Mischief Makers: Best plugins and emu core to use?

[pancake_lizard]

I'm really pulling my hair out trying to get Mischief Makers to play better than simply decently.

My system: Athlon XP 2700+, 1GB RAM, GeForce FX 5700LE 128MB, SBLive 24bit

It seems no matter how long I mess with different emulators and plugins I still have issues with both the video and the sound.

Right now I'm using 1964 w/ Rice's latest beta plugin, jabo's sound from PJ64 and the default RSP from PJ64. This is the best combination for this game I've found so far.

The audio never seems to sync quite right no matter what the combination of plugins and settings I use and/or is full of clicks. I've tried Jabo's DS 1.6, Azimer's HLE v0.56 WIP 2, and schibo's 1.2.

As for the video I am well aware of the invisible bolder problem, but what about the levels with the areas that are transparent and shouldn't be?

Also, can anyone help with the advanced options w/ Rice's latest beta plugin?
There are quite a lot, I figure I'd try to ask here before I spent another 6 hours of my time trying to make this work well.

So if anyone has played around and figured out the optimal plugin settings and such for Mischief Makers, please help me out.

Thanks!




PS. Please don't reply and say "who cares that game sucks" because I bet you never even gave it half a chance.


*EDIT*
Some more details with the audio... with Azimer's no matter what combination of settings I use the sound either runs slightly too slow, or the tempo goes all over the place. With Jabo's I get clicks but the sound seems synced well, I can live with this.

Some more questions about video... with 2xsai I get weird lines in the video sometimes, any way to fix this or should I use another texture filter... if so which one do you prefer?

[Agozer]

Mischief Makers rules.

Maybe you should try Glide64 with a wrapper. IIRC, the game has issues that are not so easy to fix.

[pancake_lizard]

Strangely the latest Rice Video beta is having major issues whenever I use it in 1964. I changed nothing.. just happened after a reboot.

Framerate jumps ALL OVER the place whether or not I have the frame rate control on or off. Also the weird lines are all over the place and of various different colors, some weird artifacts around certain text too...

Now if I use Jabo's in 1964 it works fine, or if I use Rice's in pj64 it works fine.

I'm highly highly confused....

Anyways, I'll try that glide plugin. Question though...

Why that one? Seems kinda weird to use a glide plugin only to have to use a wrapper for it to work... Does it just happen to not have the same issues as other plugins do with Mischief Makers?

Also what core emu do you recommend?

Thanks for your help!

[Agozer]

The Glide plugin seems to be pretty accurate, but like all Glide plugins it needs a wrapper to work with graphics cards that don't support Glide.

As for the core thing, I can't answer that.

[pancake_lizard]

Ok...

This Glide plugin is GREAT as far as accuracy goes. I'm amazed... BUT... apparently my machine isn't fast enough to deal with the wrapper...

I can't get the framerate to stay at a decent level and there seems to be no frameskip option in the plugin setup. Tried in both pj64 and 1964, I'll try mupen for the hell of it.

Any ideas on getting the framerate up? It's often MAXING my cpu.

Thanks again!

[Agozer]

Well, Glide 64 is certainly slower, because not only does it have to emulate the N64 graphics, but also the calls and functions native to Glide itself. It's very fast for those who still own a 3Dfx Voodoo card, since those support Glide "out of the box" and the wrapper is not needed.

[pancake_lizard]

Yeah unfortunately it's too much for this machine, and this machine isn't exactly slow either.

Also... I ended up noticing on some levels I can't even see the sprites... so unfortunately this doesn't help any.

But thanks anyways

Can anyone else recommend a video plugin and advanced settings for it?

[pancake_lizard]

Hmm... I can't seem to get good results with any of Rice's plugins.

Honestly I seem to get the best results with Jabo's Direct3D6 1.5.2. With 1.6 certain things are missing.

Best audio plugin seems to be Jabo's too.. w/ sync game to audio turned on.
Strangely Azimer's eats quite a bit more cpu than Jabo's and doesn't seem produce better quality than Jabo's with the sync game to audio on.

Core doesn't seem to matter much.

So much time wasted. I'd still like to hear suggestions if anyone has any

Thanks