GS Mode Selector: Development & Feedback

[dlanor]

@doctorxyz:
I've downloaded your v0.23d beta release and will check it out later and go through all the source changes. But I'm not sure yet when I can be done with this, so I can't promise a release package today.

As for now I'll only comment on one of your changes:

- Every time one DISPLAYx is trapped, both ones (DISPLAY2 and DISPLAY1) are written.

We've had this in the program before, so it does work, but the main reason why it works is that very few programs ever use DISPLAY1 and DISPLAY2 for different purposes at the same time (which is the real reason why both registers exist).

However, for those cases where the registers are used as Sony intended, our screen adaption method might not apply at all. (Like when using DISPLAY2 to overlay a smaller image on top of the one generated by DISPLAY1). So the point may be moot, with both methods being equally incorrect for those cases.

The main reason why I removed this doubled register patching before, was so as to maintain a one-to-one relationship between the register patching attempted by the game program and the register patching performed by our program. So we may change a value before using it for a register, but we always send it to the same register, and not to any other. But with your method we will take a value intended for one register, and not only modify it but also write it to another register.

This will definitely force DISPLAY1 and DISPLAY2 positioning and scaling to be identical, which is not how they are really intended to be used. Both the scaling and positioning are intended to be separate, to allow advanced methods of overlay mixing.

But like I said above, much of the point is moot anyway, since our scaling method has no choice but to assume that each DISPLAYx rectangle represents the entire screen (right or wrong) so we always scale it to fill the available resolution as well as possible.

This difference in our assumed usage of these registers to always represent a full screen and Sony's intended usage of also using it for smaller overlays is probably responsible for some of the cases of oddly scaled objects on screen, though there are other reasons too.

The above is not intended to argue either for or against the 'doubled' register patching, but merely to remind you of some further complexities of DISPLAYx register usage that we have ignored so far. (Some of which it would be very hard for us to deal properly with...)

You can find some of the details on this subject in the CRTC chapter of the GSUSER PDF, and make sure not to miss page 83, which is one of the crucial pages without a bookmark of its own, so you have to scroll into it. This shows how the outputs from the two rectangle circuits are mixed into the final output.

Best regards: dlanor

[junebug]

Again, excellent work doctorxyz and dlanor.

My feedback on the GSM 0.23d beta on a PAL PS2 with RGB SCART and CRT TV running PAL games at NTSC 60hz (circle+left)is as follows: (Please let me know when we can record these on another thread)

Grand Theft Auto 3 - Now Working
Prince of Persia - Sands of Time - Now Working
Medal of Honor - Frontline - Now Working
Onimusha 1 - Now Working
Red Faction 1 - Now Working

Others tested successfully:

Deus Ex
Cold Winter
Final Fantasy X

This is fantastic guys!

[doctorxyz]

Hi all,

Great to hear this from you... So my effort last night is not in vain.

So it's time to play...!!!

BR,

[DarkCrono666]

Again, excellent work doctorxyz and dlanor.

My feedback on the GSM 0.23d beta on a PAL PS2 with RGB SCART and CRT TV running PAL games at NTSC 60hz (circle+left)is as follows: (Please let me know when we can record these on another thread)

Grand Theft Auto 3 - Now Working
Prince of Persia - Sands of Time - Now Working
Medal of Honor - Frontline - Now Working
Onimusha 1 - Now Working
Red Faction 1 - Now Working

Others tested successfully:

Deus Ex
Cold Winter
Final Fantasy X

This is fantastic guys!

Doctorxyz, I'll update this data to our beta table, I'll assume that the tested mode is 480i and all the games are pal, right junebug?
This night I'll try with some of these games that I own in NTSC for 480p and 1080i modes!
-------------------------
Awesome!!!
Almost every game that I have now works in 1080i, at least a bunch of them that I tried. Almost none of the games that do not works before 0.23d worked in 480p. And I've got 3 issues in 1080i with them:
Final Fantasy X-2: CGs are halfed and duplicated, but the game is ok;
GOW: works well in p and i modes, but after the progressive scan activation in game a flicker occurs in the bottom half repeating the top half.
GOW 2: same issues from GOW

This progress is great!! Even Square enix games that refused to work in GSM now works!! Killzone (p and i) and GTAs worked too (i)

Thanks guys!

[Bootlegninja]

I'll give a test to the new version in a while. My ultimate goal is to see about forcing some games to work on the SMB side of the OPNUSBLD.ELF.

[Vegeta]

Tried Motorstorm Arctic Edge in the GSM 0.23d beta. Works great in 1080i but freezes on the warning text screen on bootup with 480p.

[doctorxyz]

Hi all!

dlanor,

@doctorxyz:
I've downloaded your v0.23d beta release and will check it out later and go through all the source changes. But I'm not sure yet when I can be done with this, so I can't promise a release package today.

No problem on that. Do it only when possible. Thanks!

We've had this in the program before, so it does work, but the main reason why it works is that very few programs ever use DISPLAY1 and DISPLAY2 for different purposes at the same time (which is the real reason why both registers exist).

Yes, now you mentioned, I remembered that.
Thinking on terms of Pareto Analysis (the 80:20 rule), we could keep this double patching for DISPLAYx registers. Or, better, on near future we could implement a toggle for it into OSD, leaving this choice to user.

However, for those cases where the registers are used as Sony intended, our screen adaption method might not apply at all. (Like when using DISPLAY2 to overlay a smaller image on top of the one generated by DISPLAY1). So the point may be moot, with both methods being equally incorrect for those cases.

I see.

But like I said above, much of the point is moot anyway, since our scaling method has no choice but to assume that each DISPLAYx rectangle represents the entire screen (right or wrong) so we always scale it to fill the available resolution as well as possible.

It seems that we have no more options for the moment...

The above is not intended to argue either for or against the 'doubled' register patching, but merely to remind you of some further complexities of DISPLAYx register usage that we have ignored so far. (Some of which it would be very hard for us to deal properly with...)

Yes, and that further complexities are far away beyond my knowledge. For now I am satisfied with all this GS / GSM crazy stuff... ;-)

You can find some of the details on this subject in the CRTC chapter of the GSUSER PDF, and make sure not to miss page 83, which is one of the crucial pages without a bookmark of its own, so you have to scroll into it. This shows how the outputs from the two rectangle circuits are mixed into the final output.

I've re-read that doc and now I got that point.

BR,

[dlanor]

Again, excellent work doctorxyz and dlanor.

My feedback on the GSM 0.23d beta on a PAL PS2 with RGB SCART and CRT TV running PAL games at NTSC 60hz (circle+left)is as follows: (Please let me know when we can record these on another thread)

Grand Theft Auto 3 - Now Working
Prince of Persia - Sands of Time - Now Working
Medal of Honor - Frontline - Now Working
Onimusha 1 - Now Working
Red Faction 1 - Now Working

Others tested successfully:

Deus Ex
Cold Winter
Final Fantasy X

This is fantastic guys!

Your feedback would be even more useful if you specified which of those games work with the new version of GSM, and NOT with the previous ones (most recent previous one being v0.23b). Such comparative feedback is what we need to evaluate the effect of the latest changes. And I know for certain that FFX has worked perfectly with GSM for many of its past versions.

Best regards: dlanor

[dlanor]

I'll give a test to the new version in a while. My ultimate goal is to see about forcing some games to work on the SMB side of the OPNUSBLD.ELF.

Some games already do work that way. There appears to be no direct conflicts between GSM and OPNUSBLD, and some games even seem to benefit from the presence and activity of GSM, improving their compatibility to OPNUSBLD...

As stated elsewhere I have two Nippon Ichi RPGs, "La Pucelle Tactics" and "Makai Kingdom", which the regular version of OPNUSBLD is unable to launch, except when GSM is active and enforcing either PAL vmode or 576p. This is really odd, since both those games are US versions that should normally run in NTSC vmode.

But this is probably because GSM modifies the network timing somehow, as this GSM trick has no effect on launching those games from USB, which always fails for me with or without GSM. Another aspect of this issue is that both those games work perfectly with an experimental OPNUSBLD version using SMS network drivers, without needing GSM. This further strengthens the hypothesis that a network timing issue is involved.

So GSM does have some influence on how OPNUSBLD works with standard networking, probably by affecting timing, but for my test cases this has only helped, and never caused any new problems.

Best regards: dlanor

[junebug]

Hi dlanor,

Apologies for the format - I have put my results in a HTML Table. (Code below) These are all tested at 480i (NTSC) on a CRT TV with RGB SCART on a SLIM PAL PS2.

I hope this will help make my results clearer.

I would also be interested, DarkCrono666, if we could have a PS1 section as well. This would be to inform users if menu screens are usable if using the NTSC switch aspect of GSM.

Thanks again guys!

<TABLE id="Table4" cellSpacing="1" cellPadding="1" width="454" border="1" style="WIDTH: 454px; HEIGHT: 1265px">
				<TR>
					<TD>Title</TD>
					<TD>Format</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px">GSM v0.23b</TD>
					<TD>GSM v0.23d</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Grand Theft Auto 3</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">stops on loading (Plays CGI first)</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Prince of Persia - Sands of Time</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">Plays opening video and short real time game 
						balcony scene, stops on loading new game and new game CGI intro</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Medal of Honor - Frontline</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">Plays opening video, stops on CGI intro 
						video for new game.</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Onimusha 1</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">stops on loading (Plays CGI first)</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Red Faction 1</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">Loads to menu screen. Stops on new game CGI.</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Rayman Revolution</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD bgColor="red" style="WIDTH: 134px">stops on loading (Plays CGI first)</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Deus Ex</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px">Not Tested</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Cold Winter</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px">Not Tested</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Final Fantasy X</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px">Not Tested</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Resident Evil: Code Veronica X</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Splinter Cell</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#ffcc00">
						<P>Works&nbsp;-</P>
						<P>cgi audio dialogue out of sync.</P>
					</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#ffcc00">
						<P>Works&nbsp;-</P>
						<P>cgi audio dialogue out of sync.</P>
					</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#ffcc00">
						<P>Works -</P>
						<P>no cgi is shown</P>
					</TD>
					<TD bgColor="#ffcc00">
						<P>Works -</P>
						<P>no cgi is shown</P>
					</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Juiced</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Tomb Raider - Underworld</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Mace Griffin - Bounty Hunter</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
				<TR>
					<TD>Brothers in Arms - Road to Hill 30</TD>
					<TD>PAL</TD>
					<TD style="WIDTH: 134px" bgColor="#99ff33">Works perfectly</TD>
					<TD>Not Tested</TD>
				</TR>
			</TABLE>