Best Psx Emulator?

[lovinmyhonda]

I currently use pSX, which I must say is a pretty freakin' good emulator. The only beef I have is that I cant use plugin to upgrade my graphics and whatnot.

What other emulator and plugins would u guys recommend, I'm trying to make FF7 a little more visually appealing.

[jonc2006]

you can try epsxe, although alot of the plugin stuff depends on your system. as a heads up though, certain features that are intended to pretty-up the graphics have been known to backfire and cause really nasty graphical glitches in ff7 so keep that in mind.

[lovinmyhonda]

1) LOL @ your avatar.

2) This is unsettling news.

Now i dunno what to do

[jonc2006]

no dont get me wrong, there are graphical enhancements that work for it, but there are also a few, specifically hi res texture options, that can produce unwanted effects.

[lovinmyhonda]

Well what do u recommend using? I really don't wanna take a stab in the dark and get the latter.

[jonc2006]

well again it depends on what hardware you have. the openGL2 plugin is the most feature enhanced plugin out there right now. you can see some of the possible enhancements you can get from it in this thread (that isnt just limited to ff7 im just showing you an example of what its capable of, there are lots of other things that can be done with it besides shaders and such).

[lovinmyhonda]

Windows Vista Home Premium OS

Sony Vaio AR605E

NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT

[jonc2006]

do you know what kind of videocard you have? if you dont know, just open up the dxdiag utility and check under the "display" tab. your system can handle the emulator and the openGL2 plugin (unless you are using an ATI card, their drivers have serious issues with GL plugins). from what i can tell. and if you decide to try epsxe, you will need to make sure that you assign the emulator to only one of your cpu cores, as it wasnt designed with multicore cpus in mind. as for what video settings to avoid with ff7, i would stay away from any and all hi res texture options. having them enabled produces what is known as the "green lines glitch". texture filtering is ok to use ( the 0 or 4 settings work the best), and shaders should be as well provided you set them up right (look in the thread i posted on how to do that).

[lovinmyhonda]

[jonc2006]

yeah you can use the openGL2 plugin. if you need help setting the emulator up let me know.

[lovinmyhonda]

Ok downloaded and unzipped ePSXe. Installed the neccesary plugins to get it to run proerly. tested the game, works good.

now i made a new folder "shaders" and unzipped "Guest's Shader Collection" set it up according to the link you provided, But i get an error message saying "shader effects: missing custom file".

is there something else i need to download in order for the shader to work?

EDIT: trying to use the cartoon shader.

[jonc2006]

what you need to do is make a directory in your epsxe directory and extract your shaders to it (in this case the cartoon shaders). they should be in pairs, with a set name of gpuPeteOGL2.* if not name them this (keeping the original extensions intact). set the shaders directory using the "..." button in the plugin next to the "Shader Effects" option.

now if the shader you want to use is a fp and vp pair, set the OGL2 plugin to "Shader Effects=3" and make sure "Screen Filtering=1" and it will load %ShaderDir%\gpuPeteOGL2.fp and %ShaderDir%\gpuPeteOGL2.vp where %ShaderDir% is where you told the plugin to find the shaders.

for a slv and slf pair, follow the above, except set the plugin to "ShaderEffects=5" and it will load %ShaderDir%\gpuPeteOGL2.slv and %ShaderDir%\gpuPeteOGL2.slf instead.

[lovinmyhonda]

Ok i get'cha/ that shader looks like my ass unfortunately i'll be trying a few of em out. thanks for the help jonc!

[jonc2006]

no problem. you can also check this forum for other shaders.

[Phil]

it seems to me like the more you use epsxe the more interesting it gets.

When I was playing FF9, ive configured it to take out the battle swirl for faster battles. ( i dont see why people see that as a flaw) :

[jonc2006]

Originally Posted by Phil

it seems to me like the more you use epsxe the more interesting it gets.

When I was playing FF9, ive configured it to take out the battle swirl for faster battles. ( i dont see why people see that as a flaw) :

if you want to speed through random battles you can disable the fps limit for a minute and then re-enable it once the battle is over. this is a great thing to do if you are spending time to fight for exp point and/or gil because it lets you get double the amount of what you would normally get in regards to time amount.

[Phil]

yeah i did that on popos hights (above gizmaluke's grotto). if you fight the grand dragon things on disc 2, you can go from level 14 to level 50 in 3 hours

man now i have that urge to play ff9 again

[RockmanForte]

ePSXe and PCSX

but Xebra is the best one and you need stronger computer to run games better, I believe.