Thinking that my system might not be powerful enough, but would like to check

[SamingtonSquire]

Hello everyone,

I have successfully installed PCSX 2-CE using Wineskin. It launches fine and I am able to load my ISO.

The intro screens run fine, but shortly after starting actual gameplay, the emulation becomes extremely slow and my system becomes hot.

I have a mid-2012 MBP with an Intel CoreI7 at 2.6 ghz. It also has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1024 MB of RAM but, for some reason, it doesn't seem to be available in the Adapter dropdown in the GS plugin settings. I was hoping that this may take some load off of the CPU?

I'm using the "Aggressive" preset in the Emulation settings.

Is my system just incapable of running PS2 games properly? If so, I'll give up for the time being until I buy a more powerful Mac.

I'm trying to play Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

[willkuer]

I think this is one of the rather demanding games.

Keep in mind that wine is another virtualization layer. This could create a much larger load on your mb than if you would use pcsx2 natively. Unfortunately the native mac port is in bad condition. If possible i would suggest to dualboot into linux or better windows if you want to play that game.

I would expect that less demanding games should more or less work. Keep in mind that speedhacks can reduce speed as well.

The gpu is probably not shown due to the wine gpu virtualization. I guess pcsx2 has no direct access to your gpu.

[SamingtonSquire]

Hi Willcuer, thanks for your reply.

I did actually get it working of sorts. In the SPU2-X plugin, I switched the synchronisation to "Mixed". While levels now appear to be playable, cutscenes and intros are either speed up or just cut short. Shame as I like the Crash cutscenes. I'll try turning off the preset in the Emulation settings and tinkering further with individual settings. If that fails, I should still have my Win7 disc lying around, so I could do as you suggested.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.

[willkuer]

So maybe some hints:
Ee cycle rate hack should help you best with this game. Vu cycle stealing is something like a fancy frameskip. Still i guess it produces more errors than it will help you. Vu clamping to none is often a compatible speedhack. You can also check supervu vs microvu. Seldomly supervu is faster but still compatible.

(A small correction: a few games are ee bottlenecked on the ps2. For those games ee cyclerate hack makes everything worse)