With just seeing what is Happening with Duckstation with the Licensing and I know that RA uses a Fork of Duckstation in Swanstation.
1 of the big issues brought up was how he does not want to Fork Duckstation for RA and other Programs and Software and Devices
So I was wondering as don’t know how to Check It IF Swanstation still get Updated or not and also How to Check and Future of Swanstation Core?
I don’t know if there is a better way of looking this up, but at least you can fallback to the source code commit messages:
You don’t need to be a programmer to get an idea when and what type of changes were made recently. Date and a short description are available.
It will not get further updates based on upstream Duckstation, since they’re switching to a proprietary, no-derivatives license. No one who works with open-source PS1 emulation can even look at this sort of source-available code without putting their own project at risk.
After taking so much … inspiration … from mednafen and beetle-psx, this is a disappointing turn of events, to say the least.
In other industries, a switch to a restrictive license is usually followed by a mass exodus to the most recent still-open fork, but I don’t suspect that will happen here since most emu users and scenesters don’t actually care about open source as a philosophy and just want to play teh rawmz.
Most users are completely oblivious to everything surrounding it: drama, licenses, technical issues… All they know is that there’s something called emulators and, supposedly, they let you play old games for free and… eww! Why don’t those graphics look like my PS5? Did people really play like that? Oh, wait! This YouTuber said you can, like, “upscale” the graphics, I think. For real. And there’s this DuckStation thing that does it. Bussing.
That sums the current zeitgeist. Personally, I don’t think it deserves any special attention. After all, RetroArch serves another crowd. I know it’s a bit tiresome having people coming here and there, asking the same questions over and over, but they usually don’t know any better and think that’s just how every project is. RetroArch, for as good as it is, still has trouble clearly stating its usecase, so many users mistaken it for a collection of every single emulator around.
Yes it’s a Huge Shame.
I am not a Fan of Steznek.
He is a Good Developer but his Stance makes him look bad.
Lacks People Skills
I can see stopping people using it for Comercial Reasons but not for Free and Open Source
Could he Technically ask to take Swanstation Core down now?
Not really, because Swanstation has the license of GPL before he made changes in Duckstation. Also it’s branding is Swanstation by Libretro, not Duckstation. Technically he could “ask” to take it down, but there is not legal ground to it. At least from my understanding.
Guess in Worse Case Scenario there still the Medafan/Beetle PS1 Cores which are very good cores as well
PSC ReArmed is also a Good PS1 Core
I remember you couldn’t even play a simple game like Captain Commando on DuckStation (fully updated standalone), whereas Beetle PSX never had this issue. I don’t know if DuckStation was fixed by now, but there’s this misconception that it’s the “better” emulator. It’s not. It’s the “graphical enhancement” emulator, which is its claim to fame and main focus of development.
It ran Monkey Hero for a long time before Beetle was updated to support that game. I don’t know if either is 100% compatible with the library, but both are pretty up there. Personally, I really like how Swan’s core options are laid out. Beetle’s were more messy last time I looked at them.
You can enable Dualshock globally in Swan and it doesn’t mess up certain games that didn’t support analog, like SOTN. You do have to manually enable analog for some games that support it, but don’t enable it themselves, like Crash 2 though. You can force it on with a game specific core option for those, or just press the analog enable combo every time you launch that game.
Also, SwanStation is great for native res emulation, since it also has a software renderer. It’s based on Mednafen’s just like Beetle’s. When using software renderers, I haven’t found an instance yet where there was a noticeable difference visually or audibly between the two. So I disagree that it’s only good for graphical enhancements.
Since Swan has better options and is faster than Beetle (great for fast forwarding 10x through loading screens), it just seems better all around to me. Though I would be interested to see any comparisons that showed accuracy or compatibility differences.
Two points:
You can enable DualShock globally in Beetle PSX, but it must be done inside the controls submenu, as it’s the libretro usual. Just save a core preset afterwards.
Swanstation has some rendering quirks that messes with some crt shaders (mostly scanline gaps and mask evenness), especially at native res, and even when using the software renderer. That’s really bad, as playing PS1 games at native res without a crt shader is pretty rough. I have no idea if current Duckstation still have this issue.
Yes, but I think it force enables analogs, which breaks some games like SOTN. At least I remember using the default controller as the global and only setting DualShock for games I knew had analog support when I was using Beetle. SwanStation doesn’t force analog on unless you enable a core option for it, so setting DualShock as your global controller doesn’t break anything.
Any idea which ones? crt-hyllian looks fine to me with the software renderer, unless I’m missing something:
About Beetle PSX, you can change if the core forces analog or not by default, or change that behavior on the fly with a button combination (I think it’s L1+R1+select).
For the shaders, I’ll test them later to make sure I’m not speaking nonsense, then I’ll tell you.
That’s good, I remember seeing some commits in Beetle not too long ago that changed how analog on/off worked.
Done the testing. Disregard what I said, I didn’t notice any major issues with the software renderer. Sorry. I didn’t keep up with the updates. The hardware renderer still leaves to be desired though, as it blooms out the scanline gaps, perhaps that’s from where the weirdness kicks in. There’s actually a small difference between Swanstation and Beetle about how they handle shaders, but, as long as you’re using the software renderer, then it’s so tiny and insignificant that it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I feel satisfied that Swanstation reached a point to provide a proper native-resolution experience, as having other options never hurts.
Options are always good to have
I have not really notice much but not really tried it and I don’t use Shaders
I heard about Captain Commando having issues with SwanStation and tested it myself. It does have graphical issues in Swan with software rendering that aren’t there in Beetle PSX. So there may be more merit to Beetle being more accurate than Swan that I thought.
Even the latest DuckStation stand alone still has the boss sprite glitch in the software renderer, but doesn’t have the bar on the right side like SwanStation.
SwanStation:
Beetle PSX:
DuckStation:
I find it weird, since even PCSX ReARMed doesn’t have this issue, and that core is focused on speed, thus having many built-in hacks.
I found a post saying that it’s CD timing related (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/261925). Too bad the issue tracker the post links to for DuckStation was removed years ago.
Just to clarify since I was testing Beetle, you need to enable “DualShock Analog Mode Toggle” if you want to use DualShock as the core’s default controller type. Crash 1 wouldn’t accept any input until I turned that on.
Another thing I prefer about SwanStation is that you can turn off the annoying messages that always pop up in the bottom left corner. Beetle notifies you about the DualShock analog mode and sometimes bad sectors. I don’t need to see that every time I boot a game.
Another thing I prefer about SwanStation is that you can turn off the annoying messages that always pop up in the bottom left corner. Beetle notifies you about the DualShock analog mode and sometimes bad sectors. I don’t need to see that every time I boot a game.
This can be disabled by simply adding this line to either beetle.cfg or the game’s own cfg:
video_font_enable = “false”
It will disable all on-screen display messages though.
