PSX Emulation, is this the best we have?

Libretro Lakka
#1

Recently I started re-playing through some old classic Playstation games, starting with one of the all time classic RPGs of the era: Xenogears

With Mednafen I get some serious visual glitches in some scenes, sprites are often “sliced” vertically, some of the terrain disappears when the camera is rotated at a certain angle, and on the overworld the frame rate drops dramatically*.

PCSX is a bit better. The glitched scenes play without issue and the overworld runs at a solid 60 FPS, but the sprites are still sliced, the terrain sometimes disappears, and the audio is glitchy (its glitchy in Mednafen too but I think thats a frame rate issue)

*I understand that Mednafen is supposed to be more accurate, so the frame rate is going to suffer for that.

PCSX looks a little better than Mednafen, but even then its a far cry from how smooth it looks/runs on the PS1 Classic title (which is, afaik, just emulated too).

So my question is: is this the best we have for PSX emulation? A beefier system would probably help the frame rate of Mednafen out a bit, but wouldn’t really solve any of the other issues.

#2

Does Beetle-PSX have the sprite issues when using the software renderer? The hardware renderers still have a substantial number of bugs, though mostly minor ones.

2 Likes
#3

I second Hunter K. I’ve tried every which way but Sunday to get graphics that don’t glitch using the hardware renderer on Beetle PSX HW. I’ve yet to run into visual glitches using the software renderer. You can double the resolution if your CPU has enough grunt which cleans up the graphics really nice. My second Gen Core i3 can’t do it without dropping frames, but I’d much rather play PS1 in it’s native resolution with no glitches than in a higher res with glitches.

#4

Did you try Both Medafan PSX Cores?

#5

@DaveTheMan1985 There was only one core included with Lakka 2.1, the Beetle PSX HW.

@hunterk @OldsXCool When I turn on software mode for Mednafen/Beetle, I do notice that a few of the more minor visual glitches are gone, but I am not currently in an area that exhibits the other glitches I mentioned so I have to wait a bit to check those out. I do know that with software mode on, that some 3d geometry is…jiggly like Jello. Thats the best term I can use to describe it.

An oddity that I noticed though is that the PCSX core is named/labeled as PSX ReARMed but this is an x86 box.

1 Like
#6

The x86/x64 versions of Lakka can run the arm versions of cores. Strange, I know that shouldn’t be the case either. shrugs

#7

PCSX-ReARMed has a generic C path that works on x86/64 but it’s not very good. It’s buggier and not as fast as the ARM-optimized path.

As for the jiggly geometry, if you’re describing what I suspect, that was a natural characteristic of the PS1 hardware, which lacked true depth precision. The hardware renderers can take advantage of a new development called PGXP that fixes a lot of those issues and makes the geometry more stable.

#8

Which is why I usually stick with Beetle for PSX emulation on the Brix. thumbs up