FF7 and FF8 PCSX RELOADED CONFIGURATION HELP

Omnislash

hello everyone. I am by no means a noob at emulators and have been doing this for a long time now. AT least for pc that is. I now have a macbook pro 17inch 2.6ghz 8gig ram specs to play these rpgs. I got this to work as well. I load these fine , they work fine, everything seems good. But back when I had a pc I was able to really speed up teh game in ff7 by holding something down on the keyboard so it speeds up TRAINING modes and saved many hours of work. MY question is Does anyone know how to exactly set the settings so that the speed of both games actually can be sped up in PCSX reloaded? and also WHERE can i Download the best plugins in terms of graphics for pcsx reloaded mac version because I know for a fact its to do with the gpu settings. I also heard of speed hacks out there and frame buffer is involved as well but PCSX settings are very simple. But since i am a mac user now I can say I am sort of new and unsure of what gpu plugins would suit best. ANY help would be appreciated THANKS!

speedofmac

Hi Steven,

The PCSX-Reloaded graphics plugin isn't as advanced as the common PS1 graphics plugins for Windows. Running the Windows version of PCSX-Reloaded using Wine (see http://speedofmac.com/pcsx_wine1.html) should give you the ability to remove the frame limit. When you're running a game, just press fn+delete then fn+left arrow until the FL box is empty (you'll see what I mean), then press fn+left arrow twice to revert to the default 60fps. I can get around 400fps on my 13" MacBook Pro, so that this speed things up considerably for you!

I found this tip at http://forums.ngemu.com/generic-epsxe-queries/43147-fast-forward.html.

Omnislash

hey thanks. Which button on the keyboard is Fn i forgot. I have a macbook but a pc keybaord haha. And do I HAVE to install wine to make it work? or will this fn trick work with just what i am doinog now.

speedofmac

A pc keyboard? I didn't guess that! Use the delete key and the home key instead of the function combinations. This is a Pete's plugin feature, so it isn't available on the Mac version. If someone else knows another way, it'd be good to hear. Otherwise, installing Wine isn't a huge bother: http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/wine/

Omnislash

so Fn + either home or End? and what will appear on the screen. I have used the Fn on this keyboard before i just gotta find it lol. 400fps is damn fast.

speedofmac

Steven Lee wrote:

so Fn + either home or End? and what will appear on the screen. I have used the Fn on this keyboard before i just gotta find it lol. 400fps is damn fast.

Nah, if you have a Windows keyboard, you just need to press delete (not backspace) and then home. Don't worry about the fn key. Fn+delete on an OS X keyboard is the same as Delete on a Windows keyboard, and fn+left arrow is the same as Home.

Here's a screenshot of what shows up when you press Delete (I've also already disabled frame limiting):

When you press Home, the leftmost box labelled FL (Frame Limit) will change colour. When it's full (green) then frame limiting is on, keeping the game speed at 60 frames/second. Press Home until the box is empty, and then it will run as fast as its little heart desires. For me, it was going 392.5 fps--over six times faster.

I hope this helps!

Squishy Tia

I've got a couple questions for ya Speed.

First, I'm currently playing FF7 via PCSX-R on my Mac Pro (1,1 model, 2.66 GHz Xeons, 7 GB RAM, HD3870), and every once in a while, seemingly randomly, the emulation just flat out stops for about 1/4th of a second out of the blue, then just continues on its merry way. It's really annoying if it happens during battle, but not a killer elsewhere. It also is guaranteed to happen whenever the game accesses any cutscenes/FMV from the ISO (I run the ISO from my HD, and the HD has been recently defragged to help with the 1.2 million files on my HD thanks to the Dev Tools being installed), or whenever I initiate a save to the memcard. I can see a slowdown on occasion if I were running the game from my DVD drive, which is a Pioneer A018 drive that goes to sleep fairly rapidly and loves to spin up in an unusually slow manner (and it's new!), but from a defragged HD where the ISO is one contiguous file, shouldn't there not be this issue? Seems like I/O accesses of any kind make PCSX-R stutter momentarily.

Second, is there any internal VSync option I could toggle on? There's a "broken" scanline that wiggles its way down my screen continuously in a loop during emulation that looks suspiciously like screen tearing. This one is distracting because it never ends, and you can readily tell there's a break in the image and that break moves down and down until it cycles back up to the top like pacmac on the old Atari 2600. :)

I'm not looking for must have fixes - I'm just curious what causes #1, and if there's any internal way to activate Vsync for #2.

Squishy Tia

Looks like I've found the culprit for the stutters in PCSX-R. It is indeed HD I/O that causes it. I had seemingly random stutters, which apparently occured anytime the game had to read from the "disc" (the ISO on the HD). Creating a RAM Disk and sticking the ISO in there killed the stutters completely except for when creating save states and/or saving to memcard (neither of which is an issue).

I'd still love to find a way to enable VSync. With that enabled, the screen tearing would end and games would look sweeeeeeeeeet using my Samsung's AMP (120 Hz mode). FF7 looks so much nicer when it appears to run silky smooth than its native ≤30 FPS rate. :)