Pete's D3D driver for PSX emus ------------------------------ Mmm... what to say? If my OpenGL driver doesn't work well with your gfx card, try this D3D port :) Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Requirements: DirectX 7 or better installed. Without DX7/DX8 you will prolly not even see my plugin in the emu plugin selection window. Note: replace 'DirectX 7' with 'DirectX 6' in case you are using my D3DDX6 plugin :) The plugin needs a card with hardware 3d acceleration. The D3D software mode is not supported. Only 16/32 bit desktop color depths are supported. The plugin can use secondary devices (add-on cards like the Voodoo2... mmm... but prolly the DX6 plugin will be working better with V2 cards :P). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Configuration: As with my OpenGL plugin, take yourself some time to test different settings, you can use my PSSwitch/ePSXeCutor configuration tool to store game configurations for PSEmu Pro/ePSXe. Here is the list of the available settings and their baddies and gooddies... 0) Rendering device -------------------- If you have more than one gfx card installed (I have for example a GeForce and Voodoo3 PCI), you can select the card you want to use with the "Select device" button. Some add-on cards (V2) will only work with 'Fullscreen flipping' enabled, but be aware, that this option can cause flickering with some games. FSAA is also only supported with activated 'Fullscreen flipping' with some cards. 1) Resolution & Colors ----------------------- Well, that section should be self-explaining. Please note: some cards (like the 3dfx V2/V3) can't do a 32 bit color depth, or rendering in a window (V2). Selecting an option which your card can't handle will cause error message boxes or missing textures or crashes... yup, sorry 2) Texture quality ------------------- Basically there are 16 bit textures and 32 bit textures. * 'don't care': it's the first matching texture type your card can offer... most time it will be the same as "4-4-4-4" textures. * 'R4 G4 B4 A4': Every color info has 4 bits, so texture colors are not as fine (the real psx can use 5 color bits), but most cards should be working with that texture type. * 'R5 G5 B5 A1': texture colors are fine in that mode. With OpenGL that mode is showing black rects with 'Alpha Multipass' enabled, but I can use color keying with d3d for transparency, so it's a good choice for many cards. * 'R8 G8 B8 A8': Best colors your PC can offer, at the cost of speed and vram. If game speed is OK with that mode on your PC, use it! Not possible with 3dfx V2/V3 cards, though. Hint: 16 bit textures don't need as much vram as 32 bit textures, so if your card has just 16 MB (or less), stick to 4-4-4-4 or 5-5-5-1 3) Texture handling ------------------- To optimize the texture storage, the plugin has to know the size of your gfx card vram. You can try to let the plugin auto-detect the available vram memory, or you can enter the right amount yourself. If you have a lotta vram (64 MByte or higher), you can also try the "Hi-Res texture (2xSaI)" or "Hi-Res texture (Scaled)" option. The 2xSaI one will use the superb 2xSaI algorithm from Derek Liauw (http://members.xoom.com/derek_liauw/) to improve the texture quality. For more informations check out the version notes from 10. July, 2002. The "Scaled" hires textures will need additionally some texture filtering (best: filtering mode 2) and a screen resolution of 800x600 or above. 4) Bilinear filtering ---------------------- Give it a try... the real PSX doesn't support BF, so there will be some glitches if you turn BF on. Several games will look nicer... there are two filtering modes... the Extended mode is slightly slower, but even better with most games (be sure to use 'Dynamic caching' with extended filtering). If you want you can also try both filtering modes without sprite filtering. Some game text will be much better readable, but some games will look weird if everything but sprites are smoothed. Or try the new "filtering with sprite smoothing"... that one is giving nice results most times :) 5) Framerate limit/Frame skipping ---------------------------------- You can activate FPS limitation if your game is running to fast. You can use "Auto detect FPS limit", if you are not sure, what limit would be best to use or just type in a FPS rate. PAL games use 50 FPS, non-PAL games 60 FPS. And if things are getting too slow... you can try Frame skipping. Tip: to get the 'right' speed you should enable skipping and limitation together. You can also enable the in-game menu right from the game start (showing the fps and let you change some gpu options while playing). Of course you still can use the "DEL" key for showing/hiding the menu. Btw, all gpu hotkeys are described below. If you want to change the keys, you can use the small "..." button. 6) Offscreen Drawing ---------------------- There are now (1.48 or newer) 5 different OD modes... OD is used to detect drawings which are outside the front/backbuffer, doing such stuff in software (or by tweaking polygon coords). 0 (none): fastest mode, glitches in splash screens/game gfx can happen 1 (minimum): takes care of most splash screens 2 (standard): does an easy check, if software drawing is needed 3 (enhanced): does a more complicated check for soft drawing 4 (extended): does the "enhanced" check, and adds some additional buffer swap (can cause flickering with some games) 7) Framebuffer textures ---------------------- To get whirling screen effects and psx motion blurring, there are two ways to go: a) set framebuffer textures to emulated vram, enable full vram primitives (framebuffer access option) and offscreen drawing or b) disable full vram primitives and set framebuffer textures to 'gfx card buffer' or c) use 'gfx card buffer & software'. (a) will work on every system, but it will be very slow. (b) will prolly work only with certain gfx cards with a good speed (GeForce :)... (c) is kinda a compromise: there will be little gfx card accessing (good for slower gfx cards), and more software drawing instead (which will need some cpu power). btw, some games will work better/faster with (b), others may need (c) instead. You have to try that for yourself :) Well, ppl with slower cpus and/or gfx cards can use "black framebuffer textures", this option will be very fast, but, of course, the special effect will not appear! 8) Framebuffer access --------------------- Sometimes the real psx is reading/moving the already drawn display to create special effects. Again depending on your hardware and the game you want to play you may need to activate one of the available options to get all effects. The highest setting (Full software drawing) will cause the internal soft gpu to paint every polygon, etc. into the emulated gpu vram. That's helpful if you want to see most of the fancy psx effects, but also _very_ slow. Ah, and another hint: never use the gfx card reads/moves with FF8/FF9. 9) Advanced blending --------------------- To get perfect lighting, you should enable this mode. Some cards (3dfx again) can't do this in hardware (you will get no textures if you try), activate the "software" mode instead. The software mode can cause some wrong double-blended areas, though, and it is slower. If you don't mind the better lighting, you can also turn AB off, of course. Some games are really looking better using AB (Spyro!), try it yourself... 10) Alpha MultiPass ------------------- Draws opaque texture pixels the way it should be. Of course it could be a bit slower. But not much :) 11) Mask bit ------------ A really rarely used ability by the real PSX is the usage of mask bits to avoid drawing into some parts of the screen. Well, to increase compatibility you can turn the mask bit emulation on, but as far as I know only Silent Hill is really needing it. If you activate it, 3D glasses should also work, because my mask bit functions are using the ZBuffer. Well, but if your game doesn't need the mask detection (and most games do not!), turn it off to get more available texture vram. 12) Color dithering ------------------- If you are using just 16Bit colors (or if you have to use it because you have an older 3DFX card), you can enhance shaded objects by turning on color dithering. If you are using a 32 bit color resolution there is no need for dithering. 13) Scan lines -------------- To improve the image quality you can enable scan lines which are emulating the display of a TV screen. With the scanline brightness param you can make the scanline effect darker (smaller values) or brigther (bigger values). A special scanline mode, "Monitor dot matrix" can be enabled by setting the brightness to "-1". 14) Unfiltered framebuffer updates ---------------------------------- MDECs and such will be bilinear filtered be default. The 'unfiltered' mode is faster, though (and some ppl think, it is even looking better ;) Funny enough, GeForce cards (and prolly some other ones as well) will do some filtering even if that option is activated (filtering on stretched blits). No way around that, sorry. 15) Screen smoothing ------------------------ This option will blur the whole screen, so 2D backgrounds will look less pixelated. Of course it also needs a fast gfx card, and the higher the resolution, the slower the smoothing... and less vram is available for textures... well, it's up to you :) 16) Disable screen savers ------------------------ Helpfull if you are playing with certain joypads, and you don't want that suddenly the screensaver/power saving mode is kicking in. 17) Special game fi...
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