30fps NTSC games question

[vladeck]

I have rather simple question:

NTSC games like God of War and Shadow of Colossus are programmed at 30fps (in-game), but the menus and FMV are at 60fps. If I run GOW at 30fps NTSC settings and 1680x1050, with NO speed hack enabled - it is butter smooth, with EE about 60% max (AMD PII 955BE, 4GB DDR3 1600MHz, Sapphire 4890 Toxic). But, when it comes a time to play FMV or go to menus, it is slow-mo... Is it possible to set 30fps for in-game and 60fps for FMV (I can bear slow-mo in menus)?

Thanks

[patrickdinh]

actually, God of War (1 and 2) runs at 60fps in-game, 30fps for FMVs --- and in my experience, speedhacks should be able to pull off what you're asking for (at least with GoW)

[Bositman]

NTSC games like God of War and Shadow of Colossus are programmed at 30fps (in-game)

No they aren't. Full speed is 60fps constantly for all NTSC games, your CPU just can't take the load and pull off those FPS (obviously it can at menus since there is no 3D...)

[Shadow Lady]

The games are programmed at 60FPS, what they have is an internal frameskip that acts as 30FPS and that's what Vu cycle stealing speedhack takes advantage of... as far as I remember

[Mazzieh]

How should I set frame skipping options to get 30 fps instead of 60? I've searched the forums but I seem to can't find any explanation about relation between frames to draw (what does it exactly mean?) and frames to skip (that sounds simple).

I'm asking because some games look ugly with some speedhacks and without them are slowing down by about 25% so I prefer to have stable constat 30 fps with skipping instead of 60 with unwanted bullet time

[rama]

Frameskip works by first drawing "Frames to draw", then skipping the next number of frames set in "Frames to skip".

You also shouldn't focus on those 30FPS you're trying to achieve.
What you want is to run the game at normal PS2 speeds.

[Mazzieh]

Thank you very much for this reply I'm trying literally everything to get as close to stable 100% speed as it is possible on my current CPU, in both games I play, the biggest slowdown is dropping the game to 45 fps, but most of the time it's a stable NTSC default. But 45-50 is a noticable slomo mode, that's why i'm prowling the internet in search for other players' configs.

In one game (FF XII) speedhacks without extreme cycle stealing is enough for me to play and enjoy, even at 2x internal resolution and default ps2 filtering. Slowdowns are not too often, while in GoW 2 I have to enable full cyclerate and cycle stealing to jump from 30 (50% speed! matrix bullet time ftw ) to a really smooth 60 fps, tho a lot of flickering and few artifacts here and there - annoying.

[rama]

GoW doesn't like VU cycle stealing much. That's why you get the flickering characters in it.