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Full Version: Why are some games easier to emulate?
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So, I've noticed this with a few games. The Final Fantasies, Kingdom Hearts, Killzones and Resident Evils all play fine.

But why is it that some of the lesser known games such as Raw Danger, Disastor Report, and a lot of the other lesser known ones seem to struggle?

For example, I can run FF XII at x4 native just fine, but I seem to have trouble with Raw Danger even on x2 native.
No one game uses the same game engine no one game use the same amount resources not every game is programmer effectively some were programed baddly other good on the ps2, some games have compatibility bug in pcsx2 as such every game runs differently.

Im sure there is technical explain more in depth to this, but the above about covers it in very simple way
(12-14-2013, 06:55 AM)xenoriddley Wrote: [ -> ]So, I've noticed this with a few games. The Final Fantasies, Kingdom Hearts, Killzones and Resident Evils all play fine.

But why is it that some of the lesser known games such as Raw Danger, Disastor Report, and a lot of the other lesser known ones seem to struggle?

For example, I can run FF XII at x4 native just fine, but I seem to have trouble with Raw Danger even on x2 native.
Different games have different programming. If the games uses the hardware in a weird way it can bump up the requirements. If you have a beefy physics engine or if the gfx part of your game engine is hard to run then well the same thing is going to happen on the emulator. It could also be that the emulator isn't as accurate as it needs to be in order to get a good framerates. There is a lot of things that make a game demanding.
Many different factors overall.

How well was this game coded? How demanding was this game, in spite of the coding? How much of the PS2's resources did it actually use? What's going on in this game at this section? Etc. etc. It varies from game to game. You'll see some ugly games that don't look impressive at all that run like garbage, either because they were coded like crap or the emulator itself doesn't have high accuracy with that game yet. Some games ran like crap on the original system, thus they will run like crap on the emu.

Then many different games used different engines, which utilized the PS2's resources in different ways... And some devs used various "tricks" and "work-arounds" which the end user would never notice under normal gameplay to achieve certain things. Games notable for this would be the Ratchet & Clank series, and the Jak series. Ran just fine on the PS2, but are really hard to emulate despite having simplistic cartoony graphics. The devs themselves stated in interviews various times that they used various tricks to achieve the smooth framerates constantly back then, which is why sometimes the people who ported the games to the PS3 and Vita ran into issues whilst porting them.

Then there are other games which were ported from other platforms to the PS2, which were lazy ports and thus ran like crap. Games like this were Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories/Vice City Stories, for example. Original PSP games ran okay, PS2 versions ran like crap, they run like crap in the emu. Liberty City Stories uses mostly the same exact map as the one from Grand Theft Auto III, yet GTA III is 10x easier to emulate at fullspeed than it.
The same as asking why PC games have different minimal requirements. The difference is the minimal requirement is always the same hardware.

What this mean is the games weight differently on PS2 also although this most of times is transparent to the user.

On the other hand there are external factors as well, for example the emulator is optimized to deal with certain code sequences and loses efficiency when the "standard" is not followed, in extreme cases those optmizations might become a hindrance themselves when the game's logic is designed to take advantage of specific (read obscure) PS2 hardware features so to gain the last drop of performance so that game can run without much of lag on PS2 itself... what might mean extra and heavy load for the emulation.

Edit: This last case is where many times in the past (maybe today as well), "patched" emulator's versions where attempted by 3rd parts so to run specific game better. The problem being such patches break the emulation of other games badly when work at all. Of course the purpose of PCSX2 is not to emulate specific game but to try and run most PS2 games over there.
If the game run well in ps2 then it will also run well on pcsx2. But if the emu coding or comptblity with this specific game is well.
Oh,one more thing sys requirmnt matters here.