Author Topic: This might be kind of stupid, but....  (Read 5279 times)

Offline gpw11

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This might be kind of stupid, but....
« on: Monday, November 26, 2007, 11:20:44 PM »
Is there any way to enhance graphics rendered in software?  Like by applying AA or anything like that through a background program?

Here's the dilemma;  I like Saturn games a lot.  NiGHTS, SF3, and all that jazz.  In fact, The later two scenarios of SF3 are currently being translated and apparently Scenario 2 is very close to being finished.  That's great news.  I owned a Saturn at one point, but it was a piece of shit bought from a pawn shop for a few bucks and it died literally within the first week of owning it.  So, now I resort to emulation.

The thing is that Saturn emulation is a bitch.  It's not that no one is trying, it's just that it was by all accounts a very very complicated console.  We have, however, gotten to the point where there are a few different working emulators.  This is great news, but they all have flaws.

Cassini
This may or may not be legal.  It's a bit of a grey area at the moment.  See, one of the most promising emulators years ago was Girigiri.  Sega bought it, poured some money into it and integrated it into a program they offer in Japan which allows people to download Saturn games on their PC.  It was leaked a few years ago, but was pretty primitive.   Cassini is based upon that.  The developers claimed they reverse engineered the code or something, but really it's almost exactly the same as the old leaked girigiri.  That's not a bad thing:  It runs very fast, uses the gpu to render games, and is compatible enough for me to get by.  The problem is that it is completely bare boned when it comes to features.  I need two things from my emulated games (specificially in relation to SRPGs like Shining Force 3) an option to controll the frame skip/limiter in some way, and save states.  It has neither and for whatever reason I find it very hard to play certain games under those conditions in an emulator.

SSF

Still alive and kicking, this is probably the golden child of Saturn emulation at the moment.  It has both the ability to change the frame limiter and support for save states.  The problem?  It renders in software, meaning that the low res Saturn games look like fuzzy, jaggy ass in fullscreen. 

Yabuse

Kind of middle ground.  There is a speedup button, and it renders through the gpu, but there's a problem.  See, one of the reasons SSF renders in software is because the Saturn hardware didn't use triangles for 3d at all, it used quadratic surfaces to create 3d images.  I don't think there's been hardware support for that since the original nvidia card (guess who looked up the history of nvidia the other day on wikipedia?).  That's a problem emu developers have had a tough time getting around, and why SSF uses the cpu instead of the gpu.  It also means that the gpu rendered graphics in yabuse are often very fucked in some way or another.  I don't know if this is still being worked on, and I don't know how the original girigiri developers managed to get around this problem that hinders everyone else, but until there's actually some key features supported in their emu, it doesn't matter.

So, that's my problem.  I don't know anything really about CPU rendered images, but my question seems like the sort where a positive answer is somewhat unrealistic.  Nevertheless, I figured I'd try. 

Offline Xessive

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #1 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 12:07:06 AM »
Man, I miss my Saturn!

Aside from what you've mentioned I don't know of any Saturn emu that has achieved [successful] gpu based rendering.

To answer your question about AA, don't know of any software way to do it. The only relevant technology is vector I guess.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #2 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 12:35:48 AM »
This interests me.  Saturn emulation is one thing I've never even tried since I own a Saturn... but there are so many games I never played.  I own like... 2.  I should give one of these a whirl.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #3 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 01:17:09 AM »
I'd wait on it.  As soon as I find something that works very well (or a configuration that does) I'll let you know.  As it is right now, I've wasted some time on it.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #4 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 01:18:28 AM »
I did a lot of that waiting for PSx emulation to catch up, and wasted a lot of effort too.  It never really did manage to get anywhere until the perfection of Popstation (the PSP's built-in emulator), though.  And after using that, I can't imagine going back to ePSXe for most things.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #5 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 01:31:27 AM »
Whaaaat?  ePSXe is the bomb.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #6 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 02:16:40 AM »
I worked with that original NVidia card.  Haha.  It so happens they were in bed with Sega at the time, and it's because of Sega that NVidia went that route.  The quads (for quadrangles) were a bitch.  We were supposed to port Descent, which of course used triangles as rendering atoms, not quads.  You couldn't bring together 2 vertices to turn a quad into a triangle either.  That would distort the hell out of the texture, and even the poly shape.  (These quads did not have to lie in a single plane, and they would warp smoothly if you bent them across the 3rd dimension.)  About all we could do under the tight deadline was to use the card as a last rendering step, more 2D cookie cutter than anything else.  All the real 3D work was still being done by the Descent software engine.  NVidia fortunately saw the light after this early work of theirs.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #7 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 07:21:22 AM »
Whaaaat?  ePSXe is the bomb.

When it works properly.  Let's face it, if they had continued development we could be at the level that SNES emulation is at, but instead we sit with half-baked mediocrity that needs too many individual fixes and plugin meddling to get anything to work, and even then sometimes stuff is wonky.  Why did they stop developing it?

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline Cobra951

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #8 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 11:52:35 AM »
I find no great fault with ePSXe.  There are needed tweaks for some games, but overall, compatibility is high, and performance is terrific.  All the amenities are there too, including save states.  Support for 32-bit consoles is much more difficult than 8 and 16-bit.  Emulators have to rely on the 3D hardware, and that's a whole new step from controlling everything within the emulator software.  There's also less time and man-hours invested, simply because the systems emulated are newer.  Only recently have NES emulators finally handled all the mappers properly.  For quite a few years, there were problem NES games, and even more SNES games, with their cartridge-based coprocessors.  Unlike the N64 emulators, I trust that ePSXe will do a fine job with anything you throw at it, even if it takes a bit of up-front setup work.

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #9 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 05:42:00 PM »
I've never run across a game I couldn't run more or less perfectly in ePSXe.  The one exception to this is the original Valkyrie Profile -  the game itself does run perfectly fine, but save state support causes problems for some reason.

The main thing with ePSXe is that much more configuration is required compared to say, ZSNES or Gens.  Like Cobra said, this is pretty much expected when you consider the differences in complexity for both the hardware and the software. Of course popstation is going to be easier to use, pops was professionally developed by Sony for a specific piece of hardware while ePSXe is a different beast all together.

But to answer your question, the ePSXe team still claims it isn't dead, but they're convinced it's gotten to the point where there's not much more they can do to really make it better.  It's probably not far off from the truth considering how they use a plug-in system to farm out the work on the specific graphical and audio emulation systems to others, and quite a few of those plug-ins are still being worked on.

But really, if you want total plug and play emulation like we saw with 2d, cartridge based systems, I seriously doubt we'll ever come across that again.  The best bet is to get some sort of front end so that you only have to configure each game once.

Offline scottws

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #10 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 06:04:28 PM »
I've never messed with ePSXe.  What sort of stuff has to be configured game-to-game?

I don't really get that.  An emulator is supposed to emulate the hardware or environment the software originally ran in.  I don't remember hearing about Playstation owners configuring the Playstation for each game they played.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #11 on: Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 06:49:57 PM »
What scott said is what leads me to believe that this is all a little iffy.  Granted there are differences between games, but it shouldn't be as wonky as it is now.  At least it doesn't feel like it to me.  And I obviously have no had the success you guys have.  I've had numerous games that plain wouldn't work, that even with tweaks still wouldn't play videos or something like that, and several that worked, but had issues.  Vagrant Story I got to work recently, but the last time I'd tried it (same build), every few seconds I got the "loading..." screen in the middle of my gameplay, even when it wasn't supposed to be there.  Don't ask me how I fixed it, because nobody could tell you.  The state of ePSXe's plugins is even worse.  Most of them are ridiculously outdated, as are all the lists of them you can find on the internet (at least those I've looked at, which is probably upwards of ten now), and there's no guarantee what you download is actually going to work.  First time I tried to configure the thing I must have downloaded 25 different plugins and plugin packs, and none of them performed well.  What I have currently seems to be working, but again, I have no idea how I arrived at what I did.  It's a crapshoot, and that fucking sucks when it shouldn't be too hard to include a few decent plugins that work with the damned thing.  I mean... right?  Am I totally off base here?  I've dealt with homebrew and emulation and other wonky stuff for years, and ePSXe just seems like much less than what it could be in the right hands.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #12 on: Thursday, November 29, 2007, 11:39:52 PM »
I don't get what the problem you're having is.

The plugins off the bat work pretty much fine if you just want to run a game.  the majority of the configuration is for the graphical and sound options, and most of them are there to provide enhancements if you so choose.  That might be the issue - epsxe wasn't really created with the intention of straight up emulation, but rather to play the games we all love with graphical enhancements.

That's also generally where the config problems come in, it's not like the PSX's graphics chip was standard in any real way, nor did it use any sort of standard API.  The configuration comes in because the guys writting the plugin (there's actually pretty much no config for the actual emulator) have to convert all the instructions and everything to Direct 3d or Open GL.  Problems arise because of little pangs in the translation (ie, frame buffer effects worked completely differently on the PSX).  A huge difference than when all you have to emulate are sprites, which can be done in software with zero penalty.

On that note, if compatibility is what you want, you're best off running sound and video in software (P.e.o.p.s.).  Beyond that, there is another emulator (xebra) and it's goal is pure compatibility, so you might want to try that out.  I wouldn't expect ePSXe or any of the other major PSX emus to be updated though, most people are completely happy with them, complaints are low, and as such they consider them more or less complete and have moved on to PS2 emulation - which is coming along quite nicely.

Offline Xessive

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #13 on: Thursday, November 29, 2007, 11:51:04 PM »
The highest compatibility (and the closest to the original games) is software mode. ePSXe just gives us the option to enhance everything with our hardware should we choose to do so. If I'm having too much trouble getting a game to run or look good I just switch to software and it almost always runs as it did on the PS.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #14 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 01:53:55 AM »
Again, most of my problems haven't been strictly video related.  Many were audio, some were just weird things like the VS loading text issue, and the fact that most movies didn't display properly, and then once I got them to do so, they stopped giving me sound.  I've tried all kinds of recommended things and setup guides and whatever, but very little seems to work well for me.  I finally got VS to work perfectly, except for the opening movie (which was a problem because I was doing a little video project involving it).  In the end, I recorded the video in the quality I wanted with FRAPS, then stole the audio from some other video that was up on the internet, heh.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #15 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 02:17:45 AM »
Are you streaming from the CD, or playing off an image?

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #16 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 08:24:45 AM »
Both, actually.  It doesn't appear to make any actual difference.

Anyway... apparently my experience isn't the norm.  So I guess maybe ePSXe is fine and stuff, but for whatever reason I consistently have issues with it.

Though there are games that have worked fine.  Also, some people have apparently used it and made their own front-ends along with a disk image in order to make "PC versions" of stuff.  Like there's a Silent Hill 1 PC Version torrent out there somewhere which uses ePSXe, but you don't have to do much other than download it and play it.  Has a nice little GUI and stuff where you can change your settings and whatever.  That worked for me right off the bat, and was a pretty cool little idea, I thought.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline Xessive

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #17 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 11:38:46 AM »
Que, have you tried pSX Emulator?

It's a more simplified emulator which does not use any plugins and basically just emulates everything software. I only switch to it in the rare cases where a game bugs out or refuses to run in ePSXe.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #18 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 02:49:23 PM »
With some games that access the disc constantly, it's definitely better to play from an image.  I wouldn't dream of playing Soul Reaver any other way.  I found that the FMVs in Legend of Mana work better from an image as well.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #19 on: Friday, November 30, 2007, 09:00:27 PM »
Generally speaking it doesn't matter now anyway.  I've been playing Soul Reaver, Vagrant Story, and Legend of Mana on my PSP, heh, so all is well enough.  And Devil Dice and Oddworld and Symphony of the Night.  And... okay, well, a lot of stuff.

The only sucky thing is that Vagrant Story had one crash that I was able to eventually work around, but it sucked, and Legend of Mana also had one that unfortunately halted my progress with the game.  That made me a bit sad.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #20 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 03:23:13 AM »
Somewhat unrelated, but:

HOLY SHIT



Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #21 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 04:24:00 AM »
SAY WHAT HOMES

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #22 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 04:45:49 AM »
It runs at fullspeed in high res with AA on as well.  nullDC is the name, and it seems to be coming along really well.  There were some graphical errors in JGR, but that's the only game I tried.

Now, think for a min....REZ pc?  yesssss.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #23 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 12:02:14 PM »
I get full speed out of Project 64 (N64 emulator) on a 2.4GHz P4/GF 5900FX.  Once the hardware is used for rendering, these systems should be covered.  Wait.  Does the DC use quads too?  I was never into that system at all, so I never read up on it.


Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #24 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 12:47:52 PM »
No, it doesn't use quads, I'm just really suprised because it seems like DC emulation went from not running games at all to running them at fullspeed in about 6 months.  I guess it does make sense though, since I believe that everything they used for hardware was more or less of the shelf.  I believe it used a PowerVR chip that's roughly the equivilent of a Geforce 2, but have no idea about the CPU.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #25 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 01:15:17 PM »
Quote
Sega Dreamcast Technical Specifications

    * CPU: 128-Bit Hitachi SuperH4 RISC (360 Mips, 800MB/sec Data Throughput)
    * CPU speed: 200MHz
    * RAM: 26 Megabyte (16MB main/8MB video/2 MB sound)
    * Sound: 64 Voice Yamaha Super Intelligent Sound Processor (45MHz, 40Mips, 64 voices, 16-bit 48KHz, 3D audio support)
    * Graphics processor: NEC PowerVR Series II (100MHz, renders up to 3.5 million polygons/sec)
    * MIPS: 360 Mips
    * FLOPS: 1.4 Billion
    * Polygons per second: 3 Million
ConsoleDatabase

That's damned impressive for 1998.

Offline Quemaqua

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #26 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 01:23:32 PM »
I don't care what anyone says, the Dreamcast was an amazing little machine.  I fought the PS2 fanboys tooth and nail back then.

天才的な閃きと平均以下のテクニックやな。 課長有野

Offline Pugnate

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #27 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 02:20:13 PM »
I think it was widely acknowledged at the time of its release to be fantastic, and ahead of its time in many ways. Pity it just couldn't get the market share it deserved.

Offline MysterD

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #28 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 04:02:48 PM »
I think it was widely acknowledged at the time of its release to be fantastic, and ahead of its time in many ways. Pity it just couldn't get the market share it deserved.

It's not like the DC was that expensive, when it came out either -- especially when compared to the original prices of both the PS3 and X360, upon their release.

Offline gpw11

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #29 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 06:41:27 PM »
It's especially a shame because the DC didn't really fail per say, it had enough of a market share to sustain itself and keep sega afloat.  The problem was that it was the first hardware success sega had in the console market since the Genesis, and they had lost so much money on the SegaCD, 32X, Saturn, and whatever else they were flooding the market with that they were so far in the red they couldn't survive.  I remember reading an interview with someone from Sega saying that in order to make up for their past mistakes they'd have to pretty much have one if every household.  Obviously, they weren't going to do that.  Looking back on it, you have to wonder if they just knew that there was no way they couldn't do it, but it was a way of buying time or something.  Or perhaps they would have been happy to go to the line and risk going down completely with the hardware business until they merged with Sammy.

In either case, it's a bit of a shame.  When you think about SEGA, they really did provide something for the market that no one else did, and it just isn't the same anymore.  They countered Nintendo quite nicely, and were polar opposites in many ways, it just didn't work out.  Nintendo does so well by playing it safe.  You know for every console there pretty much will be a Mario game, a zelda game, and maybe a metroid game that may be worth the price.  Nintendo keeps going back to these franchises because they know they'll sell software and hardware, and knowing that they can dedicate the time and resources necessary to make every one great.  Sega, on the other hand, was completely different.  They had a solid stable of franchises, but rather then relying upon them they'd rather take risks and release something new, possibly artistic, and probably critically acclaimed but lacking mainstream appeal.  IT was very hit or miss, and by the time they had to start making money on EVERY game they released it was a bit too late.  They couldn't throw the money into the classic franchises in order to ensure that they'd be top tier, and a lot of them suffered. 

I guess now that they're pure software they're starting to do it a bit more, but because they aren't looking at selling hardware and because they have different priorities it looks like a lot of these franchises are going to suffer.  We've all played recent Sonic games, and we've all probably been letdown.  You could probably just brush it off because Sonic is certainly one of those 2d platformers that you could tell wouldn't make the transition to modern 3d well, much like Castlevania, but it's the other franchises that are really dying.

For years people wanted a new Shining Force game or a remake of SF3.  When they released SF for the GBA people were pumped about what could be coming, and then they announced a return of the franchise.  Except it wasn't the same game at all.  Hell, it wasn't even in the same genre.   The Shining franchise had always been a bit all over the map.  Dungeon Crawlers, action rpgs, and the main Shining Force SRPG series.  If there was 'force' in the title, it was an SRPG.  Not anymore.  I think in the last three years or so there has been like 6 shining games, three of which were Force games.  Every one of them a sub-par action rpg.  It doesn't even really make sense.

Now they're bringing back NiGHTS.  I've always thought it was a pretty wicked game, but don't hold the same level of revere as some do for it.  It's perfect for what it is, but the subculture around it is fucking ridiculous.  I imagine NiGHTS 2 to be a failure in some way or another.  It could be great, but the fans of the original will hate it just because they don't want to accept that things have changed in the last 10 years.  It might be bad all around, or it could fall somewhere in between.  Either way, it will be interesting to see where it goes.


And on that note, it seems that Sega is finally re-releasing the original NiGHTS, but for the PS2.  I think it will be bundled with Xmas NiGHTS as well, but that's all that's really known so far. I hope it gets released here, because the game is a major headache to play without hardware acceleration for the graphics. 

But, back to the topic a bit more - JGR looks great rendered in a higher res with full AA.  I guess it held up so well because of the style, but I'm pretty impressed.   

Offline MysterD

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Re: This might be kind of stupid, but....
« Reply #30 on: Sunday, December 02, 2007, 07:37:33 PM »
You're right; Nintendo often played it safe, to say the least. When Nintendo wouldn't allow MK to be uncensored on their SNES, Sega invented their own rating system so games could be rated; which is basically the same rating system the ESRB put to use. Sega helped path the way for what the ESRB does, these days and age -- rate games.

Eventually, Nintendo joined the club -- even though kinda' late, they began allowing whatever rated games on their systems. And eventually began having their own M-rated games, like say Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Oh, yes -- I loved SEGA. Yes, Genesis was freakin' great!!!

Imagine if say SEGA released Saturn and/or Dreamcast in THIS era -- y'know, when $400-500 consoles are the norm'...