Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Talk about Kojima's hard sci-fi masterpiece.
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Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by best name ever »

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Recently mednafen added fully realized PSX support to its latest WIP release 0.9.32.

The current state of emulation I hear is very good and requires no plugins/heavy configurations and tops all PSX emulators out there in terms of accuracy/compatibility. However it comes at a price, being a relatively beefy CPU,
A dual-core Phenom II or Athlon II at 3GHz or higher, or rough equivalent(in terms of single-core IPC), is recommended for running Mednafen's PlayStation 1 emulation on. For better performance, the binary should be compiled for a 64-bit target(for example, x86_64) rather than 32-bit, if available.
Mednafen is also Policenauts friendly, due to it having mouse support :)

Also, the credits scroll correctly!
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Sadly my PC is not powerful enough to run it smoothly...Anyone here meet the CPU requirements to run this?

LINKS:
http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/
http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/documen ... x/psx.html
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by SnatcherMkII »

I was able to play Fist of the North Star: The End of Century's Savior through a libretro core (Mednafan) and it played with 60fps and my Macbook is only like 2.26GHz. Then again, Can You Run It Systems told me that I can play Team Fortress 2 up to 3.1GHz, which doesn't make sense.

By the way, can you test Policenauts on XEBRA as well?
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by TechNoir »

Wait-wait, there's something more accurate than XEBRA?
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by best name ever »

SnatcherMkII wrote:I was able to play Fist of the North Star: The End of Century's Savior through a libretro core (Mednafan) and it played with 60fps and my Macbook is only like 2.26GHz.

You mean this?
https://github.com/libretro/mednafen-libretro
I'll have to give it a try; though I only have an AMD Duel Core at 2.24Gz, which is about six years old at the moment...
SnatcherMkII wrote:By the way, can you test Policenauts on XEBRA as well?
I have tested Policenauts on XEBRA in the past. It seemed to run perfectly (credits scrolled and everything). However I don't understand XEBRA's mouse support function. It's labeled as an option in the control config, but none of the mouse buttons seem to operate. :/ Maybe this is just an issue on my end?
TechNoir wrote:Wait-wait, there's something more accurate than XEBRA?
From what I hear, this is indeed more accurate then XEBRA...or at the very least, close (not positive).
Though mednafen is still being heavily developed and is open source, so I have more faith in mednafen then XEBRA at the moment.
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by SnatcherMkII »

best name ever wrote:You mean this?
https://github.com/libretro/mednafen-libretro
I'll have to give it a try; though I only have an AMD Duel Core at 2.24Gz, which is about six years old at the moment...
Yup. That's the one.
It wouldn't hurt to test it out. I tried using the accuracy core for Higan and I could only get up from ~30 to 50 fps. I could overclock my Macbook, but that's just too risky for a 3-year old laptop with some wears.
I have tested Policenauts on XEBRA in the past. It seemed to run perfectly (credits scrolled and everything). However I don't understand XEBRA's mouse support function. It's labeled as an option in the control config, but none of the mouse buttons seem to operate. :/ Maybe this is just an issue on my end?
Which build did you use? The one from April of 2011 or the recent build from two months ago?
TechNoir wrote:Wait-wait, there's something more accurate than XEBRA?
I do recall from Emu General that Mednafen is perfect for 2D games, though I'm guessing that was for older builds. XEBRA, as far as I know, is the only PSX emulator that supports PocketStation emulation.

I guess we'll see which is more accurate when TASVideos.com does a comparison. I used to believe Nestopia was the most accurate NES emulator, but apparently puNES, an underrated emulator got a 92% before it fixed the status bar in Mickey's Safari in Letterland, whereas Nestopia got a 79%.
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by TechNoir »

SnatcherMkII wrote:I guess we'll see which is more accurate when TASVideos.com does a comparison. I used to believe Nestopia was the most accurate NES emulator, but apparently puNES, an underrated emulator got a 92% before it fixed the status bar in Mickey's Safari in Letterland, whereas Nestopia got a 79%.
puNES? Holy hell!
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by best name ever »

SnatcherMkII wrote: Yup. That's the one.
It wouldn't hurt to test it out. I tried using the accuracy core for Higan and I could only get up from ~30 to 50 fps. I could overclock my Macbook, but that's just too risky for a 3-year old laptop with some wears.
I've tested it, and oddly enough it seemed to have had a dramatic increase in performance on my machine. However its not perfect, I have speeds from 59.9-55.0 making games jerky and crackly.

Maybe the libretro core is optimized in some way? That would enplane my performance increase.
SnatcherMkII wrote: Which build did you use? The one from April of 2011 or the recent build from two months ago?
I've used both, and both have the same issue with me. Have you ever had the mouse operate correctly?
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by best name ever »

Just a quick bump.
Mednafen has seen allot of progress the past year and is now a bit more optimized for lower end PC's.
However, I have also gotten a better PC and I'm able to run this now at max fps.

Verdict: Best PSX emulator out there! Throw ePSXe out the window!
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Re: Emulating Policenauts in 2013

Post by TheThrillness »

Can anyone actually write a guide on how to use mednafen? Like I can get games to run fine (this emulator seems perfect for Policenauts) but how do you actually configure the emulator to use say an external USB gamepad and such? It also seems like savestates don't work which doesn't matter I guess but would be nice to have.

Edit: Figured it out. Pretty weird emulator but decent. If people want a better user interface I'd recommend waiting for BizHawk to release a stable build in the next week or so (uses mednafen).
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