Community The Emulation Thread - When That PC Port Just Ain't Happening

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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Durante how do you feel about PCSX2 devs going out of their way to break Ar Tonelico 2 retranslation patch under their emulator?
Pity, kind of wanted to finally play it on Deck... :\
:steam_pig_mad:
Why do they do this ?
 

Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
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The game needs a hack to work correctly, otherwise doesn't display world map properly.
Both the orignal game and the patched release had such hacks up to beginning of last year, where all patched games hacks were removed from the DB.
Since PCSX identifies game by executable CRC, and CRCs for the patches were removed, they stopped being patched at runtime, and currently don't work properly, unless you either modify and rebuild the emulator on your own, or just stick to an ancient version.
Devs have repeatedly stated that they won't budge on the issue.


It's 'just a hack', you don't expect us to support every single hack out there seems to be the reasoning.
Except in this case it's not 'just a hack', it fixes the unbelievably broken official release.
 
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SkyStarblaze

Starlit Entity
Aug 20, 2020
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The game needs a hack to work correctly, otherwise doesn't display world map properly.
Both the orignal game and the patched release had such hacks up to beginning of last year, where all patched games hacks were removed from the DB.
Since PCSX identifies game by executable CRC, and CRCs for the patches were removed, they stopped being patched at runtime, and currently don't work properly, unless you either modify and rebuild the emulator on your own, or just stick to an ancient version.
Devs have repeatedly stated they won't budge on the issue.
Wait but the vanilla game would work or not? I'm confused now. I mean it's good that they finally want to get rid of hacks but that means we would be potentially wait for a long time till the game runs properly again?
 

Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
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Wait but the vanilla game would work or not? I'm confused now. I mean it's good that they finally want to get rid of hacks but that means we would be potentially wait for a long time till the game runs properly again?
Vanilla game will work, but has shitty, MTL quality translation, removes good 50% of voice acting and has a bug that crashes the game during the final boss battle, so can't be finished even on real hardware.
With Ar Tonelico 2, things got worse. Painfully worse. Even if you could forgive the numerous typographical errors, missing words, and shaky sentences littering the dialogue, the mistranslation of important game terms, and the inconsistently-adapted names, the localization introduced or exposed game-crashing bugs in the game. Furthermore, in order to move more copies of the game based on sex appeal, NISA marketed the game via a crude and clunky ad campaign. They boasted to media sources that the dialogue was even racier than in the original – when, in fact, AT2 was intended to be a more serious and thoughtful game, with less emphasis on cheap hooks and a greater focus on the plot, than AT1. Finally, in order to fit English voice acting onto the disc, they cut approximately half of the Japanese voice-acted scenes, leaving many important plot points lacking appropriate impact. The result was a game vulgar, ugly, and offensive in parts, but with enough of its soul left intact to appeal while still being a shadow of the original.
The patch fixes all of these.
 
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Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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Um yeah, that doesn't seem "going out of their way to break" it but rather treating it like every other game rather than prioritize fixing it or any other fan patch.
Idk since when but Test Drive/Le Mans 24 Hours has largely been fixed in Flycast. It runs, plays & looks great, only rolling demos still bork the main car off track.

Mattias shader as usual. Some more glitches may occur depending on api, with Vulkan the loading screens flicker, with glcore I didn't notice any more issues. Also, it seems the game unlocks its fps at the end of replays/races/stuff and seems to go 60fps, I wonder if that can be used for the whole game somehow.
 
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SkyStarblaze

Starlit Entity
Aug 20, 2020
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Vanilla game will work, but has shitty, MTL quality translation, removes good 50% of voice acting and has a bug that crashes the game during the final boss battle, so can't be finished even on real hardware.

The patch fixes all of these.
Ah I see thanks for the heads-up! Though I have to say I see it much like Alextended, maybe the devs could have made a compromise though by leaving hacks for games that really "need" them like AT2 temporarily in in a hardcoded way till the emu doesn't need them anymore.
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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The CRC hack system is a giant mess anyway, hopefully they'll eventually add something that's a better system overall.
 
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Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
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Downunder.
If you ask me they should dump those CRC hacks into their .pnach equivalent so all that work won't be lost to entropy.
 

Parsnip

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I don't think anything is lost unless they somehow nuke the 10+ years of github history, and that would be madness.
I'm also relatively certain that there are forks that are based on the current nightlies with the removed CRC hacks restored. Might need to build it yourself though. :blobmorning2:

But yeah, the current implementation seems just an artifact of the past. I imagine and hope they'll go with something like... they'll only ship a .pnach equivalent with official releases, but then also have .pnach_user or something of that nature that would also get loaded if it exists.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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Trying to emulate Just Dance 2022 on Yuzu emulator.
How do I do here? How do I configure the emulator?
Maybe dumb question, but did you setup the controller as dual joycons ?
 

「Echo」

鈴鹿御前。
Nov 1, 2018
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Mt. Whatever
:unsure:

This will seem a bit random, but with news of Majora's Mask coming to NSO Emulator it reminded me how shit the Switch's N64 Emulator really is.

So I've come to ask your guys opinion, the best version OoT and Majora's Mask would be Emulated AND modded 3ds versions... right? I think you can get them to 4k that way?
 

Cacher

Romantic Storm
Jun 3, 2020
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Are you telling me that we will be able to upscale xbox360 and PS3's 720p to 1440p through retrotink 5x soon? WTF this is huge
 
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Cacher

Romantic Storm
Jun 3, 2020
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Continuing my journey in Super Robot Wars OGs. I am midway into OG1's Ryuusei Route (the disc contains the remake of OG1 and OG2 from GBA and a few extra chapters, and both remakes have two story routes). Stages are getting long but I am having so much fun. These animations and special cut-ins during battle continue to surprise me. They are just so damn good to watch.

Btw, this game just had its 15th anniversary a few days ago. Crazy.


 

Tizoc

Retired, but still Enabling
Oct 11, 2018
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Oman
ko-fi.com
Um yeah, that doesn't seem "going out of their way to break" it but rather treating it like every other game rather than prioritize fixing it or any other fan patch.


Mattias shader as usual. Some more glitches may occur depending on api, with Vulkan the loading screens flicker, with glcore I didn't notice any more issues. Also, it seems the game unlocks its fps at the end of replays/races/stuff and seems to go 60fps, I wonder if that can be used for the whole game somehow.
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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Any difference AMD/NVIDIA ?
I haven't tested it yet myself, but from what I've gathered from the discussion is that any game that requires/benefits from accurate blending should run faster on vulkan than dx11 or ogl. I think I remember Metal Gear Solid games being mentioned as good examples.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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Looks like Duckstation is on indefinite hiatus.

Stenzek got tired of TwinAphex' bullshit. Add it to the evergrowing list of why RetroArch sucks.
Yeah that's really unfortunate. I wouldn't be against dropping RA and go back to traditional emulators, but they are incomparable on the CRT shader front AFAIK :anguished-face:
 

Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
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Yeah that's really unfortunate. I wouldn't be against dropping RA and go back to traditional emulators, but they are incomparable on the CRT shader front AFAIK :anguished-face:
Wouldn't be an issue if it was only that, most of CRT shaders are ported to ReShade, which you could inject into standalone emus. But:
Autosave/autoload
Run ahead.
Proper GSync support, especially for games that run on non-standard refresh rates.
Decent multi-monitor support.
Retroachievements.
Remote Play Together.
It's just unfeasible to expect every single emulator developer to implement these on their own. :weary-face:
 
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Prodigy

Sleeper must awaken
Dec 9, 2018
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Been slowly getting back into emulation thanks to the improvements made over the last year or so (I have a terrible CPU), luckily as long as I have shaders precompiled for switch then games will run fine at 1440p at 30fps.
So far I have found Ryujinx to be better than Yuzu (non Patreon).
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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Wouldn't be an issue if it was only that, most of CRT shaders are ported to ReShade, which you could inject into standalone emus. But:
Autosave/autoload
Run ahead.
Proper GSync support, especially for games that run on non-standard refresh rates.
Decent multi-monitor support.
Retroachievements.
Remote Play Together.
It's just unfeasible to expect every single emulator developer to implement these on their own. :weary-face:
Here's hoping that in the future some smart and good people hard fork RA as an attempt to cut the main toxic people out and it catches on.
 
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jmga

Junior Member
Sep 20, 2018
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Retroarch contribution to game preservation is not only the frontend, the libretro initiative is what makes it possible for all these frontends to exist and allow the same emulators to run on so many different platforms, from PCs to Consoles and smartphones.

I understand many emulator devs not wanting to implement libretro API just because of Twinaphex, who should have stepped down as the libretro project leader years ago, but the initiative is actually awesome and if you look at Retroarch and the libretro cores contributions, dozens of different people work on it every month, it is a community driven project in the end.

If Twinaphex doesn't want to step down from Libretro project, the community maybe should push for a hard fork without him, but if emulator devs stop the development or close the source of their projects, instead of supporting an alternative or pushing for a change, then their project becomes irrelevant and the libretro core maintained by Retroarch becomes the main option, like we have seen with Reicast/Redream and Flycast, and will soon see with DuckStation and SwanStation.
 

「Echo」

鈴鹿御前。
Nov 1, 2018
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Mt. Whatever
Wouldn't be an issue if it was only that, most of CRT shaders are ported to ReShade, which you could inject into standalone emus. But:
Autosave/autoload
Run ahead.
Proper GSync support, especially for games that run on non-standard refresh rates.
Decent multi-monitor support.
Retroachievements.
Remote Play Together.
It's just unfeasible to expect every single emulator developer to implement these on their own. :weary-face:
I can't claim to have a large amount of experience with the CRT shaders ported to Re-Shade, but with the arrival of FF pixel remasters I researched and tested them a lot. And in general I have to say the Re-Shade ports are inferior in some regards, some downright broken, and others missing whole features😓

It's a shame, because afaik, those are the best CRT shaders out there.
 

Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
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sulio

Junior Member
Jan 10, 2022
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Is there some kind of good tutorial for Retroarch separate for different console in txt format not just yt videos ?
 

Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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What do you have trouble with, generally you just add needed bios files in the system folder and then work from the RA interface to download desired system cores, scan folders for games playlists, tweak options like video API output, scaling, vsync, then map your controls after starting a game to get the specific core control options and also the actual emulator core options for things like resolution or whatever they have as optional enhancements, always saving new configs.
 

sulio

Junior Member
Jan 10, 2022
18
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3
What do you have trouble with, generally you just add needed bios files in the system folder and then work from the RA interface to download desired system cores, scan folders for games playlists, tweak options like video API output, scaling, vsync, then map your controls after starting a game to get the specific core control options and also the actual emulator core options for things like resolution or whatever they have as optional enhancements, always saving new configs.
If you set all for one, than another will not work until total option reset
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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So I guess that beef he had with Retroarch at least amounted to something positive (for the rest of us) in the end?
I suppose it may have hastened this development assuming that he has more time to put on pcsx2, but I imagine he would have done it anyway.
I think I remember seeing this branch on his github already back when the vulkan renderer was in testing.
 

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
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Downunder.
I never used DuckStation, but looks like the RetroArch core build is still being maintained, right? Although not by the original author, of course.
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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Looks like the pcsx2 texture dumping and replacement feature is almost ready to go already. 🚀

So much great developments recently on pcsx2, it's great to see.
 
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Alextended

Segata's Disciple
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I've been playing SMT: Strange Journey DS emulated on my phone (I doubt it can handle 3DS version, it struggles with DS too), fun little game but it really sucks when you die and can lose like an hour of progress or worse, lol. It feels imbalanced but otherwise like pretty standard SMT fare so I dunno why it's a spin off.

But yeah, exploring a whole dang dungeon and progressing main/side missions only for the protag to randomly die in some lowly fight cuz the enemy used a chance of insta death attack on him (that seems to work 50/50 on your party but when it's you using it, it never fucking does)? Yikes. It should maybe give you like a 3 turn grace period to revive him with your demon party (then again I don't have any revival skills yet) or something rather than insta death like that (or from overpowering attacks, whatever). Demons can't use items either so when he's charmed/asleep/whatever status incapacitating him or worse good luck waiting for it to run out. That stuff's ok to have in S/RPGs but not when the main character has the most function and it's game over when he dies.

Also there's a limit of how many demons you can have which seems pretty weird... Maybe I'm meant to fuse and switch them around for more powerful forms all the time but then why have levels at all, it makes you invest in each of them when they level up and gain new powers. Experimenting with fusing is probably a chore too if you can only hold a few so you have to make room to re-acquire the same old types to try fusing them into something different.

It's still fun so far but some of that stuff I dont quite get.
 

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
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Downunder.
From the same hacker who did the English text insertion for the PC-98 version of Yu-No.




It's an early strategy game from elf. Seems like the archive file format has been cracked wide open. :flare_mogu:
 
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Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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Looks like pcsx2 folks (well, stenzek again) are adding GS fixes to the gamedatabase and they work through serial and not CRC. So I guess maybe the popular undubs and such that need GS fixes will work again? Or maybe soon? Not sure what hack those games need specifically.

 

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
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Downunder.
And another one.


 
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Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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Seems there's been some development for Naomi 2 support in Flycast, I can't quite tell but I think it's currently available in some Dojo fork but should be in the main too? Either way that's cool, it will be nice to fully get rid of ol Demul if Flycast gets Naomi 2 playable on the same level as Dreamcast/Naomi emulation.

Dunno why most of the youtube videos right now are using the Android version but whatever works.
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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So I had a week off work last week and as a fun little project to break up my NieR:Automata replay, I converted my old office Desktop PC into an emulation box.

I’ve emulated systems up to and including the Wii U. I’ve even bought 8bitdo controllers that look like SNES and Mega Drive pads, and also recycled one my DualShock 3 controllers for PS1&2. All I need is a Wii Remote for Wii emulation and something for the Wii U and I’ll be set.

For the OS, I used Batocera, which is my first dabbling in Linux. I’m very impressed with how the whole setup works.

All of this because Nintendo chose to kill their 3DS and Wii U stores in a year, thus ending the ability to buy and preserve a whole host of games.
 

Cacher

Romantic Storm
Jun 3, 2020
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So I had a week off work last week and as a fun little project to break up my NieR:Automata replay, I converted my old office Desktop PC into an emulation box.

I’ve emulated systems up to and including the Wii U. I’ve even bought 8bitdo controllers that look like SNES and Mega Drive pads, and also recycled one my DualShock 3 controllers for PS1&2. All I need is a Wii Remote for Wii emulation and something for the Wii U and I’ll be set.

For the OS, I used Batocera, which is my first dabbling in Linux. I’m very impressed with how the whole setup works.

All of this because Nintendo chose to kill their 3DS and Wii U stores in a year, thus ending the ability to buy and preserve a whole host of games.
Very cool. Sucks that 3DS emulation is still not perfect. I tried Fire Emblem Fates after the closure announcement and was surprised by frequent slowdown when emulating that game.
 

MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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What's the current verdict on Ryujinx vs Yuzu?

In terms of performance, compatibility and features?
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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What's the current verdict on Ryujinx vs Yuzu?

In terms of performance, compatibility and features?
Varies too much on a game by game basis to have a clear winner methink. While I love Ryujinx I have to admit that you can't really skip trying both for each game. Last time I looked at it, Yuzu had the advantage on shader compilation IIRC.
 
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Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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What's the current verdict on Ryujinx vs Yuzu?

In terms of performance, compatibility and features?
Varies by game yeah.

Additionally there's a bug in yuzu that manifests itself as perceived input lag for the end user, so if you are sensitive to that you will want to stick to ryujinx, or get an older version of yuzu.
On the flipside ryujinx doesn't yet have a feature complete vulkan backend and recent nvidia drivers have some really crippling opengl issues that afaik haven't been fixed yet on the driver and afaik ryujinx devs haven't worked around the issues either (yuzu has). So if you are on nvidia your best option is probably latest ryujinx with an older driver, 472.12 or older if I remember right.
 
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Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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Was checking out what Model 2 games I can play and came across Sega Water Ski. Rad as Sega usual. Gotta laugh at the character shaking their stuff at start...

It would have been great fun with the special gear, much like their skiing game, but there's not much value playing at home with emulated controls. I guess it's similar for many of their "standard" games also, what with them having awesome interactive recreations of cars, bikes, tanks, jet skis, full 360 rotational cabs, etc.
 
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arcadepc

Junior Member
Jan 3, 2020
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What's the current verdict on Ryujinx vs Yuzu?

In terms of performance, compatibility and features?
I tried playing Ninja Warriors on Yuzu and while it was smoother it would always crash after finishing stage 3. On Ryujinx there was no crash at all.
 
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