PS3 ps1_emu & ps1_netemu questions/observations

psy1

psy1

PSX-Place Supporter
Hello,

I just discovered tonight the two emulators built into webMAN_MOD: ps1_emu & ps1_netemu

I was using the default "ps1_emu" for a long time and did not think there was any other choice.
For the first time tonight I started using "ps1_netemu" and played some PS1 games that I play often and I noticed differences.

Here's the differences I noticed when I started using ps1_netemu:
- The Playstation splash screen (the first thing you see when you load a game) has higher resolution and the sound no longer crackles.
- Star Ocean the Second Story has higher resolution.
- X-Men - Mutant Academy is now playable; before that it was just a blank screen when loaded.
- Tekken 3 & Ehrgeiz - God Bless the Ring no longer have annoying scan lines in fight.
- The sound on Tekken 1 no longer cuts out in battles.
- X-Men - Children of the Atom no longer flashes a black screen on and off.

I suspect all games will have improved resolution. I'm so impressed with ps1_netemu that I've set webMAN_MOD to always load PS1 games with ps1_netemu as the emulator.

I have some questions as well:
- Were these two emulators made by Sony and did they come packaged with the PS3? If so why are there two emulators, why didn't Sony just choose one?

- Any way to set multiMAN to launch games with ps1_netemu?

- Which emulator is overall better? And is there a way to pick out specific PS1 games to always load with a specific emulator?

- How do the emulators compare to the original non-emulated PS1? Am I missing out on much by not using the original hardware?
 
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If you load a PAL game with ps1_netemu on a PAL console, the PlayStation splash screen is lower pitched than original. It's because the Cobra region free patch is wrong and it forces the NTSC-J region all the time. This emulator has got a sort of audio pitch compensation to avoid crackling or sample skipping (it is easy to hear when forcing a NTSC mode on a PAL game).

I know the Soul Reaver lagging is gone with the ps1_netemu. But this emulator does not increase the resolution. It just applies by default a smoothing filter or something like that.
 
psy1 said:
Hello,

I just discovered tonight the two emulators built into webMAN_MOD: ps1_emu & ps1_netemu

I was using the default "ps1_emu" for a long time and did not think there was any other choice.
For the first time tonight I started using "ps1_netemu" and played some PS1 games that I play often and I noticed differences.

Here's the differences I noticed when I started using ps1_netemu:
- The Playstation splash screen (the first thing you see when you load a game) has higher resolution and the sound no longer crackles.
- Star Ocean the Second Story has higher resolution.
- X-Men - Mutant Academy is now playable; before that it was just a blank screen when loaded.
- Tekken 3 & Ehrgeiz - God Bless the Ring no longer have annoying scan lines in fight.
- The sound on Tekken 1 no longer cuts out in battles.
- X-Men - Children of the Atom no longer flashes a black screen on and off.

I suspect all games will have improved resolution. I'm so impressed with ps1_netemu that I've set webMAN_MOD to always load PS1 games with ps1_netemu as the emulator.

I have some questions as well:
- Were these two emulators made by Sony and did they come packaged with the PS3? If so why are there two emulators, why didn't Sony just choose one?

- Which emulator is overall better? And is there a way to pick out specific PS1 games to always load with a specific emulator?
Click to expand...
@aldostools is the right person to help you
 
psy1 said:
- Were these two emulators made by Sony and did they come packaged with the PS3? If so why are there two emulators, why didn't Sony just choose one?
Click to expand...
Ps1_emu was made to play with discs. Ps1_netemu was specifically made for PS Store releases of games as PS One Classics.

psy1 said:
- Which emulator is overall better? And is there a way to pick out specific PS1 games to always load with a specific emulator?
Click to expand...
Netemu is much better. The games that had issues with ps1_emu were fine with netemu, especially with audio glitches. I do like the visual look of ps1_emu more, but the faults heavily outweigh the pros.

psy1 said:
- How do the emulators compare to the original non-emulated PS1? Am I missing out on much by not using the original hardware?
Click to expand...
You're not missing much at all. Besides maybe a couple games, everything works perfectly fine on netemu.
 
Both are official PS1 emulators shipped with the PS3 firmware (and there is another one named ps1_newemu for a total of 3 PS1 emulators), ps1_emu is the original implementation included since PS3 firmware 1.00, and ps1_netemu was implemented in PS3 firmware 1.70
We could say ps1_netemu is the children of ps1_emu... they took the source code of ps1_emu and made some modifications to it to convert it into ps1_netemu
It seems after that they focused most of his attention to ps1_netemu (because it was the money maker), and eventually they backported some new features from ps1_netemu back to ps1_emu just to dont abandon ps1_emu completly

What you metioned about X-Men - Mutant Academy is interesting. Every PS1 emulator have a bunch of configs/commands embedded in it, specific for some problematic games, and this game is one of them, check the lists at bottom of this page (and keep in mind the only list updated and accurate enought is the one for ps1_netemu, the others are just orientative and/or obsolete)
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PS1_Emulation#Game_settings_lists

As you can see ps1_emu, and ps1_newemu have a config for X-Men - Mutant Academy (using command ID 0x01 with value 0x01)
But ps1_netemu doesnt have a config for it (and you are reporting it works nice in it)... so it seems ps1_netemu doesnt needs it... most probably they did some change in the source code that solves the problem automatically

We dont know what does ps1_netemu command 0x01 btw, there is some speculation and notes in this link but this commands are still considerd unknown stuff
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Talk:PS1_Emulation#Commands_Info
 
psy1 said:
...there a way to pick out specific PS1 games to always load with a specific emulator?
Click to expand...
Technically there is a way to do it but there is not any tool to do it and only could work in CFW (not in HEN) because is needed to apply some patches to the emulator .self files

The trick depends of a command that exists in all PS1 emulators and is intended to redirect the game loading to a different emulator
Lets say... by using that command you can tell ps1_emu.self to redirect the loading of X-Men mutan academy to ps1_netemu.self
This way it doesnt matters if you try to boot it with ps1_emu or ps1_netemu because the result is the game is going to be loaded always by ps1_netemu :)

To achieve this is needed to modify that list with commands inside the .self but we cant increase his size... so the only way to add a new game is by modifying other games from the list
Thats a technical restriction we cant bypass, but is also a practise problem because if we are going to remove something we are personalizing it for our favourite games... so is not the kind of thing that can be released for everyone to use it
 
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sandungas said:
Both are official PS1 emulators shipped with the PS3 firmware (and there is another one named ps1_newemu for a total of 3 PS1 emulators), ps1_emu is the original implementation included since PS3 firmware 1.00, and ps1_netemu was implemented in PS3 firmware 1.70
We could say ps1_netemu is the children of ps1_emu... they took the source code of ps1_emu and made some modifications to it to convert it into ps1_netemu
It seems after that they focused most of his attention to ps1_netemu (because it was the money maker), and eventually they backported some new features from ps1_netemu back to ps1_emu just to dont abandon ps1_emu completly

What you metioned about X-Men - Mutant Academy is interesting. Every PS1 emulator have a bunch of configs/commands embedded in it, specific for some problematic games, and this game is one of them, check the lists at bottom of this page (and keep in mind the only list updated and accurate enought is the one for ps1_netemu, the others are just orientative and/or obsolete)
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PS1_Emulation#Game_settings_lists

As you can see ps1_emu, and ps1_newemu have a config for X-Men - Mutant Academy (using command ID 0x01 with value 0x01)
But ps1_netemu doesnt have a config for it (and you are reporting it works nice in it)... so it seems ps1_netemu doesnt needs it... most probably they did some change in the source code that solves the problem automatically

We dont know what does ps1_netemu command 0x01 btw, there is some speculation and notes in this link but this commands are still considerd unknown stuff
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Talk:PS1_Emulation#Commands_Info
Click to expand...
So ps1_newemu is the best of all 3 ???
 
tungatung said:
So ps1_newemu is the best of all 3 ???
Click to expand...
No, in my oppinion is better to use ps1_netemu by default, but if you take a look at the list from my previous post you are going to realize ps1_netemu have settings to redirect the loading to ps1_newemu for around 10 games (destruction derby, ridge racer, sim city 2000, etc...)
This seems to be a clear indication that ps1_newemu is achieving a better emulation than ps1_netemu in that specific games

So there is not a clear winner in the PS1 emus
 
Thanks for the information everyone.

I found what sandungas said to be quite interesting:
sandungas said:
Both are official PS1 emulators shipped with the PS3 firmware (and there is another one named ps1_newemu for a total of 3 PS1 emulators), ps1_emu is the original implementation included since PS3 firmware 1.00, and ps1_netemu was implemented in PS3 firmware 1.70
Click to expand...
 
sandungas said:
Technically there is a way to do it but there is not any tool to do it and only could work in CFW (not in HEN) because is needed to apply some patches to the emulator .self files

The trick depends of a command that exists in all PS1 emulators and is intended to redirect the game loading to a different emulator
Lets say... by using that command you can tell ps1_emu.self to redirect the loading of X-Men mutan academy to ps1_netemu.self
This way it doesnt matters if you try to boot it with ps1_emu or ps1_netemu because the result is the game is going to be loaded always by ps1_netemu :)

To achieve this is needed to modify that list with commands inside the .self but we cant increase his size... so the only way to add a new game is by modifying other games from the list
Thats a technical restriction we cant bypass, but is also a practise problem because if we are going to remove something we are personalizing it for our favourite games... so is not the kind of thing that can be released for everyone to use it
Click to expand...
hello I read that you can not add games in the self because you can not change the size of the self. why not create multiples of the same self? ps1netemuAG.self ps1netemuHZ.self one with config for games from A to G and another with games from H to Z. or am I saying something absurd?
 
Naxil said:
hello I read that you can not add games in the self because you can not change the size of the self. why not create multiples of the same self? ps1netemuAG.self ps1netemuHZ.self one with config for games from A to G and another with games from H to Z. or am I saying something absurd?
Click to expand...
I never thought in it but is not absurd, is a valid solution to the problem of the available space :encouragement:

The best solution would be to find a way (reverse engineering and some luck needed) to load that commands from external files... either using an individual file for each game... or just preserving the same structure of that list in a single "database" for all games in a single file
The first solution (individual file for each game) is the ideal, in a similar way how are loaded the CONFIG files for PS2 games, and it would boost the interest of the scene into improvng and fixing PS1 games and also it would help a lot to identify all that commands availables in the PS1 emus

The latest version of ps1_netemu.self from PS3 firmware 4.88 contains commands for 349 games, but this kind of hacks would unlock the size restriction and would allow to increase it to 500 or 1000 or whatever is needed
 
mrjaredbeta said:
Nah, newemu looks the blurriest and has graphical glitches and slowdown in specific games.
Click to expand...

I was going to mention this a well. I wish there was a way to patch out the bilinear filtering in it.

I have not much used ps1_netemu so I don't know, but it seems that ps1_emu does not de-interlace 480i.

A good example is when bringing up the map in Silent Hill and scrolling it. It has that ugly "combing" effect when played on
a (HD)TV with progressive scan.
 
Netemu doesn't have that deinterlacing issue that ps1_emu has, and stuff like Silent Hill's menu/map and Tekken 3 look a LOT better on netemu than ps1_emu because of this. I never use ps1_emu since it is full of compatibility issues (anything from small sound bugs to graphical glitches and freezing) that netemu does not have any problem with.

I also dislike ps1_emu's "blocky" image...it's *too* clear. I think netemu's natural blurriness looks great, and I have a fairly large HDTV.
 
Agrippa said:
If you load a PAL game with ps1_netemu on a PAL console, the PlayStation splash screen is lower pitched than original. It's because the Cobra region free patch is wrong and it forces the NTSC-J region all the time.
Click to expand...
I got a question, I have this issue with Tekken 1 (Ntsc J), not only the boot screen but the whole game works slower for some reason (no problems with other NTSC games). How can I fix this? I've read that changing region mode is possible through editing xregistry.sys file, but is it safe on Hen? Will anything be broken after this?
I'm using European Super slim + HEN. Thanx 2 all in adv!
 
MFS said:
I got a question, I have this issue with Tekken 1 (Ntsc J), not only the boot screen but the whole game works slower for some reason (no problems with other NTSC games). How can I fix this? I've read that changing region mode is possible through editing xregistry.sys file, but is it safe on Hen? Will anything be broken after this?
I'm using European Super slim + HEN. Thanx 2 all in adv!
Click to expand...
You can convert the game with pop-fe to EBOOT. This will automatically correct the game speed when the SLPS title ID is detected by apply the 480p resolution in PARAM.SFO, and you do not need to mess with any "Force PAL" or "Force NTSC" options in the UI. Pop-fe will also be able to fix issues in games that may not work properly when mounted as BIN/CUE.
 
Thank you I know that converting to pkg & playing from XMB is the ultimate decision, but I don't want much to have some ps1 games in xmb and others in webman menu, just because it's inconvenient you know. So I wondered are there other methods like changing region on HEN?
 
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