer to the LCD grid of the GBA if you look close enough, between the actual blank scanlines the CRT gun skips and the columns of phosphor RGB strips on the surface (naturally you'll have one color darker than the other 3, which is why you see the vertical "scanline").

Naturally looks way better IRL, but despite the color bleed the phone photo shows well what I mean by the LCD grid. There's really no substitute for CRTs at the moment, not until 8k screens and shaders to fully emulate the way the shadow masks or aperture grille looked like.

FYI The fabulous colors on alucard's cape are from a saturn-version only item in SOTN that changes colors.

EDIT: some people use a raspberyy pi with RGB output via scart to a TV for emulation, that's probably the "cheapest" authentic displauy option for arcade/console games, if you have a decent enough CRT TV somewhere.

 

[spekkio]

Sony Trinitron for lyfe! Our fucker lasted ~20 years (1991-201x - watched 9/11 attacks on it for sure) and my parents replaced it with LCD only because it died a sudden death...

---

"scanlines\scanline.slangp" shader is IMO p. decent for Snes as well. I mean...

notbad.gif

 

[Hellraiser]

Yeah it looks fine for Super Metroid, quite close to how I remember it looked when I played it last year.

 

[Jermu]

 

[Melmoth]

nintendo is a freeware pc developer now. they should be grateful to yuzu for helping them transition