FFX and PCSX2 General Help :)

[dethavin]

First and foremost I just want to say Good Evening and thank you for this awesome program! I just recently started using it and I am running into a couple of issues that someone can hopefully help me with. First I was able to set up the program and load up FFX with no issues, the issues that I am having are that I dont think I set it up correctly the way I want it. I want to run it in full 1080 HD and I am not quite sure how to set that up in the settings or If I can do that... But I noticed that a lot of the videos posted are show casing that it can be done? My last issue is that FFX itself looks for the most part fine in game with a few exceptions.. The menu's and text seem to be a bit too large from how I remember them being lol as well as the text being overly big and not looking like clean cut lines making the letters but jagged as if the resolution/ui? is say way to big for the resolution that I am running? If that makes sense. Is there anyway to fix this or is that just how it is with running emu's? Im sure my computer can handle it and handle wanting to go 1080.

AMD Phenom II x4 965 BBE 3.42 GHz
8 Gigs of DDR3 Ram
Windows 7 64bit Ultimate
Nvidia 470 GTX

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Edit 1: Ive seen a lot of views on this already but no response.. I think a easier way of asking the question is, Can I adjust the settings on the emulator so that I can play games full screen and all the aspect ratios be correct? Like menu's and text actually have straight lines and be the proper resolution instead of being super big?

[Livy]

It is recommended that you read the configuration guide first.

To achieve 1920x1080, use 4x native resolution. AFAIK console games does not use square pixel, so if you use custom 1920x1080, graphic glitches may occur. 4x native is a bit bigger than 1920x1080, but it will be cropped to your monitor resolution anyway.

The text always looks like that. If it looked smaller, imagine such text on a 512x448 resolution of the PS2 -- you could not read it if it did. When playing on the PS2 at a low resolution, you think the text is normal, but when on PCSX2, you think it is big.

The graphics glitch on the text occurs when using high resolution. No fix for it other than using native res.

[dlanor]

As I assume you already know, the choice of basic window size, as well as the rendering choices for full-screen mode (4:3, 16:9, Stretch), do not in any way alter how the game generates pixels. PCSX2 simply stretches (or compresses) the pixels generated by the original game code so as to fit the current display format, frequently mutilating the aspect ratio badly in so doing.

Raising the "D3D internal resolution" in the GSDX plugin settings can raise the quality of 3D graphics significantly, since the 3D models of most game objects contain far more detail than could ever be rendered in the original PS2 resolutions. So when using higher custom resolution for this setting it causes the emulation to not just stretch the pixels that would have been generated by a real PS2, but instead generates the object pixels using the 3D engines of the PC (and/or its Graphics boards) to render the objects at the size they will have on screen, allowing far higher quality in a high resolution than was ever possible in the limited game resolutions of a PS2. But this still does nothing to fix the aspect ratio.

The same visual scene (though more detailed with a custom D3D rez) will still be forced/stretched to fit the chosen window size or full-screen mode, without any real regard for a natural aspect ratio.

Fixing the object aspect ratio in resolutions with used full-screen/window aspect ratios differing from 4:3 is only possible by changing how the game itself scales the 3D objects when rendering them, so we must patch either the game code itself, or the run-time variables it uses for such scaling. And this must be done individually for each game, in ways specified by someone who has analyzed that particular game to find out how its rendering can be altered. He/She can then define patches for use by anyone using the same game.

Normally these patches are implemented as special 'pnach' files stored in the subfolder "cheats" inside the main program folder of PCSX2. These files have a name prefix which is a CRC code based on the game disc, so that the emulator can automatically load the correct pnach file whenever a game is launched. This usage also requires that you enable the flag named "Enable Cheats" in the "System" menu of PCSX2.

The 'Chatterbox' subforum of this site contains a thread named "PCSX2 - Widescreen Game Patches" where you can find lots of pnach files for various games.

FFX has been something of a problem for some patchers though, as it seems to require patching of the ELF code. But I did implement a pnach file for the Korean release of the game (the only NTSC FFX-International version with all-English language), which is the release I use. You can find it on page 79 of that thread, as an attachment to post #781.

Here's a direct link to that page:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-PCSX2-Wid...es?page=79

NB: If you use that file as-is, the scaling will be done for 16:10 (like my monitor), but the file also contains scale factors for 16:9. You just uncomment those two text lines while making the two for 16:10 into comments, by removing/adding the double-slash comment prefixes "//".
(Any normal text editor can be used to edit pnach files.)

I could of course make pnach files for other versions of the game too, and probably a bit better than I did back then, as its save spheres were still not quite as 'spherical' as I want them, indicating a remaining aspect error which could be fixed by further tweaking of the scaling constants.


Finally, some of the graphics glitches for text (and some other stuff) are in fact due to imperfections in the hardware emulation. Most such glitches will disappear if you switch to software mode instead (using F9 key), though that will also kill some graphic improvements made possible only in hardware mode. Hopefully future improvements of the hardware emulation can eliminate those glitches...

Best regards: dlanor