Some things you guys need to change for this emulator to be successful

[thelasthallow]

ok well its just i remember reading that the PS2 has several things that the regular computer needs to emulate. so im just saying instead of having them all run on only 2 cores why not take advantage of the other 2 or more cores and spread out the work more? now i myself only have a dual core processor but what about the people who have quad core processors and wish "heay i wish it took advantage of my other 2 cores"

now when you say how many programs take advantage of quad core processors i say very little. but then i also say why not PCSX2? its defanetely one of those programs that would benefit from it

also to Zero29 i got the latest plugins for the graphics and tweaked the hell out of them. tryied all different settings speedhacks and CPU settings and yeah wen im looking at the ground yeah its 60+fps but when i look acrossed the map it starts blinking with black lines and then the Emulator dies.

This to
so what it all comes down to is there are so many ways you can get the program to run faster but it do sent seem you really want to even though it is probably the best move to make.

-where did you get that impression? any quotes of the devs proving this?
-i remember reading somewhere in the forum that someone said it would be to hard and complicated to make the emu threaded for a quad core so it would probably never happen.

and this
which is basically you saying: move your lazy a**es and get the d**n thing completed.

technically it will probably never be completed 100% but what i ment was that through the past 2 years it seems the emulator has not changed very much. the only real change i see is the patches. when i added the patches to get better compatibility (the latest patches) the games that didn't work so well worked better but still lagged due to the fact that my processor was being maxed out.

a good example is guitar hero 2. when up close to the characters and not showing the crowd the game playes like a charm. then when it zooms out and the crowd is in the camera the CPU Maxes out and the game laggs.

thats pretty mutch it. it just seems to me that the bottle neck is in the CPU area and not the graphics card area thats why i was talking about having the processing spread out over multiple cores.

also amendment 2222 ill give it a try and see if it works. but on pic 2 neither me nor my friend have the box on the very right and on pic 3 we dont have micro VU

[Larfin_Man]

Please tell me after all this, your at least running one of the later betas, not just the last stable release?

[thelasthallow]

im just running 0.9.6 becaus it was the only newest release to download. if there are others i can download i may think about getting them but im really just looking for the best compatibility

[Larfin_Man]

The latest beta versions pretty much always increase compatability, while also making games run faster. That's probably why you're getting such bad performance on SotC. Try the latest beta from here, then see how you go.
Using the installer I linked, it will install the necessary files to run PCSX2, but it may override the plugins. If it does, just go to the plugins section and get the latest GSdx.

[HULK2003]

you can get new gsdx here http://212.92.18.46/gsdx/index.php#GSdx

[zero29]

ok well its just i remember reading that the PS2 has several things that the regular computer needs to emulate. so im just saying instead of having them all run on only 2 cores why not take advantage of the other 2 or more cores and spread out the work more? now i myself only have a dual core processor but what about the people who have quad core processors and wish "heay i wish it took advantage of my other 2 cores"

and again you don't seem to understand the problem with that: all the threads running on different cores of your cpu have to be synchronised, which if done not properly would generate so much sync overhead, that the quadcore version would be slower than the dualcore version.

now when you say how many programs take advantage of quad core processors i say very little. but then i also say why not PCSX2? its defanetely one of those programs that would benefit from it

because pcsx2 does not execute the same simple task over and over again, so that you can just feed multiple cores at the same time with the same tasks to speed up things without any problems. it's no coincidence that bositman predicted a possible 20-30% speed gain with a quadcore version (if it really happens), the rest of the performance is lost, because the two new cores are idling or busy with the complex snychronisation between the 4 threads. pcsx2 scales not that easy with more cores like encoding or rendering.

also to Zero29 i got the latest plugins for the graphics and tweaked the hell out of them. tryied all different settings speedhacks and CPU settings and yeah wen im looking at the ground yeah its 60+fps but when i look acrossed the map it starts blinking with black lines and then the Emulator dies.

then why didn't you open a thread to get help with your config? other users are capable of that instead of blaming the emulator alone for their performance. often the solution to a problem is just one download or one changed setting away.

This to
so what it all comes down to is there are so many ways you can get the program to run faster but it do sent seem you really want to even though it is probably the best move to make.

-where did you get that impression? any quotes of the devs proving this?
-i remember reading somewhere in the forum that someone said it would be to hard and complicated to make the emu threaded for a quad core so it would probably never happen.

yeah, but the devs try anyway. some years ago noone would have thought that it is possible to emulate the ps2 at all, and where are we now?

and this
which is basically you saying: move your lazy a**es and get the d**n thing completed.

technically it will probably never be completed 100% but what i ment was that through the past 2 years it seems the emulator has not changed very much. the only real change i see is the patches. when i added the patches to get better compatibility (the latest patches) the games that didn't work so well worked better but still lagged due to the fact that my processor was being maxed out.

well, i think if you would look into the code of pcsx2 during those 2 years, you would have a quite different view about that, especially if you would have participated in coding it (doesn't mean that i have, but i know what it's like to look at walls of code for hours and making 1000s of test runs, and the best thing is that you often do your job best if the client doesn't even notice your changes, cause users tend to notice bugs but not features ).

a good example is guitar hero 2. when up close to the characters and not showing the crowd the game playes like a charm. then when it zooms out and the crowd is in the camera the CPU Maxes out and the game laggs.

thats pretty mutch it. it just seems to me that the bottle neck is in the CPU area and not the graphics card area thats why i was talking about having the processing spread out over multiple cores.

so your test with your specific hardware/pcsx2 config/game combination is enough to blame the emulator for being too slow in general, although many other users report very good results with many games? and if the cpu usage shown in the title bar maxes out it usually means that your gpu is the bottleneck. and one of the many helpful users of this forum would have been able to tell you that, if you would have tried to get help for your config and specific game first.

also amendment 2222 ill give it a try and see if it works. but on pic 2 neither me nor my friend have the box on the very right and on pic 3 we dont have micro VU

they were added in newer beta revisions and can make a huge difference in speed and compatibility. but if you want to enable microvu (can be slower), you should probably enable it for both vus (no idea why amendment only uses it for one of the vus). it would also help to know what graphics card you got (and the settings of your gsdx), as it alone can make the difference between playability and slideshow. not that it could be the only reason for your laggy gameplay, though.

[dotHack]

Without offense, I think you should learn to configure your emulator better. I don't know what your specs are (but if you have an athlon xp like your avatar says, then it will be slow... very very slow indeed, like having a pentium 4 up to 3.6, it won't be fast on pcsx2) but you and your friend should really read more in this forum and "learn" to configure your emulators better to play those games, seeing as I can play them on a 2.4Ghz processor, on a laptop.

Really. Search for information in the forums and you'll play SotC, unless you have an Athlon XP or Pentium 4 in wich case "i don't know" what your speed will be but I think it'll be slow anyways...

Tell your friend if with 2 years of theory he would dare to start the migration of the emu to 4 cores =P the code is there and waiting for him if he want's to give it a try and see some "real world" codding =P

P.S: As I said, no offense. Just configure the emulator and the plugins better, seriously.

[rama]

I'm getting the impression you think us lazy, and not wanting to go quadcore, or optimize more..
Well, this is entirely wrong! Guess what yours truly does like everyday? We're constantly trying to
make things faster here, on a level that goes way beyond "more multi threading might help".

As Refraction said, speed in games has gotten like 4 times faster over the YEARS of tweaks and additions.
All the performance critical parts of the code are recompiled, usually in the 5th or so revision of that recompiler.

Now, there is a few parts left we can (and will!) optimize yet, but we're talking about serious rewritings.
These don't come easy, we need to think them out, write the code, iron out the bugs, wonder why its slower than before, fix it, etc etc.
All that out of pure will to make this emulator even better, as a hobby.

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

This whole thread made me laugh.

Did you bother to read anything at all on these forums? There are tons of games running at full speed on a variety of systems, many of those that work well with upscaling so they can look sharper than when you play it on the PS2(which is the reason many of us use this program, and why we're willing to shell out for good hardware to do it).

It has been explained time and time again that recoding the emulator so that it uses more cores would require a huge overwrite for very little performance gain. They've relented somewhat by starting to experiment with threading the microVU, but as I understand it, this is about the only other component that would benefit in any measurable amount by being threaded.

Also, download PCSX2 0.9.4 sometime. That was many many generations back. Now try to play FFXII on it. I bet you'll find it's very sloooooooooow. Now use the 0.9.6 release. Should be damn near full playable, and without a lot of glitches. Grab the latest beta and latest GSDX, and then I bet you'll find the game is practically flawless and you can even bump up the internal resolution quite a bit.

So, yeah. The emulator has made huge leaps and bounds in the last two years. You're just obviously not observant enough to see it. Tell your friend who took a "2 year programming course" (probably for Java or something that has equally no insight into how this program is coded) that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that an emulation program is FAR different from a normal computer program.

Also, this little tidbit:

now i have read the someone said to take PCSX2 From Dual to quad would take major re writes of the code and things like that. but i say its worth it due to the fact that the hardware you need to buy is more than that of 1 brand new PS2 so whats the point of playing it on PC when its cheaper just to buy a system? i think it would be a grave mistake to not move to dual core systems as the increased cores would increase the emulator speed seeing as how so many things need to be processed at once.

I sure hope this doesn't mean that you are trying to use the emulator without owning your own PS2. This would be quite illegal.

[ChickenLiver]

This to
so what it all comes down to is there are so many ways you can get the program to run faster but it do sent seem you really want to even though it is probably the best move to make.

-where did you get that impression? any quotes of the devs proving this?
-i remember reading somewhere in the forum that someone said it would be to hard and complicated to make the emu threaded for a quad core so it would probably never happen.

and this
which is basically you saying: move your lazy a**es and get the d**n thing completed.

technically it will probably never be completed 100% but what i ment was that through the past 2 years it seems the emulator has not changed very much. the only real change i see is the patches. when i added the patches to get better compatibility (the latest patches) the games that didn't work so well worked better but still lagged due to the fact that my processor was being maxed out.

Honestly...Years of unpaid labor have gone into getting the emulator both functional and running as fast as it is, and changes continue to be made to PCSX2 on a daily basis, as a simple look at Google code would tell you. Calling people who have devoted so much time to it lazy (As you are basically doing) is incredibly hypocritical, seeing as you have spent absolutely none of your own time creating any freely available creative content that you've released on the web. Or providing free support for the aforementioned software.

Also, suggesting randomly throwing more cores at it will increase performance is pretty ignorant. There are literally dozens of posts discussing why this is incredibly complicated and takes both time and a careful design to get right. Rather than wasting people's times with a new post (Which actually decreases productivity, as refraction and rama wasted a minute or two replying to you), you could have searched and read one of those. Synchronization is the big issue. Emulated operations run at dramatically different speeds relative to each other on the PC than on the PS2, and having operations on different emulated parts of the PS2 that depend on each other run out of order is very, very bad, and the source of a large number of game-specific problems. These dependencies are generally due to shared memory, which is much more complicated than only sending data through a bus. That is, rather than having explicit op codes that pass data, they share random access memory.