Emulator Issues

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wataru14
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Emulator Issues

Post by wataru14 »

Now that the games (and the consoles we play them on) are getting older and harder to find/repair/replace, I wanted to finally make the switch from Playstations and discs to emulators (and I own the consoles and game discs so it is entirely legal for me to do so). The thing is, I am having the hardest time getting the damn thing to work.

I have downloaded the most recent ePSXe (version 1.9.0) directly from their website and am running my own disc in the DC rom instead of an ISO and it's glitchy, the sound keeps freaking out, the slowdown is obscene and all the sprites look smudged somehow. Maybe I'm using the wrong plugins. I have no idea. There is a thread where someone posts their config options, but that is for S2 and I am trying to start with S1 for now and go through the series. Can anyone help? I have an older computer (about 3-4 years at this point), but it its not a bad machine and is a 16-year-old game really going to cause that many issues?

My second plea for help is for someone to walk me through how pec works for cheat codes. I downloaded it, and the editor. PEC itself has no Suikoden codes listed at all. I tried adding them in the editor and sending them to PEC, and I see them there, but the ePSXe will not recognize that they are there and I cannot activate them.

Also, how do you get the system to recognize patches? Once this is all fixed I want to add Pyriel's bug fixes to S2 and I can see that being a big issue in the future.
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Pyriel
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by Pyriel »

The smudging may be natural. You're probably playing the game on a screen with a much higher resolution than it was designed for. These were made to be played on a standard with a maximum resolution of 640x480. You can always play with the GPU/video settings, and try to make it look more acceptable. The sound going mental may be normal too, depending on what you're talking about. I don't remember having trouble with 1, but 2 has reverberation effects and so forth that get stuck from time to time. I'm not sure if it's strictly a bug with the sound plugin, or if it's just the sound plugin not emulating some quirk that let Konami get away with being sloppy.

There will occasionally be some slowdown on an emulator, due to system load. If it's constant, changing the configuration may help. Highly accurate emulation is very taxing on the system. The author of the BSNES emulator has a long article about it that's an interesting read. That emulator strives for perfectly accurate emulation, and if I remember right, the most accurate version of it has a requirement of a 3.0 GHz processor for emulating an SNES. That said, ePSXe is nowhere near that anal about accuracy, so tweaking a few parameters should make it run well 90% of the time. All I can tell you on that is to read their FAQ. I don't recall all the ins and outs of it right off the top of my head.

I don't know what you mean by "adding [codes] in the editor and sending them to PEC". You don't activate codes from within ePSXe. What you do is configure the emulator to use PEC as the GPU/video plugin. PEC will wrap around the actual plugin. Then need to have PEC running to use codes. All you have to do is put checks by the codes you want, and hit the "Send Cheats To Emulator" (or something like that) button. You should see them take effect after that. However, the PSX does have some instruction cache, and it might have a small amount of scratchpad RAM (I don't recall). All that means is that there's a pool of fast memory that's inaccessible to the cheat device, and if you activate cheats after the game has fully initialized, some of them might appear to not work because the PSX is using instructions or data out of that temporary cache instead of the "master" copy in RAM.

There are no PSX emulators I know of that do patching like, say, an SNES emulator where you just put the file (IPS or whatever) in the same directory as the ROM. You have to apply the patches according to the instructions for them. In the case of the bug fix patches, there's a small batch file in the directory that launches the interface for applying the patch. There are instructions on the Wiki, and it's actually fairly self-explanatory.
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wataru14
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by wataru14 »

I got the emulator to work.

My question about PEC is this: the version I have (ver 2.5) does not have any codes for either Suikoden in it. There is no function that allows you to add games to the program, and if I try to directly edit the .ini file called codeslist it tells me I am not allowed to edit it. There is a program called Pec editor that supposedly allows you to add to PEC but when I save the changes they do not carry over.
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Pyriel
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by Pyriel »

I think I have the latest version, which reports as 3.2.2, but it has differently formatted version numbers in different places. I always just edit the user.inf file, unless I'm testing something simple enough that I can stand to use the line-at-a-time entry form.
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wataru14
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by wataru14 »

Where did you get that version? I can't seem to find a site in English
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Pyriel
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by Pyriel »

http://pec.duttke.de/download.php

Apparently the plugin is version 2.5, the interface is version 2002/2, and whatever "VT" is is version 3.2.2. You probably have the latest, but their "Head Up Your Own Ass" versioning makes it a pain to tell. It doesn't say version 2.5 anywhere on it that I can see.
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wataru14
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by wataru14 »

That's the one I had. Any time I try to edit the .inf folders it says "access denied" when I try to save it. Codelist and user to the same thing.
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Pyriel
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by Pyriel »

You probably installed it under Program Files or Program Files (x86). Windows User Access Control (UAC) on Vista and above protects those directories, so any attempt to edit files within them requires you to elevate to Administrator privileges when you run the editor. Even if you're logged in as an admin, you have to explicitly start the text editor with the "Run as Admin..." option.

The best solution is just to install it someplace else, like C:\PEC or something. This is a Windows thing that came along quite a while after PEC was made.
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wataru14
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Re: Emulator Issues

Post by wataru14 »

It works now. Thank you so much!
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