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SSF 0.08 released

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Lord Darkstorm

Lord Darkstorm

Great sage, equal of heaven
Perhaps I don't understand. Perhaps there is a good reason "That would look terrible." If so please explain why in a professional manner. I am not being sarcastic. I genuinely like to learn new things. Especially about video games.

Show just a little respect to your fellow enthusiasts and our communities will grow. In that spirit let me apologize if I have offended anyone with this post. It is just sometimes we need our eyes opened.
Don't worry, you haven't offended anyone. ^_^ The reason the previous question got such terse replies is because the member had already asked the question here, had gotten a reply, and then ignored it and asked the exact same question again in this thread. You should always feel free to ask questions.
 

LCountach

New member
Thanks. I my have just learned something. I had forgotten about the quads on saturn.

I have still played NiGHTS and FIGHTERS MEGAMIX on hacked GiriGiri. The polygon rendering quality looked very good to me. Far better than any Playstation Emulator I have scene. That includes Pcsx & epsxe. Polygons twitch wildly in those PSX emulators. In fact I have scene the polys twitch on the original console.

You have peaked my interest. Are there any examples screenshots to display the distortion and an explanation on how the glitches happen. I would love to see them. :)

Thanks for the above replies. I look forward to seeing these new examples. :)
 

Runik

Saturnin forever !
You have peaked my interest. Are there any examples screenshots to display the distortion and an explanation on how the glitches happen. I would love to see them. :)
On the next pic (courtesy of M3d10n on the Segaxtreme messageboards ) you can see on the left a quad split into two triangles and in the middle a quad as it should be displayed.

perspective.jpg


On a practical example, these pics are from Baku Baku Animals running on Saturnin, you can see the distortion on the right one :
040321-bakubaku3.JPG
040321-bakubaku2.JPG
 

LCountach

New member
Thanks. Now I see what you mean. Is it possible you could take a Baku Baku screenshot from the same angle in SSF? I would like to see the difference.

Strangely I have seen some old PC games do exactly what the left grid and right screenshot are doing. I am a huge MechWarrior 2 fan. That is what caused me to rediscover the new releases of SSF and Satourne. The PC's 3DFX and ATI Special Editions of MechWarrior 2 are prime examples of the distortion. It was later fixed with game engine updates in newer releases. Also the Original Playstation Hardware always does that. It was something I always hated about Playstation.

Makes me wonder if somehow the problem can be remedied in the Saturn Emulators.

Edit: Oh! hang on a second. I thought the reason higher resolutions were not supported in SSF was because of the Quads would be distorted. Those shots from Saturnin look to be at original resolution. What's up with that? That makes me think the problem is in the rendering scheme coded into Saturnin.
 
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Borisz

New member
The point was that to increase the polygon resolution the way girigiri or satourne does, you need to use hardware acceleration, but mounting saturn quads to modern pc 3d hardware will get disortions like that.

Satourne looks the same... just with sharper polygon edges.

Girigiri doesnt even boot the game.

edit: for psx games with similar disortions, there were one or two games which were built for saturn and later ported to psx (which used polys), and got a bunch of disortion issues. The most blatant example would be Tomb Raider which worked with quads even year later in the 3rd or 4th episode.
 
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LCountach

New member
Wow the difference on the last two shots is amazing! I did a little testing of my own. In FIGHTERS MEGAMIX I tested in the training ring. Girigiri distorted the cage immensely. SSF looked much better however without doubt it would distort the cage slightly which was mostly hidden by the low resolution. All in all SSF is very nice and accurate.

My experience with Playstation was mostly Gran Turismo & GT2. Signes and fences looked like accordions! The track was a wonderful ocean of waving asphalt. My friends had many games I would not play. However while hanging out and watching them play I liked to point out how hideously inaccurate texturing always looked.

When I first played MechWarrior 2 on SSF I was stunned at the accuracy differance compared to the PSX EMUs. On PSX both Polys and Textures ripple and pop like there is an earth quake. SSF was smooth as silk. Blocky pixelated silk. Like I stated I am a MechWhore. The console versions have two major advantages over the PC incarnations. They have over double the view distance and double active enemy AI units. I am stuck with great resolution or great accuracy. I want both. :(

Anyway I speculate SSF could double the 3D resolution in software(CPU) rendering. I could maintain the 2D resolution by overlaying it on the 3D. SSF is already running at 640x480. It is just doubling the pixel size to maintain the 320x240 look. Many PC games of old could handle very high resolutions before 3D Accelerators came about. It was all down to the rendering engine run by the CPU.

Again just speculating. I have no idea how SSF is coded. It's a fantastic piece of work. I just won't be playing many 3D games on it. Perhaps it should offer options like Graphic Plugins? I will always take distorted polys so I can see what is shooting me. In MechWarrior the distant enemies are Literally 1 or 2 pixels tall!

I am grateful for you replies. Those screenshots do have a hammer blow like effect to show the accuracy difference.
 

Borisz

New member
Old games didnt have to emulate 8+ cpus in perfect synch so duh.

The SSF website says that "the final goal of the emulator is to perfectly reproducate the Saturn hardware, not running games in high resolution or more beautiful then the real hardware", and that "even though its slow, a screen generated by software will be identical to the real hardware as much as possible". So I wouldn't hold my breath for increased graphics (I admit a resolution selector would be nice, for PAL games for example).

The two video processors don't work in a way that you can just increase resolution in them, to do that, you'd need to simulate things in the hardware, which introduces issues as said before. Remember that the Saturn is designed mainly for 2d processing, not 3d. In fact there are only a handful 3d titles which dont look horrible on the Saturn.

The doubled resolution is used to match a TV (scanlines, etc), and its handy because your monitor doesnt have to switch resolutions that often. The increasment is exactly 2x so its a lossless stretching anyway.
 

deathace

New member
I have a widescreen monitor, so whenever i make it full screen, the screen is always stretched. I turned on 'enforce aspect ratio' and it didn't do anything. How do I get the right ratio in full screen mode on my widescreen?
 

Borisz

New member
Set your lcd to display 1:1 pixel ratio without stretching. ssf will use 640x480 or 720x480 no matter what.
Enforce Aspect Ratio only affects windowed mode.
 

deathace

New member
I can't find this option on my on screen menu. It's a samsung 206bw btw if anyone knows how to set it on this particular model.
 

LCountach

New member
I can't find this option on my on screen menu.
Many times the option to enforce the 1:1 pixel ratio is in the Video Card's Driver menus. I have used both Nvidia and ATI Video hardware in laptops with Widescreen. Both had options to adjust this. It is probably labeled as something other than "1:1 pixel ratio" so you might have to hunt for it. I hope you find the control somewhere. Good luck. :)
 

Hawq

New member
Quick dirty translation:
* Interruption processing of 68000 was corrected.
* Timing of CD block was modified.
* The DMA processing of SCU was corrected.
* The dynamic recompiling processing of SH2 was corrected.
* The drawing weight processing of VDP1 was corrected.
* The cycle pattern designated mistake processing of VDP2 was corrected.
* Memory access weight processing was corrected.

Sound formation processing was made another thread exclusive use.

The drawing timing of VDP1 slipping, there are times when sprite flickers.
That time, please try setting SH2 Instruction Numbers low.
 

grand master

Emualtion Pimp
Is anyone else having probs with R11? Sonic R title screen is black and for some strange reason the bios (Saturn splash screen) no longer show up.
 

Hawq

New member
I've heard of one person saying it has a tendency to freeze up on them, not sure what game it was with though, havent tried this release myself yet so cant give much of an opinion
 

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