on the ipod touch 5 I run PSX ReArmed and it runs it flawlessly. But on my PC it doesn’t seem like that emulator is an option? So I guess I use Mednafen and in Lunar Silver Star Story the opening scene gets static sounds every few seconds. What could be causing it and is PSCX ReArmed available for PC also?
never mind, see PCSX isn’t working well with Windows. That’s weird though a puny little ipod touch works perfectly. Hopefully this can be sorted out eventually.
Any guesses as to the static in the audio/video playback?
Audio crackles usually occur because you’re not hitting full speed. PCSX-ReARMed is available for PC, but it’s not much faster because the fast renderer is ARM-only (hence the name “ReARMed”).
Thanks. Why is the IOS version just so much more efficient? I’m just surprsied I’m having problems with just a PSX emulator.
It’s because the ARM renderer is written to utilize ARM’s NEON SIMD extensions (roughly equivalent to x86/64’s SSE extensions). Using SSE/NEON speeds up certain very specific functions by up to like 1000x.
While an SSE-specific version could likely be written, it’s a lot of work and no one has done it. Instead, the renderers for PCSX-ReARMed on x86 and for mednafen-psx are both written in regular ol’ C, which makes them more portable (i.e., works anywhere there’s a C compiler, regardless of CPU architecture) but obviously less performant.
Furthermore, these C implementations are software-rendered, while you may be more familiar with hardware-renderers, like what you’d find in PCSX-r, ePSXe, etc. These can be quite fast and enable some things like internal upscaling to arbitrary resolutions, but they are GPU/driver dependent in their behavior and support, and they are also handled by libretro differently (there are hardware-rendered libretro cores, such as mupen and ppsspp, but software rendering is generally preferred for a variety of reasons).
what specs would you need to run the psx emulator in RetroArch flawlessly?
From Mednafen PSX’s documentation: “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.”
I’ve had issues with Windows power settings throttling RetroArch and causing crackles sometimes. You can try going into your control panel, Power Options and changing the plan from Balanced to High Performance and see if that helps any.
looks like it’s already set there. I have a 2.8gig not sure how many cores since I’m not expert level but it does say AMD Phenom II x4 830. It’s 64 bit, I’m probably just need a little more power. Might get a new one some day if this playing on the TV thing is really fun. Does having a better graphics card help performance or should I just focus on upping the processor?
Teremei: GPU only helps with shaders. CPU helps with emulation speed.
If you haven’t already, try enabling the cd caching option in the mednafen core options. I had similar crackling issues until doing that with the PSX core so it might not help.
I selected medefen, but went to core options in the main menu and it said no options available.
core options are only available once you load a game
how do you get back out to the menu while the game is loaded? ESC completely exits the program.
I can’t test right now, but I think it was F1.
Yep got it thanks. Didn’t improve it. I didn’t think I’d have to get a new computer to run PSX games but there ya go :).