An emulation question

[eLhabib]

Hello fellow pilots!
I have a question I could not find an answer for online due to my lack of knowledge about the whole topic - I hope someone here has some insight:

Is there a way to emulate PS1 games on a pc (or mac) with improved resolution (maybe even up to 4k) and a higher/unlocked framerate?
More specifically, I would love to be able to run wip3outSE, but for example I don't know if the whole ingame physics are locked to the framerate or not (same with sound/graphic effects).

has anyone done this? Is there even a way to do it? If yes, please point me in the right direction!
Thanks in advance,
eL

[blackwiggle]

Somebody else just asked me about this today, so I did a search......getting excited....the answer is a very big YES !

You need a program called RetroArch, which is sort of a front end for different emulator 'Cores', the core for the PS1 is called Beetle PSX HW.
Most of the cores are preloaded with the program, you just have to check that they are up to date.
http://www.retroarch.com/index.php?page=platforms

So how good can you get PS1 games looking on a 4K screen?
Checkout just how stunningly good this emulation of FFVII is, I was absolutely blown away when I first saw this.
Make sure you have a blank piece of A4 paper and a pen with you when you watch this video, as the as the video plays the guy gives the various settings he has used to get the results, you'll see them typed up on the top right of the screen.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=101&v=sl0CWiHNu0U&feature=emb_logo

Also see this forum where I first heard about it.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/ps1-emulation-can-do-amazing-things-nowadays-ffvii.109469/

I'm going to be trying this stuff over the weekend.:lol

[eLhabib]

WOW! Thank you so much! Will try over the weekend!

[blackwiggle]

Check the NEWS section of the RetroArch site.
There is a public BETA of a update to the Beetle PSX

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/blog/

It allows you to overclock so that you can lock the frame rates.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqSUlW2atI

I've just been looking in the forums - Guides section and saw this post linked below.
Looks like we already have a Wipeout fan that has got this working, as now he's asking if anybody else is having a problem using their NegCon controller :eek

We might need to join this forum and pick this blokes brains if we run into trouble.:nod

https://forums.libretro.com/t/issues-with-wipeout-sequels-and-negcon-controller/16021

By the way, I just looked to see what system requirements are as of July 2019 to run RetroArch, they are in link below.
I know WOzone and Pacer community member NZLion is heavily into PC gaming, so I shot him a PM asking if he has this running, which I sort of suspect he has, and asked him to post in this thread what he knows.
Looks like there is going to be at least 3 of us all starting out at the same time 'Virgin like' with this program with the same aim, hopefully all successfully.
I remember many years ago somebody posted here that said they had got 2097 emulated, and that he was looking for somebody else who was running the same, as apparently you could race online against each other like you could if you had two PSones linked [only 2 players obviously]
https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/requirements/retroarch/18959

[Hellfire_WZ]

That's actually really interesting. I haven't really played around with Playstation emulation beyond ePSXe so will definitely take a look at those!

[slimjim]

Anyone have any luck doing this

[eLhabib]

Couldn't figure it out for the life of me. Settled with BallisticNG.

[T-301]

It is very much possible to emulate PS1 games at high resolutions, and even unlock framerates.

In the past decades we've seen many major improvements to PS1 emulation. First, we got mednafen, a command-line emulator that focuses on running PS1 games (and a few other consoles) as accurate to real hardware as possible. It's a core-based emulator, meaning it doesn't require you to search the web for dozens of plugins to make games work, like ePSXe (a plugin-based emulator) does. All it needs is the BIOS files of the console you want to play (like the PS1's) and the roms of the games you want to play. This emulator, however, has no GUI of its own and almost none of the improvements you really want to see.

Next, we got Retroarch, which was already mentioned. It has numerous cores based on mednafen, and the most favored these days is Beetle-HW. It's basically mednafen, but packaged with an UI that lets you tweak settings. But as many people have noticed, Retroarch's unwieldy UI is a big negative, and prone to misconfiguring itself. It has the improvements you're looking for, but is also rather clunky.

The emulator I'll recommend to you guys is Duckstation. It's also a core-based emulator that's been in development for about a year now. Its performance is on par with mednafen and Retroarch, on top of having said improvements and an UI that's simple and easy to navigate.

The things you'll need:

- The emulator itself (run it through its Qt GUI executable): https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/releases
- PS1 BIOS files (specifically named scph5500.bin, scph5501.bin and scph5502.bin) from the mednafen BIOS pack: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Emulator_Files#Multi-system
- Your PS1 games (discs or dumped .cue/.bin/.chd roms)

Things it can do:

- Software rendering, Vulkan rendering (great for low-end PCs), OpenGL rendering and DirectX rendering
- PGXP (changes the original PS1's integer rendering, more commonly known as "wobbly/jittery PS1 graphics", to a precise and stable geometry)
- Force NTSC's 60Hz/30FPS for PAL games (this will not make PAL games run at 30FPS, only make them run ~16% faster to meet the 60Hz refresh rate)
- Internal upscaling (quite literally increasing the resolution games are rendered as from the native 320x240p up to 5120x3840p
- Aspect ratio options (game-native, 4:3, 16:9 and beyond)
- Widescreen hack (displays the horizontal overscan area of the games when used with a widescreen aspect ratio. Be aware that you were not supposed to see what is rendered beyond the original games' resolutions, so expect to see some clipping and textures/models popping in/out of the screen. This option is not necessary if the game in question has a widescreen option of its own)
- Integer upscaling (when enabled, it only upscales the game in whole numbers, so pixels will always look perfectly square)
- Downsampling (when used with internal resolutions higher than the native 240p, it'll scale the game's resolution back down to 240p to make it look low-res, but with the added benefit of higher detail)
- Anti-aliasing
- Texture filtering (can smooth out textures or leave them pixelated like in the original PS1)
- Dithering options (better known as the 16-bit "grainy pixels" texture shading of early PS1 models, they can be scaled up with the internal resolution, or disabled altogether by enabling 24-bit colors)
- CPU overclocking (useful for fixing framerate drops when playing games that have slowdowns)
- Integrated Gameshark cheat codes (kept in .txt files that can be edited)
- .CHD file support (a file format that can be converted from .cue/.bin files, losslessly compressing games into smaller filesizes, and can even combine 2-disc games into one file so you won't have to switch .cue files when playing those)
- Savestates (including an option to save the exact spot you are in during gameplay when you quit the emulator, so it can place you exactly where you left off when you start it back up)
- Qt GUI out of the box with tooltip descriptions of every function in the settings

Once you download the emulator, get the BIOS and put them in the BIOS folder, and get your games. Point the emulator to the folder where your games are located, boot them up, open the settings menu and fiddle away with the Display/Enhancement options.

Here's what WipEout 3 looks like at 5x its native resolution, with PGXP, scaled dithering, nearest-neighbor filtering, widescreen hack at 16:9 aspect ratio, crop overscan for all borders, and a scanline postprocessing filter on top for taste.

https://images2.imgbox.com/b4/c3/uzHv3zx3_o.jpg

[eLhabib]

WOW :eek this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you so very much!