Members 
Search 
Help 
Register 
Login 
Home Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
|
   |
| PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2903] | Wed, 23 January 2013 20:27  |
|||
| ||||
|
EDIT 1/30/2013: I'm thinking my original version of this was a TL;DR kind of post. I have a tendency toward that, sorry. Short version: The pretty on the right? I want that. But the emulator that can do it A) Is windows only and B) has terrible compatibility with all kinds of plug-in fiddling. Was wondering if it's feasible to do this in mednafen and, if not, _why_ not. Just curious! Thanks for your time. Below are full comparison shots. Original, Sabr, and hi res, in that order. Imagine how gorgeous a mednafen PSX game would be with high res graphics and full screen sabr effect. 
Attachment: Vagrant Story Example.jpg(Size: 286.24KB, Downloaded 17121 time(s))
Attachment: VS_5a.png(Size: 591.92KB, Downloaded 16615 time(s))
Attachment: VS_5b.png(Size: 764.93KB, Downloaded 16382 time(s))
Attachment: VS_5c.png(Size: 1.08MB, Downloaded 18901 time(s)) [Updated on: Wed, 30 January 2013 22:13] | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2928 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Tue, 05 February 2013 20:25  |
|||
| ||||
|
Mednafen's GPU emulation is done in software on the computer's CPU; rendering it at an artificially higher resolution would require making the code more complex, vastly increase CPU usage(to the point of unusable slowness probably), and make the other deficiencies(no texture perspective correction, no z-buffering, extremely low-polygon models, seams due to low-precision fixed-point math) of the PS1 that much more obvious and jarring. Higher-resolution rendering makes sense for things like the N64 and PS2, but not for the PS1 IMHO. I have considered rendering at 2x resolution on both axes, as an option; that might look ok, but it's not a high-priority feature TODO. [Updated on: Tue, 05 February 2013 20:32] | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2930 is a reply to message #2928 ] | Tue, 05 February 2013 22:19 |
|||
| ||||
|
That makes sense, you guys have a huge feature load and I appreciate your honesty. As to the fidelity of PSOne games deserving/not deserving higher resolutions and/or texture filtering, I respectfully disagree. It definitely makes a huge difference in specific games like vagrant story, the final fantasies and breath of fire 3/4. Even the old texture filtering that PS2's were capable of while running PSOne games(sony called it "texture smoothing," something PS3s don't support) made massive visual improvement in all sorts of games. And some of these games came out on windows(Soul Reaver is a prime example) with higher resolutions and texture filtering, but then the controls on the windows ports stink. That said, I obviously get those features in inferior emulators(ePSXe), and if it came down to adding this or improving compatibility/adding another system i'd always want you to do the latter. If you ever change your mind, though, Pete's GPU plugins are open source now: http://www.pbernert.com/html/gpu.htm ...and are what I used to take that vagrant story snap. Thank you very much for your response, and thanks for making it easy to play my old games. Between mednafen and scummvm, my ancient game library lives again. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2932 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Wed, 06 February 2013 20:14 |
|||
| ||||
|
If it helps you come to grips with the rejection of your idea, try to envision that there are two types of emulators: 1) Accuracy-focused (MAME, MESS, Mednafen, bsnes, pSX, Nestopia etc.). These emulators attempt to capture the experience of the original system as closely as possible, usually in the interest of preserving the "history" that experience represents; therefore enhancements that would otherwise extend the emulator beyond such an experience are commonly rejected. 2) Feature-focused (Project64, ZSNES, ePSXe etc.). The goal of these emulators isn't so much about preserving history, and therefore the original experience; rather, they typically just provide a means to play games in the "best" way possible. This provides a more suitable platform for enhancements such as the kind you want. Personally, I rather *hate* emulators in the second category as they provide a false image of the past and distorts history. It bothers me that people looking at YouTube videos of ePSXe in five years will actually believe that's what first-gen PlayStation games actually looked like! As history is already beginning to show, the biggest benefit of emulators is that they preserve the past for future generations - the fact that they play games is merely secondary. Also, the second category of emulators tend to use nasty solutions to achieve their goals, such as per-game "hacks" rather than anything resembling system-level accuracy; and "plug-ins" that introduce portability nightmares among other bad side effects which dramatically reduce their long-term viability. Thankfully, as the above examples hopefully show, the trend has been towards the former category over time; while the latter series has been slowly dying. Anyway, if you want to play games in higher resolutions, you have many options, such as: a) Play a modern game - they go up to HD and beyond. b) Play a "remake" of your PS1 game - and there are many of those - especially for titles like Resident Evil. c) Put your PS1 game in your PS2 or PS3 and play in an upscaled mode. d) Play your PS1 game on ePSXe (though given a, b and c above, it baffles me that people even want to). Anyway, hope that helps you out. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2934 is a reply to message #2932 ] | Wed, 06 February 2013 22:36 |
|||
| ||||
|
TL,DR: Thank you for your reply, it makes a lot of sense and I agree with it and think my priorities were a little out of whack. Original: Thank you very much for your reply! While certainly aware of the distinction between the two, I'd not considered that my suggestion would run contrary to the "mission statement," if you will, of mednafen, or indeed most of my favorite emulators. There are several PSOne games I like playing in their original appearance(Threads of Fate, SaGA Frontier, Suikoden, for example). Back in the day, I had windows versions of a lot of other games, in addition to/instead of PSOne versions(FFVIII, Soul Reaver). Ironically, the best controlling/most compatible way to play these games on my computer now is via an emulator instead of running, say, Soul Reaver from my steam library. In a misguided attempt to replicate the play experience I'd had on my old timey PCs, I'd wanted graphical bells and whistles that don't really belong in a PSOne emulator— because you're right, using those plugins stinks. I find mednafen elegant, but epsxe very much the opposite. So while PC support for the tomb raiders, the soul reavers, the FFVIIIs and more isn't where it should be, I should not be looking to mednafen to solve that problem, especially when it provides exactly the service I need from a PSX emulator. Thanks for giving me some perspective on that, because though what I want isn't really available at the moment, mednafen probably isn't the place to get it. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2939 is a reply to message #2932 ] | Tue, 12 February 2013 03:07 |
||||
| |||||
The people more likely to have interest in seeing those videos will probably know the reality and will correct those people. I have nothing against enhanced emulators because they look nice sometimes, and it's just about fun, but I do agree that with PS1 it's not that important to polish the graphics. epsxe looks higher res and sharp polygons, but they are not any better as far as motion and the textures can't be enhanced (unless they are patched somehow, but that's another level). So it's only a matter of opinion whether the enhanced PS1 graphics actually look good Vs. the standard and authentic. 2d games would not be helped by it and for me these are usually the most memorable on PS1. | |||||
| |||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #2941 is a reply to message #2939 ] | Tue, 12 February 2013 18:47 |
||||
| |||||
Don't bet on it. And even if they did, just keep forwarding the calendar ahead another five years until it becomes clearer that they wouldn't. The point being that any history not effectively preserved is, in the long run, history forgotten.
Yep! It's like playing a ps1 game stretched to 16:9. Yes it's horrible; and yes, sandpaper is far more soothing to the eyeballs - yet some people insist on it. Don't ask me why. Also consider that ps1 game devs did not intend for their games to be played at such high resolutions, and would often write game code specifically in accordance with the known limitations of the hardware. Had better resolutions been available at the time, you would likely see entirely different code in many cases, some likely even affecting gameplay. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to play these games under such false pretenses. | |||||
| |||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3044 is a reply to message #2941 ] | Sat, 04 May 2013 18:52 |
|||
| ||||
|
While I completely agree with the point you are making I would like to make a case for increased graphical fidelity. The problem with running the game at it's native internal resolution is that it looks entirely different on a CRT TV than it looks on an LCD/Plasma at 1080p. I personally want to play my emulated games as closely to the original as I can, but the truth of the matter is that it looks completely different on my current TV/Monitor. As you mention, those games were never designed to be running on a 60" 1080p plasma, but that is often the only way people can play them right now. Most video card drivers are incapable of outputting at 320x240/256. Thankfully we have CRT shaders to compensate but they never look quite right. Also, it's worth noting that widescreen TV's DID exist, and they would generally, by default stretch a 4:3/8:7 image, so it's not entirely unreasonable for people to want to use widescreen resolutions with emulators, particularly if they use an integer scale. An increase in internal resolution - to me at least - brings the game closer to how I remember these games. P.S. First post, and a MASSIVE thankyou to the mednafen team. You have done an awesome job and I really can't express how much joy projects such as these bring to a 30 year old gamer. You are my PlayStation emulator of choice. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3124 is a reply to message #3044 ] | Thu, 11 July 2013 07:04 |
|||
| ||||
Incorrect. They're generally capable of 256/320x240 just fine. It's the 15kHz that causes issues. Outputting 120Hz instead pushes most 240p resolutions up to 30kHz, allowing their use. Motion may not look as good as 60Hz though. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3136 is a reply to message #3044 ] | Sat, 20 July 2013 16:11 |
|||
| ||||
No, that's not right at all. Games look differently on a modern LCD than CRT for obvious reasons other than those you've cited, but no matter how you slice it, increasing resolution to unintended levels or stretching the image to unintended proportions will only bring you further from the original look-and-feel of the game and will in no way make it "better". It's like trying to convince people that Frankenstein's monster is a living being, when he's nothing more than an undead freak of nature. For shiggles, years ago I tried that on my HD widescreen, and was quite horrified with the results as they were so far removed from the true experience. You are already far beyond the unwashed and uninformed ePSXe masses by choosing Mednafen as your PSX emulator. Bravo! That said, if you insist on spoiling the total experience by screwing with resolution and aspect ratio, then go on with your bad self - but you won't convince most of us here. 
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3555 is a reply to message #3136 ] | Sat, 21 June 2014 16:29 |
|||
| ||||
|
Just my two cents here, but I would love to see a OpenGL-based renderer for PSX core in Mednafen. Please note that I'm not asking for fancy "High-Resolution stuff" or such, I believe in the accuracy way, BUT a OpenGL renderer could still preserve most of it by rendering at original resolution without texture filtering. Even dithering could be implemented by using a fragment shader (correct me if I'm wrong). This would be a great enhancement for limited CPU-powered devices, since it would defer the load to GPU instead. PSX blend modes can also be emulated with fragment shaders. I had a look at the mednafen PSX core and since the GPU code is pretty clean it would be "easy" to implement it. Sadly, Pete's OGL2 plugin which is by far the most adavanced implementation of such an OpenGL 2.x based PSX renderer is not open sourced, for some reason. What do you think of this idea ? | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3572 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Thu, 26 June 2014 02:44 |
|||
| ||||
|
It would make more sense, and be simpler, to just do the GPU rendering on another CPU core, and not have to worry about OpenGL latency killing performance on games that read data out of the GPU framebuffer via CPU or DMA for special effects.
[Updated on: Thu, 26 June 2014 02:44] | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3606 is a reply to message #3044 ] | Thu, 03 July 2014 14:04 |
|||
| ||||
Personally, I feel that the original resolution makes the games look BETTER than "hi-fidelity" augmentations. Cranking a 320x240 game up to 2560x1440 may eliminate the "chunkyness" of pixels, but trades that for the chunkyness of very simple polygons which were obfuscated originally by it's resolution ( oh, the irony  ).Just for one example- FF7 in even 640x480 causes the same problem as the native PC version- jarring clash between the polymodels of the player and NPCs ( and some interactive map elements, such as items ) and the backgrounds. In the native, un-tampered with experience, the backdrops were arguably the MOST detailed and impressive elements of the experience. Now, with a tweaked resolution, they are just a bunch of relatively low-res images with smooth blocky polygons fluttering about. I say this not to condemn the opinions of those who want such features, but to support the current state of Mednafen PSX- the cleanest, most pristine emulation of an authentic Playstation experience ( certainly most stable ) available at this time. [Updated on: Thu, 03 July 2014 14:06] | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3644 is a reply to message #3572 ] | Sat, 02 August 2014 17:14 |
|||
| ||||
Is MultiCore support planned in the near future? I love this psx emulator (using it in Retro-Arch) on a low power kabini apu with Linux but most 3D Games are to slow or have annoying sound stutters. I noticed the emulator is only using one core at the moment. i guess with emulating the gpu part on a second core this should run fullspeed? | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3658 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 13:26 |
|||
| ||||
| Talking about non-native resolutions - full-screen aspect correction for PSX is wrong. If you set "psx.stretch" to "aspect" and try to run USA or Japanese title in 1920x1080 resolution, the aspect is around 3.6:3 instead of 4:3. When you try to run a PAL game, the aspect is around 3.95:2.75 instead of 4:3 and the picture has black bars not only on left and right, but also on top and bottom - why? Readme says "Full-screen stretch as far as the aspect ratio can be maintained", but since there are black bars from all 4 sides for the PAL games, it's clearly not "as far as the aspect ratio can be maintained". | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3659 is a reply to message #3658 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 17:34 |
|||
| ||||
|
What you describe is not a bug. The documentation states "Full-screen stretch as far as the aspect ratio(in this sense, the equivalent xscalefs == yscalefs) can be maintained.", and it sounds like the feature is working as intended. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3660 is a reply to message #3659 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 17:38 |
|||
| ||||
PSX aspect ratio is 4:3 for all 3 regions, isn't it? | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3661 is a reply to message #3660 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 17:58 |
|||
| ||||
|
There's no such thing as a "PSX" aspect ratio per-se. An NTSC TV has a nominal display aspect ratio of 4:3. Where an active image is displayed in that area, its (effective) pixel aspect ratio, and its dimensions, are determined by the PS1 GPU(which is programmable to a degree by the game) and how the TV is designed/tuned(especially in regards to overscan). | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3662 is a reply to message #3661 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 18:19 |
|||
| ||||
Still, I don't think it's correct, when windowed mode aspect ratio is 4:3 and fullscreen mode ratio is 3.6:3 for NTSC-J and NTSC-U, but whatever. | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3663 is a reply to message #3662 ] | Mon, 11 August 2014 18:22 |
|||
| ||||
| Could you take screenshots in both windowed and fullscreen modes with Shift+F9, and attach them to a reply here? | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3664 is a reply to message #3663 ] | Tue, 12 August 2014 09:29 |
|||
| ||||
|
Japanese and USA shots are 1440x1080, means the screenshots themselves are 4:3. But there are bars to the left, to the right and to the bottom, so the real resolution is 1319x1077, which is around 3.67:3. For the PAL even the shots themselves aren't 4:3, they are 1414x1080, which is around 3.93:3, but the picture itself (minus the bars from all 4 sides) is 1295x898, which is around 4.33:3. According to the MESS, PSX pixel aspect ratio is 4:3, so Mednafen aspects look weird to me.
Attachment: jap-usa.png(Size: 290.52KB, Downloaded 347 time(s))
Attachment: pal.png(Size: 218.13KB, Downloaded 318 time(s)) | ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3668 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Wed, 20 August 2014 17:29 |
|||
| ||||
|
I appreciate your dedication to focusing on accuracy. I totally agree that this is the best way to go for 8 & 16 bit systems. No HQ4x or SuperEagle for me (although I am one of those stretch to widescreen weirdo's. Sorry  )But It would be nice if the PSX emulation could do 3d acceleration or support Pete's plug-ins. I consider 3d console games to be a different animal from 2d ones. Looking at PSX graphics on an HDtv makes my eyes bleed. OMG LOOK AT THE DITHERING! AHHHH MY EYES! Just my 2 cents as a Mednafen user. BTW: Mednafen + ICE + Steam = The greatest thing to happen to a HTPC since PLEX. More systems please!  Lets get some Sega-CD and Saturn running up in this raggedy mofo. 
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: PSX Non-native resolutions and texture filtering? [message #3781 is a reply to message #2903 ] | Mon, 01 December 2014 17:20 |
|||
| ||||
|
Just backing up the call for the ability to render to a higher resolution than the PlayStation default. Like others here it seems, I was an original PlayStation gamer, spending a few thousand hours on it in my youth - I've done my time. The graphics from today's perspective are absolutely dire however, I was quite disappointed when I realised what a grainy mess this stuff actually is many years later (shakes fist at rose-tinted glasses of Final Fantasy VIII graphics). I have seen what a decent (e.g. 720p) resolution can do to 3D graphics - quite impressed with Final Fantasy X under pcsx2 with OpenGL rendering - so I believe there is a lot to visually gain by throwing today's hardware at the problem. I was unaware that there are purists over this. Regardless, I owe the Mednafen programmer £40 for implementing the first properly working graphics and audio libre emulator (I have no interest in proprietary stuff). I was really happy to listen to FFVIII's intro playing back without audio choking, and Quezacotl's summon now sounds right! I have spent too much time using the Peops SPU...How can I donate via Paypal to this project? Edit: Happy to look into bitcoin if Paypal is too privacy-violating. [Updated on: Wed, 03 December 2014 16:38] | ||||
| ||||
| |
| Previous Topic: | Mednafen v0.9.36.5 compiled for Mac OS X |
| Next Topic: | mednafen server 0.5.2 for windows |
]