PCSX2

From Emulation General Wiki
Revision as of 01:50, 18 August 2014 by 90.1.210.160 (talk) (i knew i was forgetting something)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
PCSX2-Logo.png
Current version: 1.2.1
Active: Yes
OS: Windows, Linux, OS X
Authors: PCSX2 Team
Official website: PCSX2.net
Source code: GitHub

PCSX2 is an open source, plugin-based PlayStation 2 emulator. Its purpose is to mimic the PS2 hardware using a combination MIPS CPU interpreters, recompilers and a virtual machine which manages hardware states and PS2 system memory.

Downloads

Recommended Specs

  • Windows Vista / Windows 7 32-bit/64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.2 GHz or better
  • GPU: 8600 GT or better
  • 1GB RAM (2GB if on Vista / Windows 7)

For those with DualShock 3 controllers, use the new SCP Driver Package.

Setup

Gamepad

Get God Hand running on a laptop

Native DS3 controls with Lilypad-SCP - Import this with the 'Load Bindings' button in Lilypad's config.

Either that, or you can use the Pokopom XInput Plugin. If you use a DualShock controller running under an XInput wrapper such as SCP Server, then this plugin is a no-brainer. It's very customizable, and you don't have to configure it beforehand. All of the buttons are bound at startup.

Video Setup

Now, most of the video options are very straight-forward. However, there is one that probably bears explaining: The interlacing modes. Now, many games can run fine without interlacing modes. You can just select "None" and everything will be fine. However, some games will have a "jitter" effect if you don't have interlacing modes enabled. The "Sawtooth" interlacing method is not recommended at all. Artifacting is far too heavy to be usable. The "Bob" interlacing method has the least artifacts out of all of them, but it can still let some jittering pass through. The "Blend" interlacing method has the least amount of jitter. However, that comes with a pretty hefty side-effect: blurriness. Yes, the Blend interlacer does frame-blending. This is also known, more colloquially, as motion blur. This means that if there is heavy jitter, the video output will be extremely blurry since the two jittering frames will blend together. Only use this interlacing method as a last resort.

Issues

Automatic gamefixes

Whenever you encounter any kind of bug that isn't graphical in nature, objects going through other objects, untargetable objects that should be targetable or A.I. freezing for example, make sure that the automatic gamefixes option from the system menu is activated.

Major graphical glitches

Whenever a game has graphical problems such as garbage texture, light sources visible through wall, burn in or transparent objects being opaque, the easiest fix is generally to switch to software mode either by pressing F9 in-game or via the configuration panel of the GSdx plugin.

Poor performance in software mode

Many games will require you to switch to software mode to fix various issues, albeit at the cost of a significant performance loss. However, an easily overlooked setting in the graphical plugin configuration panel, extra rendering threads, might help lessen the performance loss if you have a quad-core or higher CPU. It is recommended to set it to the number of cores in your CPU minus one if you aren't using the the MTVU speed-hack, or minus two if you are (ex: if you are using a quad core CPU you should set this number to 3 without MTVU and 2 with MTVU).

Multi-threaded microVU

Multi-threaded microVU (MTVU), while generally a very useful speed-hack, might sometime cause minor problem like hanging and absence of performance gain or more severe ones like massive performance hits, save-states corruption and crashes to desktop.

Crashes

Crashes could be the results of several things. If the log warns you one or several time about being out of memory you will need to apply a patch to make the executable large address aware, its more commonly referred to as the 4GB patch. If the log warns you about TLB miss you are either:

  • Using a bad dump of a game - in which case you'll need to re-rip your disc or re-download the game you are trying to play.
  • Playing the game directly from your DVD drive - in which case you should rip the game and play using the .iso instead (it's not advised to play directly from your DVD drive).
  • Trying to play a game that isn't supported by the emulator - in which case you cannot do anything except trying another version of the game (PAL or NTSC-J for example).

If PCSX2 still crashes after doing all of the above, check that you aren't using any speed-hacks and that your system is stable and not overheating especially if you are overclocking.

Blurry

It's either interlacing or a filter in the game itself. For the former, switching the de-interlacing mode with F5 may help, and may cause flicker or screen shaking. For the latter, hacks are required. Either Aggressive-CRC if the game is listed there, or skipdraw (toy with the number, 1-100) might work otherwise.

Black lines

Those lines are caused by scaling to a non-integer internal resolution (anything other than XxNative), texture filtering (Check that shit off or to half at most), improperly offset textures(TC offset hack, Wild Arms hack), or improperly handled texture edges(Sprite hack). Native resolution for the most part fixes those. But software rendering may be required as well.

Guides and Info