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April 11th, 2004
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#1 (permalink) |
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Registered User
 Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Hamburg / Germany
Posts: 520
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FF9 OpenGL2 settings
Hi folks, some weeks ago i felt like playing FF9 again and yesterday i finished it with over 135 hours of gametime. I think i did nearly all possible sidequests (except aktually beating ozma, this guy really sucks balls -_- ) and maxed out most of my characters. Anyway i thought i might be able to give some tips for anyone trying to play it emulated for the first time. Here are my system specs: GFX: ATI Radeon 9800XT - ASUS CPU: AMD Barton 3000+ - 400MHZ MB: A7N8X-Deluxe - NForce2 RAM: 2x512MB Corsair CL2 - 400MHZ (DUAL-Channel Mode) First of all the game looks and plays freaking awesome with the recent ePSXe and plugins. No comparison to my first tries years ago. (Thank You Pete) ^_^ ePSXe 1.5.2 VS 1.6.0: Even after reading through the forum that multiple people recommended using 1.5.2 i thought i'd give 1.6.0 a try and so far it was ok. The only minor problem was that every so often the screen got distorted during the FMVs where 3D characters where mixed in the actual video. Besides that, everything ran nice and smooth. No crashes, no glitches,... nothing..... UNTIL: well it didnt crash through all those hours of leveling, exploring etc. and when i finally fought Kuja and the end-boss i though i could post my config in the forum and prove all those 1.6.0 haters wrong... but ... right at the beginning of the credits there is this video where 3D Zidane runs and jumps through the Lifa tree, chased by living roots. And that video was finally too much for poor little 1.6.0 . It crashed at the same point over and over again with every GFX-/CD-rom plugin i tried (beating the **** out of Kuja at 300FPS rocks! lol). So everyone with similar system specs like mine should probably use 1.5.2 for FF9 from the beginning if he wants to see the outro. Also noteworthy was that except for the end the game was rock-stable for me. In all the hours i only had a SINGLE crash. (during an ATM in Lindblum). And this one was caused by a faulty CD-Image. Remaking the image from my original discs solved it imediately. settings: Take a look at the attached image to see my settings. here some more info on what each setting does to the game. I'm not a pro though. This is all just my personal opinion. Resolution: it doesnt really matter wich resolution u choose. Everything from 640x480 and upwards is fine. I only chose 1024 for text-reading issues because i often played in windowed mode. "Keep PSX aspect ratio" is also a matter of taste. i like to keep it off because the black bars of my PAL version of the game tended to get filled up with background windows, wich was pretty annoying. Internal Resolutions: The higher the better. High X and Very High Y is max for me but i think some of the newer FX cards can do Very High X aswell. Framerate: Now this is why i prefer playing this game emulated! While in game u can switch the OSD on and off with the delete-key. And while its on u can simply press the end-key to cycle through 3 types of framerate limitations. Unlimited, auto-detect and the custom value u type in the FPS limit box. switching to unlimited is really useful if u want to level ur characters or make some money (fighting grand dragons at 200FPS rules  )Compatibility: These settings should all be maxed out if u dont want to miss anything. Too low values will "hide" the battle menu, make the swirls disappear, etc. Textures and Full Screen Filters: These settings where the most complicated to adjust. many Texture-settings produce unwanted side effects like black borders everywhere or garbled menus and text-boxes. In the end i chose to use the "normal" Extended setting for Texture Filtering and NO Hi-Res Textures at all. Instead i activated Screen Filtering and Shader effects to get everything smoothed out. Especially the menus and text. If u feel the menus are too blurry with these options u should just lower the level of the shader effect or deactivate it. EDIT: I'm using the "Pseudo Median" shader from Pete's Homepage. Misc Options: Not much to say about these. Be sure to activate the MDEC Filter and if u're using a GeForce u might have to enable the GF4 fix. No special game fixes are needed. Well thats all for now. I'm not sure if everyone likes the settings like this but i can asure any newbie that with system specs similar to mine and these settings the game will look and play awesome from beginning to end. And u wont encounter side-quest-impossible-making graphical glitches like in the older 3D-plugins (eg: missing airgarden shadows on worldmap) bai bai Hatman Last edited by Hatman; April 12th, 2004 at 02:30.. |
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April 11th, 2004
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#2 (permalink) |
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the only one you've ever SEEN
 Join Date: May 2003
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 21,978
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hey, very good analysis  2 quips however:what shaders are you using? the ARB ones change. i think with the 60.72 forceware i can use those.... also, why did you put OSD at 2? it works just fine for me at 1 Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.5 Author: Pete Bernert Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation GFX card: Stinger/emulated by GeForce FX 5600/AGP/SSE/3DNOW! (i think my starstorm drivers might be saying that...that's goddamnstrange) Resolution/Color: - 640x480 Window mode - Internal X resolution: 2 - Internal Y resolution: 2 - Keep psx aspect ratio: off - No render-to-texture: off - Filtering: 4 - Hi-Res textures: 0 ( i want to try stretching so the world map and outside things look good...i beat the whole game without trying it  )- TexWin pixel shader: off- VRam size: 256 MBytes Framerate: - FPS limitation: on - Frame skipping: off - FPS limit: Auto Compatibility: - Offscreen drawing: 1 - Framebuffer effects: 3 - Framebuffer uploads: 2 Misc: - Scanlines: off - Mdec filter: off - Screen filtering: on - Shader effects: 0/1 (i used to use some screen smoothing but it was kinda...meh. too blurry) - GF4/XP crash fix: off - Game fixes: off [00000002] anyway, i enjoyed reading your post...this is my main area of emulation expertise (FF9)
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Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994. |
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April 11th, 2004
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#3 (permalink) |
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Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Hamburg / Germany
Posts: 520
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oh yes ur right, i forgot the shader, i'm using the "Pseudo Median" shader from pete's homepage. NOT the luminance one. This one is less blurry than the "Simple Blur" and looks better IMHO. As for the offscreen drawing, i couldn't see much (if any) difference so i kept it enabled. But ur probably right that 1 is fine too. Its just easier to say "max it" and go to the next options.
Last edited by Hatman; April 12th, 2004 at 02:31.. |
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April 12th, 2004
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#4 (permalink) |
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the only one you've ever SEEN
Join Date: May 2003
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 21,978
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post some screenshots with that shader on. sounds interesting, i just may get it...the new nvidia drivers fully have GLSL so i think i can use it 
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Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994. |
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April 12th, 2004
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#7 (permalink) |
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Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Hamburg / Germany
Posts: 520
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this last 3 are with my settings. Filtering at 2 and the median shader without luminance at lvl 3. The character images in the menu are still a little blurry but the text is more clear i think.
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April 12th, 2004
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#8 (permalink) |
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the only one you've ever SEEN
Join Date: May 2003
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 21,978
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ugh, you have "keep PSX aspect ratio" on...that option sucks but yeah, that last shader looks good. i stopped using the smoothing shader because it was just too blurry
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Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994. |
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June 8th, 2004
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#9 (permalink) |
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Go-player 15 kyu ^^
 Join Date: May 2004
Location: Norway
Posts: 185
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If you don't have a super-pc like hatman you can try these settings: Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.75 Author: Pete Bernert Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation GFX card: GeForce FX 5200/AGP/SSE2 Resolution/Color: - 640x480 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing [32 Bit] - Keep psx aspect ratio: off Textures: - R8G8B8A8 - Filtering: 6 - Hi-Res textures: 0 - VRam size: 0 MBytes Framerate: - FPS limitation: on - Frame skipping: off - FPS limit: 50/60 Compatibility: - Offscreen drawing: 2 - Framebuffer texture: 0 - Framebuffer access: 4 - Alpha multipass: on - Mask bit: on - Advanced blending: on Misc: - Scanlines: off - Line mode: off - Unfiltered FB: off - 15 bit FB: off - Dithering: off - Screen smoothing: off - Screen cushion: off - Game fixes: on [00000200] |
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June 11th, 2004
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#10 (permalink) |
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Go-player 15 kyu ^^
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Norway
Posts: 185
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Do you never experience that the game stops for 0,2 secs or so when it loads from an ISO? Sometimes I use those settings and it goes well, but it takes 0,5 secs to get the battle swirl to start and load things in battle and the field... It's annoying!! |
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June 12th, 2004
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#12 (permalink) |
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Go-player 15 kyu ^^
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Norway
Posts: 185
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YAY!! I finally found some good settings on the OpenGL2. Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.5 Author: Pete Bernert Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation GFX card: GeForce FX 5200/AGP (ForceWare 56.72 or so) Resolution/Color: - 640x480 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing - Internal X resolution: 1 - Internal Y resolution: 1 - Keep psx aspect ratio: off - No render-to-texture: off - Filtering: 0 - Hi-Res textures: 0 - TexWin pixel shader: off - VRam size: 128 MBytes Framerate: - FPS limitation: on - Frame skipping: off - FPS limit: Auto Compatibility: - Offscreen drawing: 1 - Framebuffer effects: 3 - Framebuffer uploads: 2 Misc: - Scanlines: off - Mdec filter: on - Screen filtering: off - Shader effects: 0/1 - GF4/XP crash fix: off - Game fixes: off It works really well, I don't get slowdowns because I have turned the FU up! YAY!! But I really don't recommend hatman's settings, although it is damn good graphics, it runs really slow on most computers... 20-40 FPS in battle... Question to hatman: Which file type of the ISO are you using?? And are you serious running battles in 300 FPS?? Radeon 9800XT rocks! 
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June 12th, 2004
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#13 (permalink) |
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Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 90
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It's probably running so slow cuz your videocard is a GFFX 5200. They just suck :P The game would obviously run much faster on a Radeon 9800 XT and would allow for higher settings. My Radeon 9600 can handle his settings without a hitch. Then again, I prefer a lower setting for the Pseudo Median filter(I keep it at 1), high-res textures set to stretched, and filtering set to 4. Also, I've noticed that the MDEC filter can produce unwanted side effects in some games(most notably FFVII), I don't recall if FF9 is affected, but if it is then I would turn that off as well. |
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June 12th, 2004
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#15 (permalink) | |||
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the only one you've ever SEEN
Join Date: May 2003
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 21,978
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Quote:
). so what he doesnt get 300 FPS in battles? like he said:Quote:
Quote:
 (resulting in hot temps)
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Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994. |
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June 13th, 2004
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#17 (permalink) | ||
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Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 90
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Quote:
Quote:
The GFFX 5200 is highly limited to what it can do in OGL2, especially at the stock clock settings. I'm glad he was able to get it running satisfactorily by overclocking his card. |
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June 14th, 2004
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#18 (permalink) |
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the only one you've ever SEEN
Join Date: May 2003
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 21,978
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the only thing hardcore about hatman's settings are the shaders. you take that off, and the 5200 will totally handle it
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Dedicated to mediocrity and repetition since 1994. |
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June 14th, 2004
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#19 (permalink) |
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Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 90
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Maybe, but the fact remains that it can't handle his settings the way they are and thus the reason for my comment. Also, I have to question whether or not all GFFX 5200 cards could handle the high res textures. Some people seem to have problems. The GFFX 5200 wasn't made to be a powerhouse, it's labeled "budget card" for a reason. I suppose in that respect it doesn't suck, it serves its purpose well, as a budget card. I honestly never said that his settings were hardcore or anything of the like, just that the GFFX 5200 wasn't powerful enough to handle them "as-is". Obviously if you turn a few things off or crank a few settings down... Anyway, although I do slam the GFFX 5200 it does have a few strong points. One of the most obvious being the incredible amount of overclocking I've managed to do on mine. My stock speeds are 250/400 but I can easily get an overclock of 295/535(yes, a 135 MHz memory overclock!!). I can actually crank it up higher than that(about 305/560 is about the highest I can get it without glitches and still stable), but I don't like to push my luck. This is especially awesome when you consider that this is stock cooling and it's completely PASSIVE(ie no fan!!!). All being said and done, I'm beggin' ya man, stop twisting my words. I never even said half of the things you're accusing me of All I really meant by my comment was that the GFFX 5200 is a pretty wimpy GPU in comparison to other modern GPUs which may have trouble with some of the more advanced features of the OGL2 plugin(and yes, shaders, filters, and high-res textures are considered the "advanced features").
Last edited by seph29; June 14th, 2004 at 09:29.. |
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