Post your most enhanced emulation screenshots.

[fastbilly1]

ooops, I should have thought about the multiples dilemma. Mine were taken at 800x600...ohwell I got taken away with the pretty and shiny.

[thegore]

@thegore: You need to run these games at 640x480 or 1280x960. 800x600 or 1024x768 are not multiples of the game's native resolutions. This is why all your 2D objects are so jagged and ugly, like the GUI you see there. This is MUCH more important on OpenGL then OpenGL2, because GL2 basically emulates the game in a multiple, and then bilinear resizes the picture to whatever resolution you pick, which is a good trade-off.

Also if you use an LCD screen, and it's ratio is 5:4 or 16:9, which most of them are, you need to make sure you check "keep psx aspect ratio". Only uncheck this is a certain game's display remains severely squished, like Castlevania SOTN's character menu. However Soul Blade might be on of the games that hates this option, so in this case, go to your nvidia graphics configuration and look for Flat Panel Scaling and use fixed-aspect ratio.

Of course if you use a CRT monitor ignore all that.

And this is very important. When emulating ANY console game, always set your monitor to use 60hz, and nothing more. Anything higher than that will harm the motion in your games.


You can see in this pic, it added borders to the top and bottom so I could run it in 1280x1024 without breaking the ratio.

thanks. I think I got it figured out. everything is much smoother and less harsh looking now.

[gord]

Hi,
Since the technical terms in Petes plugins are often weird and strange to people who are unfamiliar with these types of things, i thought i might just (try to) explain a few of the common ones

Texture Filtering:
this controls how the textures are rendered to polygons, When its set to "none" you will get a blocky 'point based' rendering method, its the same method that the PlayStation uses so if your looking for a more traditional feel you might like it, but most of us won't . selecting a filter method that doesn't 'smooth sprites' (unfiltered 2d) may be a good idea also, the PlayStation did not have a very high resolution so the blockyness of unfiltered rendering helped keep many fonts and the like much more 'defined'. I prefer to keep my 2d unfiltered mainly because i hate the blurly look

Hi-Res textures:
this is a pre applied filter (and thus won't really effect speeds in game) that makes the textures in the game, 2xsai will apply a blur based filter onto the texture in order to smooth it out and hopefully make the texture look nicer, especially on 2d games, here's an example but your prolly familiar with 2xsai anyway

as far as i can tell stretched mearly creates an image that is 2x the size of the original with no real filtering, this can help keep textures less blurry but i wouldn't recommend it too much.


FrameBuffer effects:
There is a major difference between console 3d acceleration and PC 3d acceleration that has existed since the start, consoles can be designed so that the CPU is able to modify the framebuffer (the final rendered image) quite quickly, whereas on a PC this is reeeeally slow, and therefor its hard to get the framebuffer effects of PlayStation games going on a PC (although most modern cpus/gpus should be able to handle it now).

if you want to play it safe you can set the framebuffer to the "Full" methods on gl2 or the emulated Vram / Full Software methods on gl1. it will go much slower when these framebuffer effects are performed (generally when entering a battle in an rpg and the screen zooms in or whatever) as it will be performed in a software mode (hardware on gl2 but still slow). might want to turn on frame skipping.

you can turn the effects off if you wish, you generally won't miss out on much.

[Mozgus]

Hi-Res textures:
this is a pre applied filter (and thus won't really effect speeds in game) that makes the textures in the game, 2xsai will apply a blur based filter onto the texture in order to smooth it out and hopefully make the texture look nicer, especially on 2d games, here's an example but your prolly familiar with 2xsai anyway

as far as i can tell stretched mearly creates an image that is 2x the size of the original with no real filtering, this can help keep textures less blurry but i wouldn't recommend it too much.

I find that 2XSai is pretty worthless on PSX, whereas it's fantastic on on 8 and 16bit emulators. I won't even try to speculate as to why, but the result, whether 2d or 3d, is always just nasty looking on PSX when applied.

But I have to disagree on "Stretched" filtering. Yes it simply creates a 2x nearest-neighbor resize before the actual filtering is applied, but I find that this mode creates a nice blend between jagged unfiltered graphics, and smeared filtered graphics. Also, when using normal filtering, many 3D games suffer from massive texture clipping on the seams of the "tiles" on surfaces. You don't see these clipped seams when unfiltered, and when using Stretched filtering, you just barely notice them. Many PSX games that got true PC ports, don't suffer from this issue any longer. I always wonder if someday they will figure out a way to cure this emulation issue.

you can turn the effects off if you wish, you generally won't miss out on much.

Woah, bad idea. Many games severely need those effects, and when turned off, graphics glitches happen or even the entire screen goes black for the duration of the effect. Tenchu 2 is a good example. Every time you perform a stealth kill, it uses a framebuffer blur. If disabled, the entire screen will go black while the kill happens and you see nothing at all. However for this specific game, there was a combination of buffer settings you could use that turned off the blur, while retaining the higher resolution display, but it still caused black screens during cutscenes. In many other games, you won't be lucky enough to find a compromise such as this.

Also I was hearing rumors that it was technically possible to use higher resolution framebuffer effects on ePSXe, but never heard anything more on that. Would you happen to know? It still sucks that in order to keep motion blurs and such, they will only be on 320x240 or whatever the game was programed for.

[Raz1r]

Hey Mozgus, those pics are awesome. The Silent Hill one is the best.

Anyway, I was just wondering if you guys could help me with the whole CD ripping thing. I got the latest (I think it's 1.6.0) ePSXe emu, and Mooby's CD plugin, but whenever I try to load a disc it doesn't do anything. I have the 1001 and 7502 BIOS files if that can help me at all.

[Mozgus]

Hey Mozgus, those pics are awesome. The Silent Hill one is the best.

Anyway, I was just wondering if you guys could help me with the whole CD ripping thing. I got the latest (I think it's 1.6.0) ePSXe emu, and Mooby's CD plugin, but whenever I try to load a disc it doesn't do anything. I have the 1001 and 7502 BIOS files if that can help me at all.

Mooby's plugin is for loading disc images off the hard drive. When you select that plugin, and you tell epsxe to load a cd, its actually loading an image that mooby's plugin was configured to load. You want to acquire and select a plugin which is for CDs, which most of them are for. Be warned that performance is severely impacted when playing off the CDs.

http://emulator-zone.com/doc.php/psx/ps ... tools.html

[racketboy]

Bumpy

[Ivo]

Bumpy

That is the name of an old DOS game. A decent one, in fact.

[racketboy]

Bumpy

That is the name of an old DOS game. A decent one, in fact.

lol

[his_pomposity]

So I only just discovered the joys of custom shaders yesterday... I spent quite a bit of time on researching and playing around with various shaders and such. I used Suikoden II as a test subject for the time being because that's what I'm currently playing. Anyway, I've discovered that the 4xGLSLHqFilter gave the game a really nice, painterly look. The odd, jarring pixelated effect was gone as well. I thought it fit quite well into the game's overall feel and theme. My only issue with it is the blurriness, but I guess that's the trade-off for the time being.



Oh, and I used Mozgus' recommended setting for the video plug-in.

Anyway, is there some sort of a master list of recommended custom shaders for any PSX games on here?