Digital Foundry: PS+ PS1/PS2/PSP emulators aren't good enough

[the-pi-guy]

Era thread

Some games are 50 hz PAL.
Some games are changed so that cutscenes run in a 60 fps container.

The answer is yes... and no. Some titles are NTSC and generally work fine. But others - including the majority of the Sony first-party games - are indeed 50Hz code. When you boot up Ape Escape, for example, you'll notice mention of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe - yep, it is indeed the PAL version, further confirmed by the ugly title screen logo. However, watching the real-time introduction, it did seem to run at 30fps, not the 25fps I'd expect from a PAL game. However, this 30fps is a stutter-fest and looks truly awful - we're looking at incorrect frame pacing amplified to the max and it looks pretty bad. Once you get in game though, it settles back down to 25 frames per second - as you'd expect from the PAL version.

Some improvements:

Polygon graphics are drawn at a higher resolution. 1920x1440

Moving on, Sony promised enhanced resolution for classic titles and that's exactly what you get. On PlayStation 5, polygon graphics are drawn at a much higher resolution - pixel-counting is tough owing to interpolation but it seems to be in the region of 1920x1440, while 2D elements receive a crisp nearest neighbour upscale - which is a positive thing up against interpolated alternatives (for the record, I also tested the emulation on PS4 Pro, which looks to offer the same resolution and overall effect).

Bizarre settings.
Aspect ratios don't seem to mean anything.

The aspect ratio options are also strange. By default, the emulator opts for the 4:3 within a 16:9 window and this seems to work as advertised, but the 1:1 and square pixels options have got issues. I'm not sure what these options actually correspond to but it does not match the PlayStation's pixel grid at all. Both options render narrow pixels, basically, resulting in a squished image, with incorrect scaling. I tested this with the PAL games which have a slightly different resolution, but these same issues exist with the NTSC releases too. I suspect this is a result of trying to fill the screen but that's what these options should be used to correct - they simply don't work.

Scanline filter doesn't match where they should be.


PSP has weird options as well.

Secondly, the scaling and display options are very weird too. The retro classic mode, for instance, simply enables the same scanline filter as PS1. The PSP uses an LCD panel - there is no reason to simulate scanlines for these games. There should be a dot-matrix filter at the very least but that's not there. The other display options are also largely illogical - the 1:1 pixel and square pixel modes, for instance, once again present a super narrow image. This doesn't make sense: the PSP's native pixel resolution is actually 16:9 so square pixels should retain this aspect ratio, which doesn't happen here. There's no reason to squish the image for PSP games at all, in fact.

[Legend]

I wonder of emulation would be a good area for AI graphic improvements. Train the AI to improve everything from lighting to animations.

Make it look near modern.

[darkknightkryta]

They've done a lot in the hobby realm.  Texture filters and high resolution do a lot for PSX games.  They figured out how to hack out co-ordinates from the GTE data so they've fixed the "wobbly textures".  High resolution downscaled to lower resolution actually looks fantastic.  Even if they left that last bit out, there's a lot they could do.  

This is a comparison from Bleem, which is what?  30 years old almost?


PSX games when texture filtered, high res'd and with a fullscreen bilinear filter to smooth out the roughness actually looks really good.  There's just a lack of someone who cares in charge of this initiative.  Cause if they were invested and researching what's been going on in the hobby realm, we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing.  Hell, even their basic PSX emulator on the PS3 with no frills would have been better than what we got (That emu is pretty accurate from what I understand).  

[SWORDF1SH]

It's not good enough. The potential is huge but they've messed it up.