The PCSX2 team has released a new version of their PS2 emulator.
Quote:It has been 2 years since our last stable release and today wee (finally) bring you the newest stable release: 0.9.8! Smile
There has been a massive amount of extensive changes to the emulator as a whole, so let's go over some of the biggest ones!
Spoiler for long:
Wee have a completely new GUI made with wxWidgets to make the whole user experience simpler and more user friendly, whilst providing us with a platform in which wee can easily add new features. For this wee have to give our thanks to Air (Jake Stine) who recently left the team, who worked on this for many months (in what was pretty much a solo effort) to make it the best GUI wee have ever had.
The entire team is eternally grateful for all of his efforts and wee wish him best of luck with his new tasks!
This new GUI brings with it a much improved Linux support, as this is a completely cross platform user interface. Code changes will effect Windows and Linux in the same way, making maintenance for us much easier and finally giving Linux users a nice and consistent frontend.
Complementing the new GUI is a new Memory Card manager, providing the flexibility to use customly named or downloaded cards with sizes of 8 to 64 megabytes. Now you can fit even more saves on one card!
Host file system and ELF loading support has been improved too.
Now you Homebrewers can work with a more feature complete virtual PS2 to test your tools!
Patches and compatibility hacks are now automatically applied by default.
With this you don't have to sit there for ages playing around to find that 1 option that fixes your game; If wee know about it, wee've already set it!
Aside from the shiny parts of the emulator which you guys see and use, wee have many internal changes to improve our overall compatibility, the most notable ones being a new VU recompiler called microVU, which is an effort to bring higher compatibility over the older SuperVU recompiler.
Wee also have a new VIF Unpack recompiler which is more accurate and safer than the previous asm implementation.
The other big change is within the SPU2-X sound plugin, which has been worked on thoroughly to improve the sound generation, provide different audio output options and filtering, but also internal changes to improve the compatibility with games such as Burnout 3 which had never booted on any previous version of PCSX2!
In all wee now have around 65% of all tested games marked as playable, and at least 85% get "ingame".
This means that over 1500 of the tested games are fully playable!
I could be here rattling off the new changes all day, but i know you guys are waiting to get going!! Here is a summary rundown of the most notable changes within the emulator, wee hope you enjoy using it as much as wee did making it!
GUI:
New, threaded GUI using wxWidgets.
New menus, for improved usability and faster configuration.
Convenient Memory Card editor.
On the fly pause and resume, perfectly stable, safe and fast.
On the fly setting switching and even plugin switching.
Powerful new configuration that is more user friendly with its first time wizard, reset to default buttons and a global presets system.
A plethora of new options that make playing games more fun!
All options have tooltips explaining what each of them do.
Comes translated, with many languages to select from.
Compatible with Aero Glass and Windows eye candy.
Looks and works great on Linux, too!
Core:
Entire emulation core has been overhauled. Many components are rewritten.
Countless code generation and runtime execution bugs fixed.
Added microVU, an improved VU0/VU1/COP2 recompiler.
New VIF recompiler
Multi-threaded GS rewrite: Faster and more stable than in 0.9.6.
Better BIOS splash screen skip method, better ELF support, host fs support.
New Game database detects the game you run, displays compatibility info, and auto applies special game fixes/patches if needed.
Plugins:
GSdx is faster, more stable and has more configuration options than ever before.
SPU2-X is the preferred SPU2 plugin now.
It has matured into almost completely emulating all the SPU2 quirks, making many more games work!
(And it sounds nice, too Smile )
Downloads depend on your OS. For Windows wee offer a full installer, a web installer and a binaries package.
Linux users can fetch a binaries package or use launchpad.
Windows:
Full installer [12.1MB / exe]: Download
Web installer [3.05MB / exe]: Download
Binaries [2.72MB / 7zip]: Download
(NOTE: Full installer includes Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables, which is ideal for offline installs of PCSX2. Web installer optionally fetches the Redists from Microsoft.com, if your computer doesn't already have them installed.)
Linux:
Binaries with correct translation [2.85MB / 7zip]: Download
There's also a launchpad version for Debian / Ubuntu x86 available here.
Note: An amd64 launchpad package can be provided when Ubuntu properly supports multi-arch (hopefully with Ubuntu 11.10).
You need to have a fast CPU to be able to emulate at decent speeds.
Quote:Recommended
Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit) with the latest DirectX
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.2ghz or better
GPU: 8800gt or better (for Direct3D10 support)
RAM: 1GB on Linux/Windows XP, 2GB or more on Vista
It also depends a lot of the game you're trying to emulate, required specs depend a lot based on the game's complexity.
You can play FFX on max fps with the above specs,
While GoW might require you to have a 4GHz overclocked Core i7.
Easy stuff like Ar Tonelico you can probably run, max speed, on a 2GHz AMD Athlon and integrated graphics.
(This post was last modified: 14/05/2011 07:22 AM by Assassinator.)
Glad to see... Sadly I have a toshiba lappy with a 2.2 pentium 4 & intergrated graphics. Windows 7 but I have 3gb ddr3. I should probably stay away from the ffxii huh...
14/05/2011 07:06 AM
Rea_pErz
Able One
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