PSX Emulator Performance Investigated

An anonymous reader writes "AnandTech took a look at console emulators (ePSXe as well as a preview of a GameCube emulator) and how the latest ATI and NVIDIA cards perform at emulating. The author also compares Intel and AMD CPUs and their impact on ePSXe emulation performance. It turns out that emulating PSX games is pretty pixel shader intensive, as pixel shaders are required to emulate a lot of the PSX's effects."

Comments

Virtual GameStation

[jetfuel]

Connectix was truly ahead of their time with Virtual Gamestation. I played all the way through Xenogears and Chrono Cross on a 333MHz iMac with a macally iShock, and it was quite a pleasant experience. There were a few rare glitches and the occasional squishy sound, but having a 6GB memory card was nice. :D It's amazing that they were able to put such an emulator together, to instantly expand the Mac's game library to thousands of titles, but it's very sad that legal action by and subsequent agreements with Sony made them have to shelf the whole project. VGS2 or at least VGS for OS X would have been nice.

Re:Virtual GameStation

[spectral]

I've not seen any other PSX emulator come close to the low sysreqs that VGS had. I played through some game on a horrible computer, one that was borderline on the VGS 'requirements', but it played fine. Every other emulator chokes on this game and slows it down to the point of it being unplayable.

Re:Awesome (well, relative) graphics with emulator

[Kethinov]

Also, you can hack the save files emulators produce at the hex level. Cheating in console games is important to me (but only on certain levels) because I like to completely conquer the games I play. This is why I vastly enjoy the save and load state features that are present in most emulators. For example, saving and loading at certain times in FF7 chocobo racing can increase your chances of getting the extremely uber rare 3 pieces of materia the races have to offer. Shortens 3 straight days of gaming into 3 hours. Great for college students with tight schedules ;)

A good example of where (hex edit) cheating is necessary is FF4 for the SNES. In order to get some of the game's items, you have to fight millions of battles! The odds are so much against you that I know people who have had the actual cartridge for upwards of twelve years and still haven't gotten it all.

So in response to this practically impossible difficulty I have created a guide for hacking FF4 ZSNES save states at the hex level, to be found here.

See, I see using console emulation like using open source software. If you don't like something about a console, too fucking bad. If you emulate it, chances are you can do something about it. Just like if you don't like something about closed source software, too fucking bad. But with open source, chances are you can do something about it. :)