Erm...what just happened?!

Testing can be a comical affair!

For instance Katamari Damacy, the poor little pint sized prince kept on falling through the universe, even better is the King would keep apologizing for a Royal Warp and return the prince to a new location, only for it to happen again.

Metal Gear Solid 3 suffers(ed) from a similar problem, Snake would suddenly drop though an invisible hole, causing the classic "Snake, are you alright? snake? SNAKE!!!"

Final Fantasy X still suffers from characters getting placed the wrong way around, so they run away from the monster, smite it and somehow return to the same position. WipeOut Fusion also suffers from things going backwards, every ship gets placed the wrong way around, and the AI along with you have to turn around before they can race!

Tekken Tag has Squishy Head Syndrome, you kick a character in the face and your head goes perfectly flat, suddenly "anything but the face!!" takes on an entire new meaning!

Over the course of testing for PCSX2 the team has encountered thousands upon thousands of bugs, but despite popular belief that all bugs are graphical, many of these bugs are much more bizarre. In fact the PCSX2 project may have released many a fine video demonstrating progress, we could have released an epic film trilogy of bloopers by now.

Now admittedly finding a bug requires the tester to try hundreds of program combinations (plugins, recompilers settings, debug options etc), make long debug logs and attempt to find the bug in the debugger or trace the origin of the bug if it's a regression, but sometimes just watching the bug makes it all worthwhile!

I fondly remember the linuz.naked_bug();, where characters in Street Fighter EX3 would be missing clothes - specifically the women missing skirts. Or how about every character in Final Fantasy X being Tidus, yes folks EVERY character, from enemies, to people walking around, nothing like hearing the pretty girl-boy with Yuna's voice!

Sometimes It's tempting to suggest we add an option to the emulator to "re-create" these bugs, from totally missing collision detection, AI going berserk, to people floating upside down, but alas we're here to emulate the PS2, not our goofs.

So next time you think of emulation bugs, do not assume they're always graphical, or some complex mind boggling bug that causes the game to do nothing - sometimes, just sometimes there's a poor unshaven tester in a darkened room, covered in coffee that they've just spat out because Lara Crofts boobs have just exploded, or Gran Turismo cars have just developed anti gravity drives!

So as a rare treat, and somewhat a prelude to current Work in Progress, here's a game with some of it's bugs intact!

Katamari Damacy - Status at time of writing: Ingame
List of testing notes:

• Floor Bug, seems the textures they use to do floor detail are layered? (zBuffer)
• Object clipping bugs (walls etc).
• Katamari Mask? (the circle around the katamari, perhaps used to cull objects under the outer layer of what you have collected?).
• Stuck on pillar, can't go anywhere bug! (Level 3).

Emwearz's Sister is Hot!

Emwearz has a really sexy sister. She's an up and coming model, and would like to do some promo shoots wearing a specially made PCSX2 t-shirt and her favorite white thong.

However we've run into a snag, emwearz doesn't want his sister doing such photo shoots, especially when they would be wet t-shirt and highly provocative (think FHM / Maxim style). Hence we need you the viewer!!!

Edit: Forgive CKemu,it's that time of the month again...(and don't edit my edits!)

PM EMWEARZ via the NGemu forums here with the subject "Hey emwearz, is your sister single?", if he receives enough of these PM's he has promised to let his sister do this photo shoot!

PS: This is a joke, to wind one of our good buddies up...feel free to PM him though   (she is hot)

PCSX2 - Video Crazy

PCSX2 is perhaps one of the few projects that releases a constant series of videos demonstrating development progress, and whilst I'm not 100% sure on this, I believe the only emulator to have had two "promo" videos demonstrating that yes indeed, PS2 emulation is possible!

These videos are delivered to you via Bit Torrent on our videos page, which for an emulation site is somewhat unique. In fact so "odd", I've had emails asking me if the use of Bit Torrent is legal, surprisingly Bit Torrent can and is used for legal distribution!

You might wonder why such "promo" videos are made, it's somewhat unorthodox, well aside from the fact they are good fun to make, they serve to demonstrate what this project is doing as many people still don't believe that this is even possible!

How are these videos made? Simple!

When using zeroGS you merely have to press F7 to start recording to your preferred codec, you then press F7 to stop recording, at this point you can just quit the emulator and marvel at your video, or you can keep playing! Press F7 again to add more footage to your video, and again press F7 to stop recording, this will produce one video based on where you stop/start recording.

zeroGS automatically speeds up footage to "normal" speeds, which causes issues if you want to record audio in sync with the video footage. P.E.Op.S SPU2 DSound Driver records at "emulated" speed and if the recording was muxed with the video recording, it would be significantly out of sync.

However, you can get around this issue by disabling MTGS / DC modes from the CPU settings dialog, and setting P.E.Op.S SPU2 DSound Driver to Thread Mode. To ensure sync with the video, set P.E.Op.S SPU2 DSound Driver to start recording before you confirm the codec you wish to record with.

You then can put the audio and video streams together in your preferred video editing software, for simple tasks like this I recommend VirtualDub.

The ability to record video directly from a PS2 game has significant benefits over camcorder or TV card recording as you can get fantastic quality at higher resolutions than the PS2 can natively output.

For the gaming enthusiast it lends itself nicely to demonstrating how kick-ass you are at a game, or lets you demonstrate secret areas, advanced combos.

YouTube obviously offers a space to share such videos, and many people from all over the world already show fantastic videos from PCSX2, even the team use YouTube as a low bandwidth option to our high quality torrented videos.

YouTube is also used by some testers to demonstrate intermediate work, and this videos are normally only shown on the official forums as a bonus to our forum browsers, an example of this would be the following video demonstrating Final Fantasy XII no longer suffering from vanishing text:

So go on! Search YouTube for "PCSX2" and check out what our users are posting! I personally get a great deal of pleasure from seeing this emulator being enjoyed and used.

If you feel inclined why not record your awesome combo powa's, or you defeating some insanely tough boss and then place them on YouTube.

If something catches our eye, you may just get a honorable mention here! We already place user made screenshots from the current release in our screenshots section!

PCSX2 Optimization

Many people have visited the forums giving ideas on how and where Pcsx2 should be optimized. While most ideas sound solid on the outside, they usually will not work in practice for various reasons. This blog will answer some of those burning questions on what Pcsx2 optimizations are important and where development work should be put in to make things run faster. We will touch on why the GPU is the bottleneck on some games and why the CPU is on others. We will also go into the distribution of workload of the various components of Pcsx2 as it is computing away. And most important, we will cover plugin design so that system resources are distributed nicely.

First a note to the people that have played around with optimization or will play around with it. Be careful when measuring performance with frames per second! If anyone told me their optimization gained 5 fps for a certain game, I would not understand what that means! Why? Well if a game went from 5 fps to 10 fps, that means each frame took 200ms and now it takes 100ms. The optimization saved 100ms of CPU time per frame and now the game is 2x faster (this doesn't happen anymore)! If a game went from 60 fps to 65 fps, each frame took 16.6 ms and now it takes 15.4 ms. This is only 1.2 ms of saved time per frame, and the game is only 1.06 times faster. Which optimization do you think is better? Also a 1-2% speed difference is not statistically big enough to say that the optimization is useful. In fact, the fps counter in the title bar fluctuates between 1-2% all the time. So you'll just be picking up noise.

Read more: PCSX2 Optimization

Site improvements: Part 2

It's been a while since the last site improvements, however this time we have some nice and maybe unique features on our site.

Our compatibility page has been upgraded. The new feature is the AJAX powered toggle boxes which allow you to see games with a particular status.
The status will be remembered when switching between pages.