Castlevania: better than the PSX??

[psicomaniaco]

Ok, I finished my first game using pSX; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night!! The game was almost perfect! The small pause on some dialogs don't bother me that much (mostly 'cause it was quite rare), but there's something great I noticed: the famous slowdowns that used to happen on the real PSX are gone!!!

For the ones that never played this game on the real PSX, this game had some nasty slowdowns on some points, specially when you used the mist in a room with lots of enemies, and when you kill a boss and you see the item apearing. There's even a place where this slowdows gets REALLY anoying, its on that place that seemed like a huge ladder (that where on the left side on the normal castle). When you are at this place on the inverted castle, the game gets soooooooo slow on the real PSX that it REALLY gets anoying! But for some reason, it was quite fast on pSX!

I was impressed when I first killed a boss on pSX and the item apeared very fast, with no slowdown. Believe me, it made me enjoy the game even more! Even the yellow mist can be used without the slowness, making the game more enjoyable!!

Also, I need to mention that pSX is the ONLY emulator where this happen! This slowdows is on VGS, EPSXE, PSXeven and even Adripsx, but NOT pSX!!

So now I ask you guys: is there some game that you tested that seems to work better than the real PSX for you?? Is there a game that seems more fun now?? Let us know!


PS: Hey, pSX Author: can you explain this?? Why this slowdown is gone, even though its there on every other emulator and the real PSX?? Was this intentional?? Anyway, congrats!! Your emu is already my favorite one now.

[billoute]

i 'm having the same feeling about speed.

Grandia on a real psx used to have some slowdows at the very start of the game (the town) : lots of details here.

but pSX run it a a blazing constant full speed, with absolutely no slowdown.

also, i would say that Xenogears and Front Mission 3 are also better than the real psx : no more slowdowns at very crowded scenes.

in fact, i assume the way pSX is designed, it works like a overclocked PSX : games are not faster, but do not suffer anymore from the somewhat limited real psx power...

i wonder if these are the benefits of the recompiler core ? as far i know, it's the first time this is used on a psx emulator...

[Kurotori]

That's strange... I have a pretty powerful system and Grandia still has frame drops for me from time to time. It rarely dips past 52 in the most extreme conditions but still.

The weird part is it only seems to be this game and Persona 2 that have any drops at all out of the games I've tried for extended amounts of play. SOTN, aside from those pauses (which are also in Grandia BTW, usually at the start of battles but are also pretty rare) the game runs pretty much flawlessly.

Use any special triggers for Grandia? (-f, -r, etc?) I didn't notice any real slowdowns til the foggy ghostship and then again in the misty forest so tell me if you get any when you reach those parts, eh? I really don't think it would be my system since it's a 3ghz machine/1024mb ram with a 6800GT for a video card, so yeah. :/

[Kurotori]

To be fair, though, I did notice the performance increase in Grandia at the beginning... the town panning didn't slow down like it does in EPSXE/Hardware; I just wanted to point out that it doesn't run flawlessly but even with the slight slowdowns in those areas the game is still running better than the hardware was allowing it to!

[emulover]

i believe pSX tries to emulate the hardware as closely as possible.

but it isnt limited to the cpu speed that the psx is

so if a game needs more horsepower and you pc can provide it the game runs faster

its the same thing that happens when you play Sonic on a sega emulator

[rhapsody]

emulover said:

i believe pSX tries to emulate the hardware as closely as possible.

but it isnt limited to the cpu speed that the psx is

so if a game needs more horsepower and you pc can provide it the game runs faster

That's not emulating the hardware properly though. Emulating the hardware properly reproduces any slowdown that happened on the original console. If pSX isn't doing that, then there's something wrong with the emulation and it's probably going to be fixed at some point in the future.

emulover said:

its the same thing that happens when you play Sonic on a sega emulator

You're probably using an inaccurate, old emulator. Gens or Kega Fusion should have the slowdown intact. If they don't, Stephane and Steve will want to know about this.

[psicomaniaco]

You are weird!!! This lack of slowdown is the main reason I loved pSX so much! I hope the author never change it!

[roushimsx]

psicomaniaco said:

You are weird!!! This lack of slowdown is the main reason I loved pSX so much! I hope the author never change it!

Or at the very least includes an option to disable/enable overclocking the CPU (which would rock). I've always lacked the technical ability to overclock my consoles (including the ultra-easy-to-overclock-Genesis) and I love it when emulators offer you the chance to give the system a little bit more juice than it had back in the day.

Sometimes it makes all the difference in the world (as Metal Slug 2 fans can attest ).

I'd rank overclocking the cpu to be on par with savestates in terms of balance between accuracy and convenience.

[billoute]

well, it's not really overclocking : games are not faster under pSX. in this way, the emulation is totally respectful of the original hardware.

slowdowns of the original hardware were due to either insuficient power or to bad programming...or the both at the same time. If pSX can give us the perfect "way it's mean to be played", without slowdowns due to bad design or limited hardware capacities but keeping all what a real psx can render (graphics wise) i say, go..stay this way.

if i want slowdowns, i should stick with ePSXe

[emulover]

billoute said:

well, it's not really overclocking : games are not faster under pSX. in this way, the emulation is totally respectful of the original hardware.

slowdowns of the original hardware were due to either insuficient power or to bad programming...or the both at the same time. If pSX can give us the perfect "way it's mean to be played", without slowdowns due to bad design or limited hardware capacities but keeping all what a real psx can render (graphics wise) i say, go..stay this way.

if i want slowdowns, i should stick with ePSXe

Thats basically already how it works

[putu]

Either its the placebo effect or you're dumb for wanting it this way. If the real hardware had slowdowns and this doesn't, then there is some bug that is screwing something else because of it.

[deftonesrule]

your telling me you want the original slowdowns? the slowdowns occured because of rendering disabilities on the console. the only reason id guess there are no slowdowns is because your average "gamer" pc is built with more ram, better video rendering possibilites and more processing power. even if it loads the games and mimics the structure of the ps1, i highly doubt that the game will be limiting to original specs,, and even if it is.. people now a days have 64- bit chpi sets.. 800 mhz fsb and dual channel ram.

if there were slowdowns, i would think there is a problem with the emu.

[Zster]

I actually remember bringing this up with the author of Adripsx at one time and he said it would be possible but somewhat difficult as many of the PSX functions were linked to the Vsync function . You can overclock the psx to avoid slowdowns but only if the original software used a timing function that was linked to the Vsync (ie no timining function). A game that used frameskipping might still skip those frames (as it's emulating the psx hardware) but still render skipped frames at the vsync rate (60hz NTSC and 50 for PAL) This would make the game to fast and unplayable.

Petes plugins used to (may still) have the option to use the old frame limiting algorythm which would have a similar effect and help avoid slowdowns as it would display 60 psx frames a second for instance. In areas of the game where the PSX was only able to display 40 Pete's plugin would let the emulator run at the speed it needed to and would keep things at a smooth 60fps but the sound functions would also speed up (as it would be synced to the 40fps on the normal psx) and this would cause serious sound sync issues. Try it out though.

I can't try this emulator because it keeps giving me the "failed to initialise D3D" error. This was after I downloaded the d3dx9_26.dll (I had DX9vb) so I suppose the only option is to get the full DX9 installation but that would take hours with my connection!

[gtmomo]

i think there's a difference between "genuine" emulation and just "accurate" emulation. now I THINK what's going on with psx emu is that it's running the game just as original psx hardware would, except it's passing interpretted instructions to our PC's hardware. since it's NOT running on psx hardware, it doesn't have the same LIMITS as the original psx. your PC isn't actually speeding up the emulation in any way at all, but where there is extra power needed, the emulator can draw on the extra firepower of your PC's beefier CPU/GPU/RAM etc. the emulation is still ACCURATE, so to speak, but you are missing out on the "GENUINE" experience.

anyways, i'd rather have the current state of the emu over the "genuine" one.

i know this is basically what a couple of you already said, but i just felt i had to state it in a different way. hope it's clear enough for everyone to understand.

[Guest]

"Castlevania: better than the PSX??"

OHOHO oh baby yes, yes indeed...

gotta love it

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D