Playstation Emulator

[nekojosh]

Hi everyone, i am new to the forum and this is my first post.

I am currently working on creating a NES PC and well I ve reached a point in which I need help or suggestions from more experienced people.

So here is the deal, I am using my PS3 Dualshock3 controller to play PS1 games using MotioninJoy Drivers. I got the thing working just fine however the problem I am having is that some old games will not recognize the controller input if the analog option is on. I know that is the usual behavior of those games since they were developed before analog sticks were introduced in Playstation games.

What I need help or suggestions for is about how to be able to turn on and off the analog option from the controller. I am trying to create a NES PC that does not use a mouse and keyboard.

I tried using pSX(psxfin) emulator it works great but there is no key to switch the analog off or on or I hav not found it. I also tried ePSXe that one can turn on and of the analog by pressing F5 but seems to be less compatible with games than pSX... so having reached this issue, what do you guys suggest or how do you handle this situation on you builds?

Thanks in advance to everyone willing to help.

[nullPointer]

Hi nekojosh and Welcome to the GameEx forums!

I gotta tell ya, I loves me a good NES PC. I've been considering a build for a while, but just can't quite bring myself to tear down an old NES. 'Spose I oughta just keep an eye on eBay for someone selling just a shell. Any hoo ...

pSX is indeed a good emulator in the event that you don't want to be fiddling around with plugin settings and whatnot. Having said that, you would likely find that ePSXe has equivalent or better compatibility compared with pSX, but you do need to mess around with various plugin settings depending on the game. If you're looking for a hands off approach to PlayStation emulation pSX is the way to go.

Unfortunately pSX doesn't offer a key/button shortcut to switch controller layouts between the older non-analog style and the more recent DualShock style in the way that ePSXe does. With pSX you need to use the menu to accomplish this. Having said that it probably wouldn't be terribly difficult to write an AutoHotKey script to automate the menu functionality and subseqently trigger the script via a button/key press, but that may be more than you want to take on at the moment. It would also break the "immersion" in that when you triggered the script you would see the menu pop up momentarily as the script navigated to the proper settings to modify.

If you're running GameEx there might be an easier way. You could actually run two completely separate copies of pSX. Configure one to utilize the older controller layout and the other one to use the DualShock style controller layout. Next separate your disc images into two separate groups (in separate directories). One group will be all the games that are compatible with the Dualshock controller, and the other group will contain those games that require an older style controller. In GameEx you would create two separate emulator entries for pSX; one for each copy of the emulator. Make sure the ROM path for each of these entries points to the correct group/directory of games according to how you've configured the controls for that emulator. Then you would simply use the Emulator Groups feature to group the two pSX emulator entries into a single game list in GameEx. Phew! The saving grace with this solution is that pSX stores its settings in a standalone config file as opposed to ePSXe which stores settings in the registry (yuck ).

So there are a couple different options for you, one more technical than the other. Please feel free to report back if you have any additional questions and/or issues.

[naborneo]

pSX is indeed a good emulator in the event that you don't want to be fiddling around with plugin settings and whatnot. Having said that, you would likely find that ePSXe has equivalent or better compatibility compared with pSX, but you do need to mess around with various plugin settings depending on the game. If you're looking for a hands off approach to PlayStation emulation pSX is the way to go.

Maybe I'm just not playing the same games, but I've never had to mess around with setting in ePSXe. I set it up awhile back and haven't touched it sence... All games seem to work just fine, maybe that's just me and the games I've chose.

[nullPointer]

I think the default plugins for ePSXe have improved a lot in release versions 1.8 and higher. So maybe this is simply a stigma that's hung on from previous versions. For me the benchmark game is Castlevania SOTN. Seems like I always had to tweak something in that game to get it to look/sound/play correctly. For that matter I think there used to be a division between the preferred settings (and plugins) for 2D vs. 3D games. Maybe not so much the case anymore though.

[naborneo]

I think the default plugins for ePSXe have improved a lot in release versions 1.8 and higher. So maybe this is simply a stigma that's hung on from previous versions. For me the benchmark game is Castlevania SOTN. Seems like I always had to tweak something in that game to get it to look/sound/play correctly. For that matter I think there used to be a division between the preferred settings (and plugins) for 2D vs. 3D games. Maybe not so much the case anymore though.

It's all about Blast Chamber, one of the best party games, that really needs an HD reboot