General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

CiDeRmAn

Inviere wrote: »

Just doing some final testing/config on Ciderman's Emulation PC....good lord the Sharp x68000 is a sensational machine.

Sooo excited for this!
I'm off tomorrow...
Just saying...

Tom Mann Centuria

Maybe a bit tenuously arcade related but the channel is so good, and a lot of us are of a certain age I thought someone might find it interesting, they fix so many Tomy toys I used to look longingly at in Argos or TV adverts. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n1N_HVaCik

*And by all means delete if it doesn't really fit here.

Nerdkiller1991

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

Maybe a bit tenuously arcade related but the channel is so good, and a lot of us are of a certain age I thought someone might find it interesting, they fix so many Tomy toys I used to look longingly at in Argos or TV adverts. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n1N_HVaCik

*And by all means delete if it doesn't really fit here.

I don't see why not. This is primarily a chat thread, anyway.

Dr Bob

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

Maybe a bit tenuously arcade related but the channel is so good, and a lot of us are of a certain age I thought someone might find it interesting, they fix so many Tomy toys I used to look longingly at in Argos or TV adverts. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n1N_HVaCik

*And by all means delete if it doesn't really fit here.

I've seen them do videos with 8 Bit Guy on youtube so had subbed a while back , but nice one!:)

Dr Bob

Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy wrote: »

Thanks so much!
My friend lended me one it was the start button kept pressing on it's own. I eventually found my ps1 controller with my PS one I put away, my heart, I knew I wouldn't have binned it it was driving me mad

if you cant get one , let me know , have a few spares knocking about I can sort you out with .

Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy

Dr Bob wrote: »

if you cant get one , let me know , have a few spares knocking about I can sort you out with .

Thanks so much! He said I can hold onto it he doesn't use the PS2 at all he's busy learning to speedrun Trials of Cold Steel atm. I wanted it for streaming playing Rule of Rose since it's spooky month.

I really should think about getting more controllers for everything, always think "sure I'll never play 2p" instead of it thinking of it busting and being stuck.

Retr0gamer

Thinking of playing a bit more master system over the next few days. I've not much experience with it, mostly watching other kids play it who wouldn't let you have a go of it.

There's not a whole lot of games in the library worth playing either so shouldn't take too long to get through most of them.

Retr0gamer

I started Jumping Flash as well and mean to beat it this time. It's a very rough early PS1 game but it's amazing how right it got a lot of things. The levels are totally chaotic but it's just so much fun to move through them all. It's amazing that a first person platform game came out so early in the PS1's life cycle and got first person platforming so right yet it took years, probably metroid prime, before other games caught up.

Also each level is a mini sandbox where you find 4 items and then go to the exit. I really can't see how Nintendo weren't inspired by this game when making Mario 64 as that game feels like an expansion on that.

The game does some clever things as well like missions that feel like first person shooter dungeons and effectively remove the ability to jump.

Short enough as well. I'd say it will take me less than 2 hours to beat.

Retr0gamer

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I started Jumping Flash as well and mean to beat it this time.

When the ps1 came out my uncle lived near by and I used to play the hell out of the Jumping Flash demo!

CiDeRmAn

I bought Jumping Flash on release and, I remember, I was on nights somewhere... a very quiet spot and ended up finishing it in a couple of hours.
It really was 3D platforming perfection, at least at the time.
The second one is also great, more of a mission pack really.
I have the Japan only third title in the series but I have yet to spend any real time with it... might have to fix that!
It does look like a bit of an evolution over the first two games though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlEyeNAkNU

KeRbDoG

I think it was an early preview of 'Jumping Flash' which made Psygnosis (some dev from a games studio, maybe Sony ImageSoft?) jump to develop for the PS1 before launch. Talking about the first game they had seen that truely breakdown the 2D platformer into a true 3D game. Noted in the "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Playstation Revolution" documentary.
Hopefully that made them jump from ImageSoft

Retr0gamer

I'm playing jumping flash through emulation and just to note there's issues with emulation. The game seems to hang for a second every so often. It's weird. I'm using the Beetle Core. I can live with it, it's no where near as bad as the sound issues on PSP.

32-bit emulation and up just is not great, been having nothing but issues with every game I've tried. My tastes would lie outside the main stream games and since the emulation is so high level it has to be optimised for every game meaning the oddities and curiosities get neglected.

Inviere

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I'm playing jumping flash through emulation and just to note there's issues with emulation. The game seems to hang for a second every so often. It's weird. I'm using the Beetle Core. I can live with it, it's no where near as bad as the sound issues on PSP.

^^ Looks fine to me?

The hardware you use GREATLY affects the emulation experience. In the above video, the uploader suggests he has used the Beetle option to overclock the PS1 cpu...so perhaps look at doing that, and then saving the config as game-only override...so it'll load that overclock automatically from then on, and only for that game.

There's also Beetle HW too, have you tried that? What are your cd-loading settings (default, async, preload)? There's options you can try, and once you figure out the issue...the beauty of retroarch is allowing you to save those options as a game only override, meaning no more config from then on.

32-bit emulation and up just is not great, been having nothing but issues with every game I've tried. My tastes would lie outside the main stream games and since the emulation is so high level it has to be optimised for every game meaning the oddities and curiosities get neglected.

Can't say I fully agree there. I recently enough played through Twilight Princess HD via Cemu and there was a single extremely minor texture glitch in a single area of the map....and that was it. Granted, as you say moving away from popular stuff might expose some current shortcomings that have yet to be resolved via emulation, but luckily in my experience they've been few and far between.

You're really only ever going to see high level emulation (HLE) for 32bit and beyond. Considering you need a 4Ghz cpu to run Bsnes (cycle accurate low level snes emulator)...Id imagine the computational requirements to run something like PS1 & PS2 via LLE probably don't exist yet in the consumer space. It's the same for FPGA....anything 32bit and above, good luck.

There doesn't exist a one size fits all approach for emulation. You often need to tailor settings for 32bit systems. As I say though, once you nail the settings, they can be saved and will never have to be touched again.

o1s1n

This evening I decided to replace the drifting analogue stick in one of my switch joycons.

Open the joycon up and took out the old analogue stick, replaced it, put it all back together - fiddly but not difficult.

Seemed to work so I decided to play a game. Started drifting again after five minutes.

Then I looked down at the bag the new analogue stick came in - it was still sealed. I'd taken the old stick out and put it back in again!

KeRbDoG

Ha Are Nintendo going to do some swap out of those since they admit its their issue now?

o1s1n

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Ha Are Nintendo going to do some swap out of those since they admit its their issue now?

Apparently they're changing them for free?

I wouldn't bother though, sticks are cheap on eBay (I think mine was under a tenner) and it only takes about twenty minutes to swap out (40 if you do it twice like me!)

Tom Mann Centuria

o1s1n wrote: »

Apparently they're changing them for free?

I wouldn't bother though, sticks are cheap on eBay (I think mine was under a tenner) and it only takes about twenty minutes to swap out (40 if you do it twice like me!)

Got two joycons fixed for free a few months ago, both well out of warranty. Only took a few weeks. I'd probably replace them myself next time though, I have the replacements ready to go (had them bought when I didn't know how much Nintendo might charge).

I don't really use the joycons now though unless we're out and about.

Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy

One of the lads I follow on Twitter started a series looking at lesser known games on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKZLTN66jL8

Retr0gamer

Inviere wrote: »

^^ Looks fine to me?

The hardware you use GREATLY affects the emulation experience. In the above video, the uploader suggests he has used the Beetle option to overclock the PS1 cpu...so perhaps look at doing that, and then saving the config as game-only override...so it'll load that overclock automatically from then on, and only for that game.

There's also Beetle HW too, have you tried that? What are your cd-loading settings (default, async, preload)? There's options you can try, and once you figure out the issue...the beauty of retroarch is allowing you to save those options as a game only override, meaning no more config from then on.

Update on this. Seems I was using ReArmed which isn't a great core. I moved to Beetle which took a while to get running (eventually found I wasn't on the Windows 10 Retroarch).

So I loaded up Beetle and was greeted with an absolute glitchfest. Textures not displaying right, looked atrocious. Would have given up if I didn't see the video above. Anyway I had to faff about with some settings to get it to display right, seemed to have to mess around with vertex depth, I imagine that the unique way the PS1 displays polyons without a z-buffer on a 2D height grid is emulated extremely poorly and has to be majorly fudged.

Finally got it working properly but by that time it was almost bed time so didn't get to play it. Not exactly a great emulation experience for me I have to say!

I tried a few other games before I went to bed and noticed issues in nearly all of them, Parappa's shadows not displaying quite right. I might have to tweak that. At least incredible crisis ran great so enjoyed a bit of ska music before bed.

I'll stick with retroarch as it's nice to have everything on the PC for now but serious looking at a terraonion for the PS1.

Inviere wrote: »

It's the same for FPGA....anything 32bit and above, good luck.

FPGA should have no problem with 32-bit and above, the issue there is custom chips. People just don't fully understand how the chips work yet so it's tough to figure out how they work when it's not fully documented. The other option is to get the electromicroscope out and image the chips but that is hugely expensive and time consuming and once the chips get complicated it becomes a herculean task.

o1s1n

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

Got two joycons fixed for free a few months ago, both well out of warranty. Only took a few weeks. I'd probably replace them myself next time though, I have the replacements ready to go (had them bought when I didn't know how much Nintendo might charge).

I don't really use the joycons now though unless we're out and about.

I completely keep forgetting the Switch pro controller exists! Just assume everyone's been using joycons and that's it. Are they known for drift at all?

If you are ever fixing the stick, the guides tell you to disconnect the battery connector, as well as the ribbon cables for the shoulder buttons and another ribbon cable so it completely comes into pieces - do not do this!

The ribbon cables are incredibly finnicky, tiny and a pain in the arse to get back in.

They seem to include it in the guides so people don't break the ribbon cables, however you'd nearly break them or worse, the connectors on the PCB trying to put them back in.

The second time I replaced the stick, I tried to keep as much connected as possible to see what you can get away with.

Here's all you really have to do:

• Disconnect the back cover and separate the outer shell pieces
• Lift the battery out (don't bother disconnecting it)
• Removed three screws for the inner plastic plate covering the PCB
• Flip that inner plate forward, being careful of the ribbon cables, especially the thin one for the shoulder buttons
• You'll then see the underside of the analogue stick - Unscrew two screws, then disconnect it's ribbon cable (this is the only ribbon cable you need to disconnect)
  

And that's it. just reassemble and you're good to go. You could get the above done in under 10 minutes.

Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy wrote: »

One of the lads I follow on Twitter started a series looking at lesser known games on YouTube

That looks really excellent, I'll give it a watch. I really want to get back into the PS1. Kind of tempted to get some kind of SD card loading thingy - I'm afraid to go near the pile of 50hz PAL games in my attic :eek:

johnny_ultimate

Just got an envelope from Nintendo this morning actually with all the labels to send off my drifting Joycon for repair. I don’t have the receipt (launch day) so curious to see if they charge for it.

In the meantime, picked up a Pro Controller as I was meaning to do anyway. It’s a comfortable and quality controller... but doesn’t make some of those infuriating Mario Sunshine moments any more tolerable.

CiDeRmAn

I picked up a very cheap set of 3rd party Joycons just to see if they connected any better to my Switch, both sets of Joycons I currently own don't connect consistently.
So far it's working well, at least with the limited play time last night.
Like JU I have a Pro controller for those duties as it is, so they were really just an impulse buy that seems to have worked out, plus they were very cheap.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08CXHYB52/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

All sold out now, they had a sale on over the last week, they only cost €23.50 with free shipping

o1s1n

Thanks for the link! I'll see if I can find some of those. I really want to pick up a left joycon with a D pad for Mario 35 (the hori ones don't have wireless unfortunately) so it looks like this will do the trick.

Inviere

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Update on this. Seems I was using ReArmed which isn't a great core. I moved to Beetle which took a while to get running (eventually found I wasn't on the Windows 10 Retroarch).

So I loaded up Beetle and was greeted with an absolute glitchfest. Textures not displaying right, looked atrocious. Would have given up if I didn't see the video above. Anyway I had to faff about with some settings to get it to display right, seemed to have to mess around with vertex depth, I imagine that the unique way the PS1 displays polyons without a z-buffer on a 2D height grid is emulated extremely poorly and has to be majorly fudged.

Finally got it working properly but by that time it was almost bed time so didn't get to play it. Not exactly a great emulation experience for me I have to say!

Tbh it sounds more like your system/configs that are the issue here. What's the hardware you're using, gpu etc?

Have you tried switching video backends through RetroArch? Radeon often has issues with opengl, so if you're using an AMD gpu give vulkan a try.

Beetle HW for PS1 for me now exceeds original hardware, it's that good. Internal resolution increases, pgxp texture correction, and so forth...ill likely never bother with an original ps1 again. I've never had the amount of issues you describe, so it definitely sounds like your having config issues. There are of course imperfections in the emulation, but as I say you do seem to be having an inordinate amount of issues I never see raised elsewhere.

I'll stick with retroarch as it's nice to have everything on the PC for now but serious looking at a terraonion for the PS1.

RetroArch is an IMMENSE bit of software, which for me, has changed the emulation experience in anyway that independent emulators never could. BUT, for more advanced systems, being able to set up overrides and custom configs is an absolute godsend. It means no more messing with configs anymore

FPGA should have no problem with 32-bit and above, the issue there is custom chips. People just don't fully understand how the chips work yet so it's tough to figure out how they work when it's not fully documented. The other option is to get the electromicroscope out and image the chips but that is hugely expensive and time consuming and once the chips get complicated it becomes a herculean task.

At that stage though, after a full decap, there's no impediments really to writing a cycle accurate software emulator either.

Retr0gamer

Nothing to do with my config and I don't have a amd card. It's just inaccurate emulation of the polygon height tree. It was a load of texture clocking and disappearing and instances were everything was unstable. It's just plain inaccurate emulation and was fixed by making changes to the height map rendering in the config file.

Jumping flash was particularly bad. The rest are visual niggles that annoy me.

I actually like beetle because the visuals are very close to the ps1. I prefer playing with the texture warping on and the dithering pattern.

Retroarch is great it's just some of the cores it is working with aren't. PS1 emulation just is not accurate enough and requires fiddling around with settings for anything other than the big games. The affine texture rendering and gpu features seem to be the issue and fixing them is a bit of a fudge job.

Its not my set up. Most people are happy with good enough were these visual niggles really annoy me.

It's not terrible but it's hardly plug and play unfortunately.

Inviere

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Nothing to do with my config... and was fixed by making changes to the height map rendering in the config file.

^^ Just saying'

It's not terrible but it's hardly plug and play unfortunately.

Nothing is though If you're as fussy as you say you are...then original hardware requires a CRT or external scaler to look even remotely palatable. If you're using a scaler you'll want specific cables, specific settings/config for an OSSC, you might want a pure digital out for that scaler which requires hardware modification (not a trivial one either). You'll have issues with 50Hz/60Hz games too. If you use a CRT you'll have to have the space for it, it'll have to RGB compliant, you'll need RGB cabling, etc.

With emulation, as you've seen, there's also issues to overcome and configure your way around.

I don't think it's quite fair to come on and say "32bit emulation of systems is ****." It really isn't, and to be fair your config WAS the issue in this case. Of course there are emulation specific issues yet to be overcome, but at the level we're at....the days of plug n play (ala any tv, any cable, it'll do), are long gone

Retr0gamer

Well I meant my computers set up, the issue was with the emulators configuration.

The actual setting I was changing was basically a fudge to change an integer offset on the height stack of every polygon.

Basically the emulator devs don't know how the playstation is sorting it's z stack so you change a setting to add a bit of height to each polygon so they separate and don't overlap and cause the glitching I was seeing.

But the thing is you have to change this for every game and it's inherently inaccurate as it's basically a fudge, a coding band aid if you will.

The thing is you have to mess around with this on nearly every game I tried.

I know what you mean about the effort to get old games working but I have my framemeister set up and I don't have mess around with polygon stacking information the first time I load up my PS2 to play Dragon Quarter and then change a game and do it again.

To be fair to Beetle, it is at least rendering the playstation graphics using a affine renderer unlike other emulators that just render them through directx or other API. It means it at least looks accurate compared to say a N64 emulator which all look wrong, even when nintendo emulates them. The only time I've seen good N64 emulation was the recent Doom 64 port (not emulation but they at least wrote a shader to render the filtering the way the N64 carried it out).

I'm not saying 32-bit and up is terrible. I mean I eventually got Jumping Flash to an acceptable state. But it's really not there yet. It's at early 2000's SNES9x levels. It's acceptable but it's not quite right. Beetle using a affine renderer is a massive step up in accuracy as well.

I think the biggest hurdle is just the hardware. People say the saturn was weird but the PS1's affine renderer is just as bananas and the custom chips to handle that just aren't as well understood.

It's got a long way to go but it is at least getting there and isn't as bad as N64 emulation (although need to take another look at that to see how it's improved). It's gotten to a point where it's good enough that I don't mind using it that much but wish they'd fix some useability issues like having to mess about with the renderer for each game. ePSXe on the other hand was awful.

Inviere

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Well I meant my computers set up, the issue was with the emulators configuration.

Indeed, hardware AND/OR software can make or break the experience. RetroArch isn't for the faint of heart, but it's not theoretical physics either...if a person is willing to look and learn, they'll be very much rewarded by it (that said, I still won't use it as a frontend....it's amazing as a backend though.)

I know what you mean about the effort to get old games working but I have my framemeister set up and I don't have mess around with polygon stacking information the first time I load up my PS2 to play Dragon Quarter and then change a game and do it again.

When you first got your Frameeister though, I'd imagine there was some effort involved in getting it up and running? This is the same...I don't have to touch per game settings either, because I've already done it and saved my changed as per-game overrides. I take your point in that some games need individual settings, but again, I've seen FAR less of that than you make out. Worst case though, fix the problem, hit overrides, hit save game override....job done. It's a 10 second job once you've got the right settings.

You're right in that this isn't a plug/play solution....but let's be fair here, Sony themselves are more than happy to push out cheap SOC hardware running PSX REarmed....Beetle is LIGHT YEARS ahead of of any official solution, and there's years of blood sweat & coding tears gone into it. It works incredibly well, and for 95% of users, if they get the setup right, they'll see it offers a lot. For the other 5% of users, it isn't perfect, but then, nobody claimed it to be. It's being actively developed, and given more time, the kinks in those games you mention WILL be worked out.

To be fair to Beetle, it is at least rendering the playstation graphics using a affine renderer unlike other emulators that just render them through directx or other API. It means it at least looks accurate compared to say a N64 emulator which all look wrong, even when nintendo emulates them.

Again though, that's a bit of a blanket statement. Have you seen the N64 core Parallel running using the AngryLion RDP renderer? There's been incredible progress for N64 emulation over the last two years: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/parallel-n64-low-level-rdp-upscaling-is-finally-here/

Sure, it still has a ways to go...but N64 emulation is far from the mess it was ~5 years ago

Retr0gamer

My franemeister was actually a very easy set up. Biggest issue was needed powered cable for the snes which I didn't get at the time.

Saying that the reason I'm looking to emulation is I want to play valkyrie profile and the franemeister doesn't like the UI of that game as I think it's displaying high res assets over a lower res and the franemeister screws up the bottom of the image.

I'll have to take a look at N64. However unless things have changed in doubt it will look right. Effects weren't emulated well. That might have changed. But the big issue is that emulators just slap a four point texture filter on art that was created for the n64s three point filter. And it always looks bad. You get really ugly stairing effects that aren't there in the original game. I'll have to see if some have taken the Doom 64 route and are filtering textures properly.

Steve X2

I'm enjoying the tennis/discussion guys, please don't stop

Inviere


Retr0gamer



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