Unfortunately though the cores are not working for now.
Playing on 480p 30fps kinda sucks. Hence the GPU
The card doesn’t work with the computer. What a pain. The card being much less potent than even the iGPU, I suppose it couldn’t handle PS2 emulation anyways. If you’re looking for a small emulation PC, get one of those DELL optiplex where you can put any regular low profile pci-e card inside.
though otherwise I’m fine with this setup for now.
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Hey there it’s been a while since I last informed Y A L L about the state of my autistic retardation.
So I got another small formfactor PC, but this time with a PCI-E slot.
It’s a fujitsu esprimo 910C. 38€ on Ebay. It’s got an X16 PCI-E 3.0 slot and a dual core Pentium.
With the R7 240 low profile GPU I put into it, it should be plenty enough for up to 6th gen consoles.
That GPU is great. It’s got a VGA and a DP connector, and being a quite modern, is very power efficient at just 50W TDP without the need of an external power connector.
To my surprise the VGA port can flawlessly display all the way down to native 240p. So I should be set for now, playing PS2 games, even if the RetroArch core isn’t usable at this point.
The issue is I can’t seem to find the right modelines.
To avoid having black bars I would prefer the PAL resolutions of course, but I’m not sure which exact resolution particular games used.
Is it true that most games just use interlaced 480*640 at 60hz? But what did the PAL regions use?
I’d just like to have a bunch of commonly used modelines to easily switch between them using a shortcut.
Some notes: I had to upgrade the Pentium G2120 to an i5 2500 (I luckily had lying around) and set the multi core rendering option in PCSX2, otherwise I would get slowdowns in more demanding games such as wipeout. As for video cards I suppose everything made in the last decade or so will suffice for PS2 emulation. Most of the demand is placed on the CPU. The “amdgpu” driver supports vulkan, but locks up the whole system if low pixel clock resolutions are set. So I have to use the older “radeon” driver which doesn’t support vulkan unfortunately.
There are separate lists around for GPU and CPU demanding games. Try something like Need for Speed Underground 2, you might run into problems.
As for resolutions, they’re displayed in PCSX2 standalone itself. There was a thread on their github regarding CRT support where it was said that some resampling to 640x480 is going on, so it’s probably not pixel perfect. But I guess it’s not that bad, I haven’t done much testing with 2D games, where this would mostly matter.
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The usable screen is pretty small so I guess I didn’t notice that the resolution was displayed there.
I’m very confused. I think I just discovered that my TV is actually NTSC. This is it displaying a PAL game. "WipEout\ Fusion\ (Europe)\ (En,Fr,De,Es,It).iso "
480 “NTSC” :
Setting the mode to PAL makes, the moving image appears weirdly jittery. I also measured the aspect ratio. It’s actually 4:3.
“Wrong” mode 480 “PAL” :
These are the modelines I’m using:
Modeline "640x480PAL" 13.320 640 672 734 852 480 540 545 625 interlace -hsync -vsync
Modeline "640x480NTSC" 13.400 640 672 734 852 480 488 493 525 interlace -hsync -vsync
Please forgive my absolutely unhinged retardation. I’m a dumb z00mer and the last time I touched a CRT before I fished these TVs out the dumpster, propably wasn’t even at middle school age.
*First two pictures
Why do those two modes PAL - NTSC , which both have the same resolution of 640x480 appear different on the screen? -
Why does the PAL game appear “jittery” when displaying it on a PAL mode?
I have no idea about the jitter, maybe some parameters are not quite right in the modeline or something with the hardware.
As for resolutions appearing differently, this too, depends on the parameters of the modeline 
640x480 are the active pixels. But the rest of the vertical pixels are different. Ergo the borders differ. This also applies in the horizontal direction. You can leave the first 640 pixels, but then change the other numbers to shrink (or expand if necessary).
There is also typically overscan. TVs typically cut some lines off by default, so you don’t see the full 240/480 lines in 60 Hz (NTSC). It’s possible to change it to some extent depending on TV via service menu etc.
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Thanks for the explanations again. But I’m still quite confused. First. Is it normal for a european TVs to support NTSC? (It’s an early 2000s CRT, so quite late to the game I guess) And secondly, how could I adjust the “640x480NTSC” modeline to have a less vertically stretched image?
Modeline "640x480PAL" 13.320 640 672 734 852 480 540 545 625 interlace -hsync -vsync
Modeline "640x480NTSC" 13.400 640 672 734 852 480 488 493 525 interlace -hsync -vsync60 Hz support and NTSC support are actually two different things. Most Euro TVs should have 60 Hz support by the 90s, but NTSC support may be lacking on lower-end, smaller TVs. Lack of NTSC support means you wouldn’t get color over composite and s-video, but you do get it over RGB regardless.
As for picture adjustments, from what I found, apparently the Funai could have a 11ak30 chassis. There are some pdfs around that suggest you can do picture adjustments by entering the main menu and then pressing digits 4,7,2, and 5.
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Hmm. I don’t have the remote unfortunately, so I can’t make those adjustments.
CRTSwitch is a new implementation and does not require modeling, all you need to do is activate it and it will take the resolution declared by the core and make the adjustments automatically. Do you need the modelines for something special?
Yes, CRT switchmode is great, but the PS2 core doesn’t work properly unfortunately.