v1.32 of my plugin released! [Archive]

Lewpy

April 21st, 2001, 00:42

Go grab it from my page (http://lewpy.psxemu.com/).
Constructive comments always welcome, good or bad :)

hankhoser

April 21st, 2001, 00:54

hi lewpy! i use ure plugin mainly for driver 2 as it runs best on epsxe.
there are a couple of annoying crash bugs that happen when you get to levels with rain effects and in vegas at night.
I know u dont have the game but i just thought i'd let u know of these in case u can look into them somehow.

thanks!

czb182

April 21st, 2001, 04:11

great plugin, if I get a video card card with anti-alaisng will i see the effects of it with your plugin.

Pestilence3

April 21st, 2001, 05:27

Hey lewpy, will my voodoo 2 8 MB will properly run Smackdown 2 and can handle 4 wrestlers...this time with your new 1.32 plugin?

sxamiga

April 21st, 2001, 05:29

Czb182, if you get a video card that supports glide (the Voodoo series of cards) then you can use Lewpy's plugin. Lewpy's plugin is for glide, Pete's are for OGL and D3D. You set FSAA from your cards drivers if your card supports it. Only the Voodoo 5 cards of the Voodoo series (useing Glide for Lewpy's plugin) do FSAA. If you get a card that does FSAA and uses Lewpy's plugin, you will see the FSAA effects w/Lewpy's plugin.
Of course other cards (the GEForce Series and Radeon) do FSAA also, but they don't use glide and there for cannot use Lewpy's plugin.
sincerely,
sx/amiga

Lewpy

April 21st, 2001, 09:37

Originally posted by Pestilence3
Hey lewpy, will my voodoo 2 8 MB will properly run Smackdown 2 and can handle 4 wrestlers...this time with your new 1.32 plugin?
The easiest thing is to try it yourself :)
I've run Smackdown 2 in 4player Rumble mode, so if that is what you mean, it works fine for me here (UK PAL version).
If not, tell me _exactly_ what game play mode you are trying to play, and I will take a look.

Lewpy

April 21st, 2001, 09:38

Originally posted by Disturbed
Congratulation on the new plugin release Lewpy :D It's great but it keeps crashing and gives me illegal operation whenever I take a snapshot or while playing the game :(
Hope it'll be fixed in the next version :)
Oh, and problems with your plugin started after the 1.29 ver.
Err, what game? That bit of information is quite important :)
You aren't running any kind of background program, that would interfer with the Voodoo card?

Lewpy

April 21st, 2001, 09:41

Originally posted by hankhoser
hi lewpy! i use ure plugin mainly for driver 2 as it runs best on epsxe.
there are a couple of annoying crash bugs that happen when you get to levels with rain effects and in vegas at night.
I know u dont have the game but i just thought i'd let u know of these in case u can look into them somehow.
Hmm, I'll try and get hold of the game.
Does the crashes happen with other GPU plugins?

hankhoser

April 21st, 2001, 14:57

Driver 2 PAL doesnt crash with any other GPUs.:(

hankhoser

April 21st, 2001, 19:08

UPDATE: Pete's D3D GPU does crash when you try a vegas night scene but unlike your plugin, it only crashes the emu and not the computer (?). I dont know about the opengl plugin as i dont use it...:mad:

[vEX]

April 21st, 2001, 19:41

hey Lewpy ...
just wondering ... do u test your plugin with final fantasy tactics ??
since i own a voodoo3 card and final fantasy tactics i'd love to play it perfectly .... :cool:

Lewpy

April 21st, 2001, 20:42

Originally posted by [vEX]
hey Lewpy ...
just wondering ... do u test your plugin with final fantasy tactics ??
since i own a voodoo3 card and final fantasy tactics i'd love to play it perfectly
I don't own the game, so can't test with it. AFAIK, it has never been released in the UK. Certainly, I've not seen it in the shops, brand-new or second-hand.

RVWinkle

April 22nd, 2001, 00:02

Originally posted by [vEX]
hey Lewpy ...
just wondering ... do u test your plugin with final fantasy tactics ??
since i own a voodoo3 card and final fantasy tactics i'd love to play it perfectly .... :cool:

The battle scenes work fine if you turn on frameskip. The map screen is pretty messed up though. It's unplayable imo.

btw, Keep up the great work Lewpy. Your plugin is awesome. :D

hankhoser

April 22nd, 2001, 00:05

fivefeet8

April 22nd, 2001, 05:06

I have played FF tactics with lewpy's glide pluggin and it works perfectly.... Just make sure you got the newest drivers.. The new version just makes it look better.... It ran about 50 to 60 fps on my amd k6-2 533 with a voodoo 3 3000 pci... at 800x600.... There use to be weird graphics errors in the previous releases of lewpy's pluggin, but that seems to have been fixed as now the game looks flawless... Also, if you get a voodoo 5 5500, and turn on FSAA 4x then it works great and runs fast as well... of course I have a tbird gig now so that helped alot too....:p

Lewpy

April 22nd, 2001, 10:33

Originally posted by hankhoser
lewpy, there seems to be a prob with the onscreen display enhancement.
it performs normally with all games on sstates/controller types changing but after approx. 5-10 mins of play it reappears on screen by itself and doesnt go away!
maybe it is because it is a new feature..?
Arse, sounds like there's a timer error :( It won't be a config error.
I'll look in to it. Thanks for the heads-up.
*** UPDATE ***: yep, found the bug. It's in the timer code, when the upper 32bit counter increments, the incremental value returned is incorrect :( fixed it (removed 6 lines of un-needed code!), so will be okay in next version. Which may be sooner rather than later, as that problem is rather annoying :)

Lewpy

April 22nd, 2001, 10:36

Originally posted by fivefeet8
I have played FF tactics with lewpy's glide pluggin and it works perfectly.... Just make sure you got the newest drivers.. The new version just makes it look better.... It ran about 50 to 60 fps on my amd k6-2 533 with a voodoo 3 3000 pci... at 800x600.... There use to be weird graphics errors in the previous releases of lewpy's pluggin, but that seems to have been fixed as now the game looks flawless... Also, if you get a voodoo 5 5500, and turn on FSAA 4x then it works great and runs fast as well... of course I have a tbird gig now so that helped alot too
Nice :) I've done a fair amount of fix ups to various parts of the plugin, but couldn't test with FFT.

Zep

April 22nd, 2001, 11:27

What exact setup would you reccoemnd for Resident Evil 3? I have a PIII 600, Voodoo 3, 128 RAM and a 30 gig HD.

Lewpy

April 22nd, 2001, 11:38

Originally posted by Zep
What exact setup would you reccoemnd for Resident Evil 3? I have a PIII 600, Voodoo 3, 128 RAM and a 30 gig HD
I don't have the game, so can't say if any settings need tweaked for it. Perhaps someone else can offer up a config. All I can suggest is try the defaults, and tweak if necessary.

SatanC

April 22nd, 2001, 11:46

hankhoser

April 22nd, 2001, 13:43

Thanx for finding the display bug lewpy.
Your plugin is fantastic!

Lewpy

April 22nd, 2001, 13:44

Originally posted by SatanC
I started playing BOF4 and the first thing i did is look at the spell effects. I'm at the very beginning.. so i did 'aura' for the dude that seems to be half dragon. The effect looked great! but then i use the 'burn' magic whit the little dudette and it just froze.. what could be causing this?
I have BOF4 SLUS01324, so if that is the same version as yours, could you send me through a save-state just at the point I can cast the spell?
Before you send it, please check that if you load that state, then the problem happens. My email address is in my profile, etc. Thanks.

SatanC

April 22nd, 2001, 14:34

Here's my savestate... same version as you.
i sent an e-mail with details.

just delete the .txt part

**edit**
i tried putting it here, in an attachment, but it didn't work.. grrrr

Pestilence3

April 22nd, 2001, 16:40

Thanks anyway it worked fine by me now wuhoo! Now I can play smackdown with 4 players inside with my ol' trusty voodoo2 8MB hahaha! Thanks man for your great plugin. But i gotta disable the musics to reduce slowdown.

GunBlade

April 23rd, 2001, 00:17

Why isn't the plugin support the great FF9 effects you get with Pete's plugin?

Lewpy

April 23rd, 2001, 00:34

Originally posted by GunBlade
Why isn't the plugin support the great FF9 effects you get with Pete's plugin?
If you are refering to the swirl-effect before battles, I do not support it in my plugin. I've looked in to buffer copying, etc. under Glide, and it is just too slow to be practical. And the effect is not critical to the gameplay, so I don't deem it important. I have to have some kind of criteria in which to rank things, and this ranks low.
I am considering doing a kind of "Full VRAM" offscreen-drawing option, due to other games (such as MG:S, where the effect is quite important to the game), which may make the effect appear, although rendered purely in software.

Bgnome

April 23rd, 2001, 01:06

its really interesting how many people feel that the pre-battle swirly is essential for their ff9 gaming experience..:rolleyes:
i say keep up the great work! :D

euphoria

April 23rd, 2001, 07:25

Great news! I've been waiting for your new version for weeks now. The improvements list is really impressive. I haven't though tested this new version, but you've done work for those games that happen to be my favorites, and thats just great news for me. Thank you again Lewpy. And please don't think that your plugin is about to die... there are many players with Voodoo's for years ahead. Hope you have the will to continue.

euphoria

April 24th, 2001, 07:47

Lewpy

April 24th, 2001, 10:32

Originally posted by euphoria
Hey Lewpy! Is it my voodoo1 or why can't i see any difference in MGS codec screen when changing 'Experimental Screen Sizing' option? I play at 512x384 and tried it with 640x480.You should notice a difference. Without the option set, the PSX resolution will be reported as 368x240.With it set, the PSX resolution will be reported at 320x240. With is set at 368x240, the screen looks wrong and it flickers badly. With it set to 320x240, it looks correctly scaled, and doesn't flicker.
Hence the name "Experimental Screen Sizing".
Also does everyone else see the frequency and the voice meter on the codec screen? And i can't see contents of a memcard when loading through the game either.No, you can't see the frequency on the codec screen. This has been discussed somewhere on this board in the last few days. Hopefully, I will have an option which will make this visible in the next release. It may be the same thing for the memcards, I need to check.
The movie's subtitles that i mentioned a month ago(?) didn't show up (In the beginnig of the game when you talk to President Baker, after you fought revolver ocelot a movie plays where a missile gets launched). Propably you know all this already, but in case you don't.Movie subtitles work fine for me (certainly on the intro MDEC). Having said which, I haven't played the game that far (never have the time to actually play the games). Try enabling "Experimental Flipping", it may have something to do with it as I have it set most of the time.

euphoria

April 24th, 2001, 13:23

No the codec screen doesn't flicker at all and never has been with your plugin (used it from maybe 1.29 ->). And the subtitles show up right in the intro for me too, but there are at least two 'videos' that doesn't show subtitles. they aren't rendered 3d graphs but images after images (like a video ;)). There the subtitles doesn't show but only when i disable FrameBuffer, but then the movie disappears.

If i press ctrl (FrameB ON) i see two images on the top of the VRAM they flicker and show up the video. the right one shows the subtitles.

Lewpy

April 24th, 2001, 14:47

Originally posted by euphoria
No the codec screen doesn't flicker at all and never has been with your plugin (used it from maybe 1.29 ->). And the subtitles show up right in the intro for me too, but there are at least two 'videos' that doesn't show subtitles. they aren't rendered 3d graphs but images after images (like a video ;)). There the subtitles doesn't show but only when i disable FrameBuffer, but then the movie disappears.Arse :( Normally a game uses the same technique for the same type of rendering throughout the game, but in this case I guess they are doing something different on some of the videos.
Where exactly are these videos? I have the UK PAL version of the game, so if someone has that copy, could they send me a save-state just before the problem video?
Strange, the CODEC screen flickered like mad on my machine, so I introduced that setting just before releasing v1.32.

hankhoser

April 24th, 2001, 16:50

i have it, and the plugin.:)
please tell me which movies u mean and i will send the sstate to u.

Rargh

April 24th, 2001, 17:02

hi lewpy :)

I don t use ur plugin (I have a geforce)
but it s great to see an author being so intersted in helping others so often!

Good luck!! :)

bye

bachlaw

April 24th, 2001, 18:25

Actually, I've noticed that battle scenes in Chrono Cross are a little more irritating with the 1.32 plugin. Switching between element levels seems to require a full screen redraw, for some reason. This slows things down a bit, but is little more than an irritant. Sometime this week, I'll try to reinstall the previous version so I can make a more precise report. I'm using all the standard settings.

I can definitely say that changing the new Alpha-thingee feature to "Aggressive" is not recommended for Chrono Cross. The fonts dissipate and look awful.

Jonathan

GunBlade

April 25th, 2001, 00:17

Lewpy, in my reply I didn't mean the swirling effect before the battle, I meant some other effects that for some reason look kinda strange (because I got used to playing with pete's plugin when I decided to switch to yours because of the better FPS) Like some effects that appeard to run perfectly on pete's plugin looks kinda like a strange facer (like the 'Holy' magic in FF9). it appears to be that there are a few objects floating around the graphics like a 2D facer instead of an effect. Maybe I'm missing something?

And another question: While playing, after some time a text is shown in the upper left side of the screen indicating the Save slot and does not disappear. Is this a known bug?

And last but not least: GREAT JOB ON THE PLUGIN, THE FPS IS INCREDIBLE!

Newbie

April 25th, 2001, 02:14

Actually, I've noticed that battle scenes in Chrono Cross are a little more irritating with the 1.32 plugin. Switching between element levels seems to require a full screen redraw, for some reason. This slows things down a bit, but is little more than an irritant. Sometime this week, I'll try to reinstall the previous version so I can make a more precise report. I'm using all the standard settings.

you need to disable frontbuffer write

euphoria

April 25th, 2001, 08:05

Thank you Lewpy for your donating your time for this. But i don't think this is that much of an issue. there must be more important things for you to do (with your plugin atleast ;)).

But in case you have time for this. If you have any use for screen shots of the problem, I could post them to you or here. (4 screen shots - 294kb).
I have an NTSC version on MGS, so i can't help you with those savestates. i do have an memcard save before that part but you'd have to play i little bit to get to the movie. Someone must have a UK PAL savestate before that part.