Not sure where this subject will lead, but meh, I'll ask anyway.

I noticed that homebrew games are losing compatibility with every new release and now adays, most commercial games do something other than give us a black screen. Why is that? Since the demos are open source and most of the code is pretty much predictable along side of the explosive commercial game progress, I'd assume most of those demos would work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining or anything like that, it's just that when working on my plugin, it's easier to test against homebrew and other open source demos to fix issues and find bugs rather than closed source commercial games. This might not sound like the brightest thing to do, but because of this, I've been testing my plugin on an old version of PCSX2 (0.81) so I can pick up where I left off before moving forward so I can release it this time. Besides that, I don't have many commercial games with me atm, so homebrew and a small handful of discs is all I have. So I'm just using what I have to work with for now.

Shogun.

can you list the homebrew games you're talking about, and which revision you're using that they work in.
we don't test homebrew as much as commercial games; and our users that report bugs mainly play commercial games so we don't really get much notice when we break homebrew stuff.

obviously we aren't trying to break homebrew games.
one of the reasons they may not work however, is because homebrew apps usually do odd stuff that is not reliable enough or good practice to do in real commercial games where you want guaranteed stability.
commercial games will have more robust code that isn't as sensitive (of course we also find that a variety of commercial games do evil stuff too).

if we can get some regression testing on the homebrew games to find the revision that broke them, then perhaps we can get them working again.
i assume you're using very old builds of pcsx2 though, so it seems like it will take a while to narrow down the revision.
there have been some major pcsx2 revisions in the last 2 years which hopefully aren't the ones that broke the homebrew you're talking about; because its really a ***** pain to find the problem when you're dealing with major changes.

I can't remember them all off of the top of my head, but I noticed that even the tutorials written by Tony Saveski were broken. I'll try to make a list of what I've had problems with ASAP. I think the regression began around the time you joined the team, but I do remember most of these demos working fine in 0.9.0 and maybe a few later releases. I still have a copy of 0.8.1 (SSE2) that I use to test for the reasons stated above, but you won't have to start from that version.

0.9.0 and 0.8.1 are really old lol.
Hopefully they at least run on 0.9.4 which is around the time pcsx2-playground started

I look at homebrew a lot for new approaches to fixing problems in PCSX2.
We found that most homebrew uses broken versions of the ps2sdk.
They work on a real PS2 by chance, for example the 64bit counters writes that are not
meant to work on a PS2 but do so anyway, at least on many consoles (on newer ones they
are unmapped, as intended).

Then another bad thing is their way to display graphics.
They often don't follow the rules for GIF packets or XGKick and it's hard to emulate the
PS2 here while also keeping up speed for proper games.

Old PCSX2 versions may work better for some (but not others!) homebrew apps because
back then the PS2 wasn't as well understood and PCSX2 was filled with bad code based
on bad homebrew. That was the best way to develop it afterall.

Edit:
That said, the ps2sdk guys did fix their code over time.
Try current homebrew and you'll find that it works just fine (well, most of it ).

(12-13-2011 02:22 PM)rama Wrote:  Try current homebrew and you'll find that it works just fine (well, most of it ).

yep it does work. atleast "4 edges" and "tabula rasa". but do you know what's wrong with "aura for laura". it never did. I'd like to see that perform.

A4L works when you set GSdx to software rendering.
It hangs in that one scene because the depth buffer download it tries to do fails with GSdx hw rendering.
Don't ask how we found that out though

ahh. great thx. that's cool.

and. actually it's just the initialisations of the voxel cubes scenes that f*ck up. else. even that runs fluid in hardware if you know when you have to switch before the transition.