Hello, I just started to use Retroarch and am really impressed!
I have a question that I can’t find an answer for.
Is it possible to increase the resolution that the 3d polygons are rendered at?
Everything is working fine, it just looks really blurry/ low res. I know the PS1 originally did not run at a high res, but my visuals don’t look as nice as the screen shots.
Thanks
I am on a Nexus 7.
As of right now, it’s not possible. If you want hi-res 3D PS1 graphics, you’ll have to look toward the payware alternatives on Android.
Hi,
I couldn’t help but noticing the nick - you don’t happen to be related to the guy who once did a bunch of PS3 emu ports, do you?
If so, good to see you here as well :).
Regarding PS1/PCSX ReARMed - Exophase’s NEON GPU plugin is very fast and very accurate (and it’s the best out there right now so far open source-wise), but it wasn’t really meant to ‘enhance’ graphics.
One thing that I will throw in for perhaps 0.9.9 is a special ‘filter 2x’ mode (as a core option) that the original PCSX ReARMed also has with the NEON GPU plugin - this will be more taxing on your CPU (by far) but should give you a 2x upscaled image with either Eagle or some other 2x scaling filter applied.
Basically, the ‘enhancements’ that the HLE GPU-accelerated plugins provide can cause these ugly ‘cardboard cutout’ lines to appear near sprites and they most often certainly never look right unless you are prepared to do a lot of tweaking. With software-rendered graphics you really don’t have all those problems and you don’t have to enable a whole series of ‘graphics hacks’ to get one particular game to look even remotely ‘accurate’.
Not to mention that a lot of games in the PS1 era had pre-rendered 2D backgrounds and those always stick out like a sore thumb with GPU-accelerated plugins - and the polygon models were really low in poly count anyway so the ‘graphics’ advantage of running it at a higher resolution with anti-aliasing enabled is kinda questionable since it makes the awful detail in those early 3D models even more apparent.
I have a similar opinion about N64 games - everytime I’m on top of the Bobomb Mountain in Mario 64 with one of the N64 PC emus, you can always see Mario with certain facial features completely gone because the engine has opted for a ‘LOD’ (Mario is far away from the camera in this scene) model that it thought wouldn’t be noticeable on a CRT screen with a 320x240 resolution (but it does on a PC with a 1024x768 or higher resolution - and it is quite galling). Basically put, PS1/N64 are just not ripe targets for ‘graphics enhancements’ like this - PS2 and later certainly is, PS1/N64 I believe to be ‘too primitive’ by comparison.
So basically - I think software rendering is the way to go for PS1 - it has never looked right before with either ePSxe or any other closed-source, PS Emu Pro-compatible plugin system-based emulator - it has always been a hackfest, created all sorts of visual bugs and these days with pixel shaders - there are a lot of ways to enhance the visuals that doesn’t involve going down this direction. I know Android GPUs aren’t too hot in the shader department yet, but that will take care of itself over time.
Black lines around sprites on the HLE plugins tends to be a side-effect of texture filtering, which as we know the PS1 was not actually capable of. Even when it doesn’t do that, I find it just looks shoddy, so I never enable it.
As for the 3D enhancements, well, indeed your mileage may vary, but I find there are games that do benefit from it, particularly fully 3D games like Crash and Vagrant Story. I completely agree when it comes to games that mix 2D and 3D like the Final Fantasies, however. Enhancing 3D elements while 2D remains unchanged results in a jarring contrast. And there is indeed the issue of glitches and bugs as well.
Thanks for all the good info.
I have played around with Vagrant Story and Xenogears, and they look pretty much how I remember them, but Final Fantasy 7 looks horrible for some reason. After some testing, it hit me why I may think it looks horrible. I played it on the computer before I got a PS1. So it’s been over ten years since I played either version of FF7.
As for how well and accurately the emulation is, RetroArch is by far the best. It’s a pity Google Play does not rank it higher when you search for PS1 Emulation.
Thanks for all the help and keep up the good work! It’s not everyday that you find a free android app that is as solid as this.
As for user name, I just got it from watching Futurama.
Ah.
Well, the ratings are probably dragged down by the 70 or so users who didn’t like the frontend UI or couldn’t get a ROM running at initial startup. That and we are not willing to add some of the features they want that would adversely affect performance. They think their ‘ratings’ can act as a bargaining tool - ie. ‘I give you 3 stars, I’ll give you another one if you fix [this little thing I want]’ and we don’t really respond to that kind of stuff - we are not putting out a ‘product’ but a labor of love and feature requests are something we have to agree with in the first place for us to implement them.
Texture filtering PSX games is a bad terrible idea and nobody should ever do it (with the key exception of games that retain very little detail in their textures to begin with, in which case this usually isn’t an issue).
Personally, the biggest thing I like about hardware-accelerated plugins is that they fix wonky geometry that a huge number of PSX games suffer from when software-rendered. Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this. So are the battle stages in Final Fantasy IX.
Excuse me if I sound dumb, but I haven’t understood why using texture filtering is bad ? For example in a 3D racing game without using shaders but only Biliniear filter ?
Wow, After the last update the PSone core options are friggin amazing. Thanks for the awesome app.