Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

[Book Thief]

Okay, but surely there's some redeeming feature here aside from the music.

Bit late getting back to you, but the hero seems to be comically ineffectual and incompetent. As I mentioned in my original post, Arnath gets sent on a quest to retrieve an herb to save the King's wife who has fallen ill. On your way to retrieve the herb, you get mugged by bandits, who knock you out and steal everything you have. When you wake up, you're informed the Queen has already died, and upon hearing this news, Arnath is horrified. The King, however, doesn't seem to give a shit that his wife died, taking an almost c'est la vie approach to the fact that we failed to save her life.

Then again, the King has two wives, so maybe it was the wife he doesn't really care that much about.



Later on, a major arc surrounds you trying to find the brother of your childhood friend, Lilith, who has been indoctrinated into an evil cult. Upon investigating the cult's church, you find a secret underground lair, and after some snooping around, you are poisoned and captured. After you escape, you meet up again with her brother, and demand that he help you search for an antidote to save Lilith, which is, once again, in the cult's secret lair. When you find it, her brother ends up captured. You give the antidote to Lilith, and resume your search to save her brother, only to find his dead body in a cell, which upon seeing, our hero states that he's "always on board for revenge," which sounds like something a villain would say, not some wide-eyed idealistic kid-hero.

So overall, the plot has this amateur charm to it that I find to be unintentionally hilarious. Shit just happens, we fail to prevent the bad stuff, and no one seems to care that we suck as a hero.

Also, you may be interested in this, a complete translation of Stargazers:

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7105/

Thanks! I'll keep this in mind the next time I feel like torturing myself with a crappy JRPG.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I have a couple retarded questions, and not sure if this is the right place to ask.

How is PS3 emulation and how easy is it to do? Specifically for GT5.
Are there any good retro games based around racing team management?

Spoiler: Autism

Occasionally I like playing Gran Turismo 4 b-spec mode (that's where the AI drives for you) as it makes for a fun idle game. The AI driver is bad, but you can focus on the best part of the game, which is car collecting and modifying.

Having done many runs in the past, I thought I'd try the randomizer mod. Unfortunately, pre-patched iso isn't available for download anymore without jumping through hoops, I don't want to install a bunch of .net stuff for a single mod, and can't get the xdelta command line to work (my fault, not the software).


My next stop was PS3 emulation or even PS3 softmodding. The reason being that GT5 supposedly has a good b-spec mode.

When it comes to PS3 emulation I hear mixed things. One is that it's in a good place and works on the Steam Deck with no issues, and the other is the emulator requires the beefiest PC just to get it to run and even then it's far from an ideal experience. I'm not interested in 4k 120fps upscales or anything.

I could look into tracking down a used copy of GT5, but GT5 was supposedly a GaaS game and as such most of the content of the game is basically missing. That leaves softmodding as an option, but I've not looked into it.


As for other games. What I'm looking for is the team management aspect. GRID had this on Xbox 360, and it was fantastic, but I don't know other games that do it. The recent EA WRC game supposedly has it too but that's another GaaS game with DRM, DLCs, and a roadmap. So I'm looking for retro games. I considered the old Colin McCrae games on PS1 because iirc you had to manage your limited work time between stages but I've not played them since they were new.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

When it comes to PS3 emulation I hear mixed things. One is that it's in a good place and works on the Steam Deck with no issues, and the other is the emulator requires the beefiest PC just to get it to run and even then it's far from an ideal experience. I'm not interested in 4k 120fps upscales or anything.

In my experience, it depends almost entirely on the game being emulated. I was able to play some games like Demon's Souls and the Sly Cooper collection absolutely flawlessly, but then games like Metal Gear Solid 4 had enough spots with terrible performance and crashes that it wasn't worth fighting with.

 

[Carpenter Trout]

I considered the old Colin McCrae games on PS1 because iirc you had to manage your limited work time between stages but I've not played them since they were new.

See if you can get it to run on PC with DgVoodoo instead of the emulated version, supposedly, TOCA 2 also runs this way, but I wasn't able to get it to work properly.
for CMR 2.0 you don't need dgvoodoo, just the Silent Patch.

I'm looking for a game that is basically Gran Turismo on PC with multiplayer and that isn't shit like the Forza Motorsport Games after 6. Maybe Toca Race Driver 3?

 

[Pissmaster]

When it comes to PS3 emulation I hear mixed things. One is that it's in a good place and works on the Steam Deck with no issues, and the other is the emulator requires the beefiest PC just to get it to run and even then it's far from an ideal experience. I'm not interested in 4k 120fps upscales or anything.

My old computer could run Persona 5 in RPCS3 just fine a few years ago. It had an Intel Core i5 6500k & a GTX 970.

RPCS3 is very easy to set up. I think you just have to download a PS3 update file, which is on Sony's site anyway.

In my experience, it depends almost entirely on the game being emulated.

This guy's right, though a lot of popular stuff seems to work. I've never played Gran Turismo 5, so I can't say on specifically that game.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

How is PS3 emulation and how easy is it to do? Specifically for GT5.

You can find the RPCS3 compatibility list here. If you click on a game, it will take you to the wiki page which may have some game specific settings to enable if you run into issues.

 

[tofudelivery]

When it comes to PS3 emulation I hear mixed things. One is that it's in a good place and works on the Steam Deck with no issues, and the other is the emulator requires the beefiest PC just to get it to run and even then it's far from an ideal experience. I'm not interested in 4k 120fps upscales or anything.

Funnily enough, outside of games that heavily utilize the PS3's coprocessors (mostly Sony exclusives like Uncharted or TLOU that need supercomputers to go past 30fps), RPCS3 really replicates the performance characteristics of the PS3 itself. Games that ran well on the PS3 run like greased lightning, being unlockable past 120FPS even on mid-range modern CPUs if simulation isn't tied to FPS. Games that ran like complete shit on the PS3 usually don't run super well.

All that said, for a growing number of PS3 games, RPCS3 is the first time they have actually been playable and not 24FPS cinematic stutter fests.

MVG keeps saying that RPCS3 is the most impressive emulator. I don't fully agree, but man has a point with how well it's handled the weirdo architecture and how it keeps getting better and better.

 

[Haftag]

You can find the RPCS3 compatibility list here. If you click on a game, it will take you to the wiki page which may have some game specific settings to enable if you run into issues.

Yes, there are also compatibility reports, but all of this could be either outdated or inaccurate, or simply not apply to your situation. For example, at the time, Prince Of Persia 2008 was reported as in-game, but I played through the DLC just fine.

MVG keeps saying that RPCS3 is the most impressive emulator. I don't fully agree, but man has a point with how well it's handled the weirdo architecture and how it keeps getting better and better.

Yeah it can at times outdo PCSX2, like about a year ago or such, Tekken Tag Tournament HD ran better in RPCS3, than the original in PCSX2.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Yeah it can at times outdo PCSX2, like about a year ago or such, Tekken Tag Tournament HD ran better in RPCS3, than the original in PCSX2.

From what I understand, this has more to do with the intractable problems of PS2 emulation rather than with RPCS3 being so much better.

The Playstation 2's floating-point unit and vector units work in a wonky, non-standard way and its solutions will be different than what x86 processors come up with. That means floating-point calculations (which there are a hell of a lot of in 3D games) often require multiple steps to come up with the "correct" PS2 solution, which results in a ton of unavoidable overhead. And you can't fudge it because developers employed all sorts of arcane fuckery that's dependent on edge cases specific to the hardware.

There are still a fair number of PS2 games that will bring top-end CPUs to their knees simply because there's no efficient method of emulating those functions.

 

[GenociderSyo]

There is a video today about Project 64 1.6 and below having a bug in them that allows the running of remote code via a rom.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I mean, nobody should be using Project64 in general. The nagware alone should be a tip, although you can circumvent that.

I only use it for the Pokemon Stadium games with that GameBoy pack

Also
>1.6
>The version almost everyone uses
They get what they deserve. PJ64 is up to 3.0.1 now, with dev versions up to 4.0, literally wtf?

 

[SNEED.EXE]

I mean, nobody should be using Project64 in general. The nagware alone should be a tip, although you can circumvent that.

I only use it for the Pokemon Stadium games with that GameBoy pack

Also
>1.6
>The version almost everyone uses
They get what they deserve. PJ64 is up to 3.0.1 now, with dev versions up to 4.0, literally wtf?

The PJ64 2.0 executable was bundled with malware. That probably put people off the later versions, Emulator Zone has a message on their site saying "The latest version is supposedly safe. Use at your own risk."

 

[DavidS877]

Apparently there's some doubt of MARS(one possible successor to MiSTer) ever being anything more than vaporware.

Not to anyone's surprise.

On one hand I'd love to see something with a bit more horsepower. On the other my MiSTer setup has been a work in progress for over a year now. Surely I'll finally get it in a fancy case.

 

[anime jetplane]

They get what they deserve. PJ64 is up to 3.0.1 now, with dev versions up to 4.0, literally wtf?

Not the only emulator with that problem. Dolphin's last release was a few years ago and the nightly builds are also way far ahead of that.

When did all of these supposedly "fanmade" emulators go corporate? Its harder to get into the RPCS3 support forum than North Korea and they all started forcing updates and shilling discords at some point and being just as bad as the bigger corporations they claim are so bad. While encouraging users to ignore all "false positives". No discordnigger cybercriminal. I am not giving you a backdoor into my devices. Fuck off.

 

[Pissmaster]

Good to know about Project64, but I thought Mupen64 and 1964 were the go-tos now. I haven't used Project64 in ages.

 

[Haftag]

From what I understand, this has more to do with the intractable problems of PS2 emulation rather than with RPCS3 being so much better.

Yeah I know (kinda). Emulation is more often than not about complexity rather than power, IMO nothing demonstrates this better than Saturn vs Dreamcast, and even Naomi 2. Emulation is hardly ever perfect and I appreciate every legitimate effort.

There is a video today about Project 64 1.6 and below having a bug in them that allows the running of remote code via a rom.

First time I'm hearing this. A lot of people still used it due to some higher versions BSODing whenever there was an error.
2.3 or something fixed it and it's been my goto for general n64 emulation.

When did all of these supposedly "fanmade" emulators go corporate?

I don't know what exactly you're refering to, but in 2018 Microsoft bought github.

I thought Mupen64 and 1964 were the go-tos now.

1964 hasn't been updated for a while, Mupen64 is a mess unless you mean either the libretro cores or the fz port.

 

[GenociderSyo]

First time I'm hearing this. A lot of people still used it due to some higher versions BSODing whenever there was an error.
2.3 or something fixed it and it's been my goto for general n64 emulation.

Supposedly that one is okay. Many stayed on 1.6 because 2.0 was packaged with malware and toolbar installations. Netplay one also seems to be on 1.64.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I thought Mupen64 and 1964 were the go-tos now. I haven't used Project64 in ages.

I kept hearing about Cen64 for ages, but not heard anything for years.

Like so much emulator talk these days, it's one of those systems where people just say "Retroarch".

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Like so much emulator talk these days, it's one of those systems where people just say "Retroarch".

Does RetroArch even have support for the different packs and addons (specifically the transfer pack)? Last i checked, you had to do some extra fuckery to get it to work properly, which is why I use a seperate emulator for it.

or do people just not care about that anymore?

 

[Friendly Primarina]

FWIW, Ares has good N64 support. If none of the other solutions work for you, I'd try there.