(05-29-2019, 02:28 AM)lyingriotman Wrote: Aside from my lack of common sense, can someone explain how to use the dev revisions in portable mode? I heard it was pretty useful to play around with the settings without screwing up all your directories.
Portable mode means that all of the files needed to run and play on the emulator are contained inside that PCSX2 folder you've made by unpacking and copying your BIOS, memcards and cheats in. You can move it on your disc to different places, or even different PCs without loosing any settings or saves. No installation was required, right? To put it simple, changing settings in one emulator folder won't affect others if you have them.
You can download different 1.5 versions, unpack them to differently named folder, copy your BIOS, memcards and cheats again and use all versions interchangeably depending on which pcsx2.exe you double click.
People find this useful if they want to check in which version particular game looked or run better and inform developers about that bug, regression.
Also because still in a lot of cases different games may need different settings, especially in HW hacks, having the same 1.5 version of emulator in differently named folders may save you the hassle of changing settings every time you change a game you play. Although this can also be achieved by using a plugin/program which saves that different emulator settings. This
PS2Lunch or this
PCSX2 Profile Manager for example.
I don't swap games so much, so I just made a screenshot of my HW Hacks settings for different games, as not to forget which ones worked good, and change them manually each time I change a game I play.
A downside of using few different emulator versions is that you can forget which memcards had newest saves, or saves from what game are on which memory card. You can obviously check that by selecting "No disc" in CDVD and then "Boot BIOS" in System, but again a hassle.