really great config OpenGL2, FF8

[hushypushy]

drivers updated? are you playing off CD or ISO?

[WildPegasus]

My drivers are updated. Both CD and ISO have the same problem.

[hushypushy]

does it skip using OGL or even peops software?

[WildPegasus]

Not exactly sure what you mean but I have a openGL 2.8 plugin.

[hushypushy]

go to pete's site (http://www.pbernert.com/html/gpu.htm) and get OpenGL and peops software GPU. see if you still get the same problem when you use those plugins.

[WildPegasus]

gpuPeopsSoft.dll I have that. Same problem.

[hushypushy]

is this the only game it happens in? what about other programs? is your computer in good running shape, i.e. is it slow in general, is your drive defragged, etc?

and is the problem when you use peops soft the EXACT SAME as when you use OGL2? have you tried any other emulators like PSXeven, SSSPSX, or PCSX?

[WildPegasus]

Yep this is the only game it happens in, my computers in great running shape (new) and I get the exact same problem with GL and peops. I haven't tried any other ps1 emulators, nope. Think that'd solve the problem and if so which is the best option?

[WildPegasus]

Scratch that, I get the same problem with other emus. Maybe it's the bios (scph1001)?

[Chern]

Question!

My game looks fine, it seems that the only problem is i can't see any text, as it is blotchy and blacked out.

I went through all the pages trying various configs, but i still get the same probolem.

my specs:

P4 2.4 ghz
512 ram
radeon 9600 pro

[hushypushy]

WildPegasus: i don't really know. and it seems i havent even responded in a month....weird.

Chern: try turning up offscreen drawing. what are your settings?

__________________
Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994.

[CoreDumpError]

Hi all, I've been reading this forum to try to find answers to my issues emulating FF8, and this thread has been extremely helpful! Ever since my PS2 finally bit the dust, I've been unable to play my favoritre games (I bought it only a year ago off ebay, but it turned out to be a hardware revision 1, from way back when the PS2 first came out). Thanx to ePSXe I can play them again, yay! However, I've got a little problem with the ATB meters... they dont get that black flashing behind them any more (disabling the special game fix to makes it to go away), instead the orange bar itself flashes while it's filling up. Does anyone know how to fix that? Everything else seems to be working perfectly, even the battle swirl (with no slowdown), though I haven't left Balamb yet, so I haven't really seen any FMVs or much other than the world map, the garden, and the card game while at my current settings. Here's what they are:

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
GFX card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 x86/SSE2

Resolution/Color:
- 1024x768 Window mode
- Internal X resolution: 1
- Internal Y resolution: 2
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off
- No render-to-texture: on

- Filtering: 4
- Hi-Res textures: 2
- TexWin pixel shader: on
- VRam size: 128 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 2
- Framebuffer uploads: 0

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: on
- Screen filtering: on
- Shader effects: 3/2
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: off [00000002]

I'm using a MacBook Pro
CPU: 2.0ghz Dual Core Intel
Video card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 128MB GDDR3 memory
OS: Windows XP SP2, using Boot Camp
System RAM: 1GB

I'm using the "median" shader at level 2 form Pete's site, but I get the flicker with or without it, so I don't know if thats important.

Does anyone have any other sugggestions for settings, good shaders, etc, besides what might fix the ATB bar flicker?

P.S. I notice that acording to my pasted info from Pete's OGL2, "No render-to-texture" is on, but there's no checkbox for it in v2.8. I turned it on in 2.7 (before I found out about 2.8, and upgraded to it), which is what made the black box flicker behind the ATB bar go away. Is there any way to toggle it in 2.8?


EDIT: I've gotten a little further in the game, and on the FMV of Squall wtaching the invasion of Dollet (for the seed exam), there were little pauses in the video every few seconds. They were only like a quarter second long, but rather anoying. Anyone know any way to fix that?

---

Last edited by CoreDumpError; July 30th, 2006 at 20:32..

[dutchMasta]

i'm getting a new computer within a week, and i'm going to be playing a bit of ff8, and will most likely do testing, including checking for the best shaders (i actually found another nice one, it's similar to blur, but doesn't blur the edges, and doesn't screw up the text either, completely forgot what it was called). so i'll get back to you on that.

[CoreDumpError]

Sweet! Congrats on getting a new computer, I know how good that feels I eagerly await your test results.

I've also run across a rather baffling issue in FF8 recently. Sometimes all the text gets illegibally corrupted, and it stays that way if I load from a save state where it was corrupted, or if I just wait for the load screen to appear when I boot the game. The only way I've found to remedy it is to save, then quit and run the game with a different video renderer (Pete's D3D for instance), then load the game and make a savestate. Then I go back to Pete's OGL2 and load state, and the text is fine.

What do you think the best-looking shader is for FF8? I've been using a few different ones, and none have really been as good as I'd like.


I've also noticed that the rendered objects look a lot cleaner and sharper in Pete's D3D than in Pete's OGL2, but backgrounds are corrupted by blackness between texture transitions. I've managed to screw with the settings and get rid of most of the blackness, but it's still fairly abundant .

[dutchMasta]

Oh right, save states sometimes screw up, like save an error that it shouldn't have saved. Usually, if it's not too big, I think if you go to a normal savepoint/world map and save/load the normal way, the error should go away.

Like if you disable audio, save the state, enable audio, it will have saved the fact that there's no audio, and you'll never hear audio again.

I'd love to test now, but I've got a shuttle, and, although it is easily capable, it has this problem where if I run anything remotely graphics/cpu intensive, photoshop, games, etc., the fans turn on to max, and actually sounds like a jet engine.

The problem I've always had in previous attempts was to get a perfect battle transition in the world map (usually get a black with multi-colour strands transition). With the OGL plugin, it was do-able, though...I forgot the settings, you'll find it somewhere in these forums, but it sacrifices certain graphics, since you'll have to turn ?alpha bit mask? or something off, which kills off certain vibrance in the image.

OGL2, it was also do-able, but with a MASSIVE slow down (prob won't be as big on my new comp). Also, certain graphics were sacrificed, but not as badly as with the OGL plugin. Framebuffer upload/effects were the key to that I think.

I tested the D3D plugin as well, but I don't remember anything coming from it.

It's been a long time since I last tested, so what I said could all be wrong. This was when using the 6800GT, and since then, I've downgraded to 6600GT (the 6800GT was AGP, why oh why did I not think of the future). Dunno if I'll be able to afford a new gfx card, I'm close to hitting the budget limit I've been given, maybe a 7600GT for now, but might just wait for the G80 series with DX10 support.

[dutchMasta]

Ok, hate to double post, but I don't think editting "bumps" the thread, which...is not really my intention, but just so that the guy I'm replying to knows...well, whatever, I found the perfect settings. Attached below, and notice also my pc specs, so might not be the case for everyone.

EDIT: Man, that was really premature testing, !!!change Framebuffer Upload to 0!!! then those are the like...99% near perfect settings for me = battle transitions perfect, no slow downs, no flashing black atb bar (but the atb bar orange bit is sort of flickering).

OR, have Framebuffer Upload on 1 or 2, but turn off Geforce fix, and instead of flickering orange atb bar, you'll get a small weird graphical artifact, both are extremely minor, much better than the problems I had before.

So, the determinant to getting the battle transitions are definitely framebuffer effects. Rendering helps it load smoother, and framebuffer upload affects those atb bars. Not being technical here obviously...since I wouldn't understand anyway.

OFF TOPIC: Someone needs to fix the multi-quote image link.

Attached Images

ff8.JPG (102.9 KB, 255 views)

__________________
PC Specs:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 1.0 F11 | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz @ 3.4GHz | 2x Maxtor 250GB SATA II HDD RAID0 |
2x Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 DDR2 800 (512MX2) | Gigabyte GeForce 8800GTS 320MB | Tuniq Tower 120 |
Dual Boot: Windows Vista x64 & Windows XP Pro SP2

---

Last edited by dutchMasta; August 9th, 2006 at 03:46..

[CoreDumpError]

Wow, those settings work perfectly! I don't even get the very minor slowdown on battle blur that I used to get.

However, I've got another problem that I hope you might know how to solve, though it's probably beyond the software. At first, this never happened, but in the last few days, my game has started hitching up and sputtering every second or so, causing the sound to pop and scratch, and the whole game to pause for a few frames. I'm thinking that it's a hardware issue, mostly because it happens in whatever rendering plugin I use, and whatever sound plugin I use, plus I can sometimes hear popping in mp3s as well. I notice that the popping and hitching occurs much worse (up to the point of full-second long freezes) while loading another program in the background (like Firefox), so it seems that CPU usage effects it. I have no idea what could have caused this, though... I'm thinking that I may need to call up Apple tech support and get them to fix it. But if you know any kind of remedy or this, I'd definately appreciate it!

[dutchMasta]

Wow they do? I really thought for a moment it was my Core 2 Duo just being awesome, rather than me finding great settings. But then again, the Macbook Pro is pretty damn good as well.

I've compiled loads of shaders for testing (not all of them, I'm maybe missing some random ones).

Regarding the sound, I can suggest a few things, but I don't actually know what the problem is.
Check the connections of the audio jacks, update to the newest drivers, check any macbook pro forums, or appledefects.com. There seem to be a lot of problems with current macbook (+pros), I REALLY wanted one, but I'm gonna wait til the later generations, and hopefully merom based ones come out. Hope you sort it out, sucks to finally get perfect settings and something else comes in the way.

__________________
PC Specs:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 1.0 F11 | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz @ 3.4GHz | 2x Maxtor 250GB SATA II HDD RAID0 |
2x Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 DDR2 800 (512MX2) | Gigabyte GeForce 8800GTS 320MB | Tuniq Tower 120 |
Dual Boot: Windows Vista x64 & Windows XP Pro SP2

[Squall-Leonhart]

How is anyone getting this to work on PCSX 1.5?

im using the same plugins with pcsx 1.5 as i am with epsxe, and epsxe will boot the game properly, but pcsx 1.5 won't :|

this is the last entry from the console

S_ADDR(80200000) S_SIZE(
Change effective memory : 2 MBytes
ResetGraph:jtb=8005ee54,env=8005ee9c
CD_init:addr=8005ddf8

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

[hushypushy]

then why not just use ePSXe...?

__________________
Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994.