• Welcome to RPCS3 · The PlayStation 3 Emulator (#2) (Milestone)
    37 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byFrrDgDcYc
Now if only the PS2 emulator could get its act together.
PCSX2 is doing fine, what?
What's wrong with the PS2 emulator?
PCSX2 is slow, buggy, and requires extensive fiddling to get games to work correctly. Compare that to Dolphin and RPCS3 where minimal set up in needed to get games running.
I tried playing Yakuza 2 on it, a 12 year old game. I had to try all kinds of settings I didn't understand the name of for 2 hours before it seemed to work at a decent performance. Then another 2 hours to fix all the visual bugs I had in-game, using Google. Then another hour to get it to run at 60 FPS, which it barely manages on low settings and normal resolution. Meanwhile, there are more recent games, more technically advanced, that I can play on RPCS3 with better performance and far less tinkering.
I already managed to forget how terrible it is until I tried to get Dog's Life to run on PCSX2 on my sisters PC (her PS2-copy broke) and after fiddling for no less than TWO HOURS it almost runs bearably now. The dog's matte black and the background gets fucked randomly.
All of this is true, mostly cause it's built on the same code for 12 years and it depends on a stupid plugin system. But no one else has really stepped up to the plate with a new PS2 emulator.
Ya'll also have to remember that PS2 was the first console to have the cell shading core, which was later in the PS3. If though the documentation was lean for the PS3, holyfuck, there was nearly nothing for the PS2 so a lot of games have incredibly hacked together solutions which lead to needing...incredibly hacked together emulation solutions.
Almost all plugin based emulators are totally fucked tbh. ePSXE is also a fucking nightmare to get working with some games on some configurations. Emulators like Dolphin and that work wonderfully because they don't have to avoid assumptions to ensure a plugin can do that role for them. It's entirely possible for the developers to really hone down what the problem with one subsystem is and get it fixed. Plugin based ones have to be quite open ended about how they present data so plugins can consume it and as the plugins usually aren't official they do shit in ways the core subsystems probably weren't built for.
Can't wait for Yakuza 3-5 to be playable soon.
The PS2 didn't have a Cell BE of any kind in it. It used the Emotion Engine CPU, another entirely custom architecture that has a few loose similarities to the Cell in that it wasn't just a CPU. It had 8 independent cores of which; 1 was a CPU, 2 performed vector maths and the remaining ones were dedicated to tasks like audio or I/O. The "shading core" (gonna go with GPU here) was an "Graphics Synthesizer", some nuts custom GPU architecture. But it wasn't used in the PS3 either. The PS3 has the Cell BE CPU, which is just a weird form of octo-core that isn't really an octo-core. Pretty fucking decent computational power in it for what it was. Not really a gaming machine CPU first and foremost though. The GPU was the nVidia Reality Synthesizer, which doesn't really have any similarities to the GE mind.
I think you may be mixing up Cel Shading, a technique to make games look like cartoons, and the Cell Processor, a CPU with an architecture very different to x86. The PS2 did have a lot of cel shaded games, but it didn't have a cell processor like the PS3.
Whoops. I did confuse them, I apologize.
I've got one of my favorite games, Warship Gunner 2, barely running. I have to choose between running at about 40-50fps and the simulation (including all sound and music) running at 70-90%, or the games run at 20fps but full speed. It's kinda a pain, but it's the best we've got, and running PS2 games at 2K is pretty great.
I'm STILL waiting on PCSX2 to try to get Ace Combat 4 working properly before I cant start on the AC holy trinity.
A few years ago I played all 3 games on my laptop in PCSX2, with all different issues but playable. In AC04 the terrain would flicker once every couple dozen seconds. In AC5 the player plane was jet black (Very fitting during the Razgriz segments), and ACZ had pitch black building textures for me.
Are you using the latest git build? Yeah it's strange how AC4 still has huge bugs while 5 and 0 work pretty much fine now.
No, I'm just on 1.4.0
two of my favorite games on PS2, Mercenaries and Simpson's hit and run, both still to this day barely function on pcsx2 people seem to think it's a great emu but really, it still has a lot of problems
Use the git build. Never, ever use the "stable" one. It's ancient.
It's astonishing how much progress has been made with this emulator. At this rate, I'm expecting it to be fully functional and very well optimized by the end of next year. Can't wait for them to start tackling bigger games like MGS4.
All I wanted to do was play Zone of the Enders before retiring the old PS3 fat version but it died before I can try 2nd Runner. Doesn't look like it's playable here.
To be fair ZoE 2 has a different HD remaster coming out this September, and it's apparently going to be on PC too.
I had basically no issues playing around 10 games so far on PCSX2, except Area 51 running slow, it run everything I tried on it. Also I'm surprised that on a PC focused forum people struggle to look up for fixes and changing a setting here and there. I have more trouble playing old PC games than playing PS2 games on my computer.
Wait, on PC too? For real? Shiiiit, that's cool! Maybe when this comes along further I can finally experience MGS4.
Prepare yourself, MGS4 is a fucking ride.
AC4 still runs like complete ass and is stuck on software in the latest builds.
PCSX2 is a mixed bag for me. Some games work perfectly (even with very minor visual glitches), some work at either 15FPS or missing half the graphical features the games had. But usually when there's an update, a lot of problems are fixed. At no point have i ever spent 2 hours trying to get a game to work. Probably because if it's got significant visual or framerate problems, i don't bother.
it must just be me then because i've literally never been able to get it to launch past the load screen, even using guides for set-up :/
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