PCSX2: emulating the playstation 2

[Jayson]

Going i7 didn't improve things much for me. These emulators don't really make use of 4 cores / 8 threads.

Thats good to know, I had been pricing some upgrades with that being one of the things in mind and the i7 stuff is still a bit too expensive right now.

[MrPopo]

If you really want your particular piece of software to take advantage of extra cores you really have to set out to do so from the start, and it can be quite difficult to do so. Certain things are inherently serial, which means that a good chunk of your code is only going to run on a single core anyway. Plus there is a cost associated with splitting the flow into parallel threads and bringing the flow back together for the serial aspects. Not to mention the inherent race conditions.

I'd figure Saturn emulation would be quicker to make use of multi-core, as if I were going to do a Saturn emu I'd do a thread for each processor the Saturn has. So moving from single core to dual core would give me a performance boost for free.

[J T]

Well, I decided to give it a shot. I've been tinkering with settings for the last hour. I can play Persona 3 FES at around 40fps which feels pretty sluggish. Disgaea usually stays right around 60fps, which is playable, but the music skips a lot and the screen has little spasms every now and again. It's definitely no substitute for the PS2 on a TV, but at least it's something.

[Funk, E]

Why not just get an external TV card for your laptop and plug your PS2 into that?

[Niode]

It's been explained several times before on this forum why using a TV card just isn't a viable option for gaming. Especially one that runs over USB. There just isn't enough bandwidth there for it to work without seeing a ton of lag.

[Funk, E]

I'll give you that a USB card probably isn't the best option, but I've used a TV card for gaming for quite some time now--an older PCI one-- and not had a single complaint. Dscaler works really fast.

[Niode]

He's using a laptop.

[Funk, E]

I'd imagine that a USB 2.0 card would do him some good, then? The bandwidth on that seems plenty high. An alternate idea would maybe be to see if there are any firewire TV cards out there.

[aw93053]

It works but only a handful of games run (usually 2D puzzle games). Castlevania works but it ran too fast and the sound skipped. I tried this about 6 months ago, they may have improved the emulator by now.

[opethfan]

I've tried PCSX2 on a single core A64 3500+, and it ran.
That's all I really have to say. FFX was slow as a dog. Needs more time in the oven to cook. Like SSF, compatibility is impressive, but performance is not. Pity, what with the PS3 being so useless at PS2 games, etc.