Gran Turismo 2 (PAL) from CD

[marc_lye]

Hiya everyone!

I've looked around on here before signing up but haven't really found anything pinpoint specific to my situation so I'm hoping you guys can help me out. I was looking for stuff more directed towards GT2 so if I have overlooked any threads relative, I apologise beforehand.

Anyway, lately I've become a serious conservative as far as HD space goes with my computer, and so I'm trying to cut down on the amount of crap thats stored into them. Including games if theres anyway I can cut down on the space they take while still being able to play them

I understand that PS emulation is best done with the images of the original discs stored on the computer but I don't exactly wanna pile up a small 60GB Drive full of ISO's now do I?

Anyway, I've almost got Gran Turismo 2 (PAL - Arcade Disc) playing perfectly on ePSXe 1.60, I have the graphics plugin sorted and setup very nicely (Nice work Pete!), as well as the sound in the Eternal plugin.

Its just getting the damn CD sorted out I'm using PEOP's ASPI/IOCTL with the W9X ASPI (I'm on XP with ForceASPI 1.7 I think) setup, using caching mode "Smooth Read" and an additional 4MB cache. All other settings are as default.

My CD/CDRW/DVD drive itself is just a bog standard Samsung SM-332B (I think thats it), my rig is just a crappy factory made e-machines so theres nothing special about it lol. The CD Drive I can't really complain about, it does its job, its nothing flash but that doesnt bother me.

The game almost runs perfectly, but as the game tries to load up any audio or video sequences (I know the game uses XA audio which is meant to be fiddly, I don't fully understand this XA or MDEC business), the game will stutter pretty badly but only for a small number of seconds. After that the game will run smoothly until maybe 10 or so seconds later when the same happens again.

I'm happy that I've managed to get this far with GT2 straight from the discs, but I'd be over the moon if I could get the game working flawlessly now, so can anybody out there help?

*Takes a breather!*

Woo... first post over with, now you can flame me to death

[n_w95482]

Can you hear the CD-ROM drive spin down during the movies? If so, try using Nero DriveSpeed to force the drive to keep the disc spinning.

[marc_lye]

Well I couldn't actually hear much movement from the CD-Drive anyway, but regardless I fiddled with Nero Drivespeed (I've never used it before despite having the whole Nero Ultra Edition heh), I went through various tweaks, lowering the drive speed (Which can be done with PEOP's CD plugin anyway), increasing the 'Spin Down' time (Could you possibly give me a quick lesson on what that is and what its all about?) but nothing seemed to aid the problem.

The game is still stuttering in the starting moments of the movies and frequently through the music.

Does anyone know if its actually possible to run GT2 (or ANY PS game!) flawlessly without the need for ISO's? As much as I hate to say I'm beginning to have a little bit of doubt!

[n_w95482]

The spin down time setting states how long the CD spins at the preset setting before it stops. It's usually 10 or so seconds on most drives but you can manually adjust it with the program. I would try setting the speed to something like 8x or 16x and the spin down time to infinite. Is this the only game that has this problem?

[marc_lye]

Well unfortunately Nero Drivespeed isn't helping matters at all, I hate to keep asking like this but are there any other suggestions?

I've raked around my bedroom and I managed to find 3 other PS games (I used to have a tonne of them but I was never the best at taking care of them back then and so alot of them are now useless!), so what I'll do is make images of each one first of all just to see if the discs can still be read, if they copy ok to the computer then I'll make backup copies of them and try them each out.

I'll let you know how each one goes, the games I have are Rollcage, Wipeout (The original), and Final Fantasy 7.

[marc_lye]

Ok well I took a look at all of those discs and to be honest, they were all scratched like hell, but I carried on anyway, instead of just reading them to images I was just gonna see how they performed read straight from the CD.

Rollcage: Almost perfect, again like GT, I know this game used normal format CD Audio, but since the disc was so damaged (at least I'm assuming it was because of the disc), the music didn't play at all. Ingame was absolutely perfect with no slowdown (and no music!). Opening FMV sequences struggled to play (Could be down to disc or problem relating to GT2)

Wipeout: Exactly the same as above

FF7: Disc was still messed up but in a better state than previous two, opening sequence struggled but couldn't be skipped so that took a while! Ingame music worked but stuttered.

To be honest I don't think these tests were all that good with the discs being badly damaged. I managed though, to find Final Fantasy 6 which I hardly ever played (Don't know why!) and so the disc was in very good condition.

I went on to load this up using the same settings I've used for GT2 and it performed very badly. The opening sequence was stuttering every few seconds, then playing smoothly for a few and stuttering again. I thought this would be like GT2 with dodgy video and audio but fine ingame but for some reason I couldn't even get into the game, the controller didn't seem to wanna do anything. So I was just left watching badly stuttering demos. :cuss2:

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what this all means, really all I want to use ePSXe for is to play GT2, and I don't wanna resort to using ISO's.

[DemonSui]

don't use the smooth read, there's another setting there that reads quickly (I'm unsure what it is) and it should work fine.

[marc_lye]

I've gone through every mode though, and none give as 'good' a result as that Smooth Read so I'm kinda stuck!

[Samor]

I'd say, try Sapu's cd-r plugin. I think I had better results with that one.
Running Win9X, btw? or XP?

[marc_lye]

Im running XP-SP2, but up to now I've had the best results in using PEOP's with the 9X-ASPI setting, I'll try Sapu's later, I have tried it before quite a while back but tbh I can't remember how it ran.

Thanks for all the posts so far guys.

[Samor]

Also, I don't use ASPI as all under XP. It seems to work just fine without.

[marc_lye]

Ok I've just tried Sapu's and not one setting (I went through all possible modes) gave any decent performance at all, its safe to mark that one off the list for me I'm afraid.

I've just downloaded Xeven's to try that out.

[marc_lye]

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!!!!!

Xeven's plugin worked absolutely wonderfully!

I didn't even try to configurate it, the whole auto-detection thing about it worked perfectly.

The opening movie played with no glitches at all and at full speed.

The little movies that appear when you're choosing the course to race slowly stutter for like a second and then work fine (Similar to my experience with PEOP's)

The ingame music loaded up quicker than in PEOP's giving me perfect performance with like less than a seconds slowdown and it didn't stutter at all afterwards throughout the whole race.

To the guy/girl behind Xeven's awesome job man, awesome job!

Hehe, is all PS emulation this fiddly when it comes to finding the right mix of plugins?

[Samor]

it can be; I'm happy it worked.

And the author of cdrXeven is no other than.... Xeven

http://batard.psxfanatics.com - He made also a ps1 emu; you should try it

[marc_lye]

Yeah that CD-R plugin is working perfectly, I even got a damaged to hell FF7 working nicely too!

All is well!

[hushypushy]

To the guy/girl behind Xeven's awesome job man, awesome job!

haha, that's a funny quote. that's like saying "whoever is the man or woman that made this Quentin Tarantino film should be praised!"

[marc_lye]

Well I'm new to the forums

How the heck would I know whether Xeven was a dude or a chick

You don't exactly give the safest impression either hushypushy

To me you could either be a chick who is VERY open about her sexuality from that picture, or you could just be a lesbian obsessed guy, either way though its all good

[fireblaster_lyz]

He is a dude...obviously

[hushypushy]

heh, no i just thought it's funny, like how you kind of made it seem like Xeven was some sort of entity...and then there was a person behind him but really, Xeven is a cool dude, so don't worry, he wont come to kick your ass

[Mikluuutus]

Could somebody give me instructions that i can make this game work too? Which bios and plugin to download and what else should i do? Thank you so much!