Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: MarzSyndrome - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

I was pondering this earlier. We're talking about a 13/14-year old console that was discontinued 8 years ago. There was talk of one potential emulator project - Cxbx - and that was about it.

Fast forward to today, and while we're enjoying putting our ninja computers to the test with pumped up Dolphin and PCSX2 setups, the Xbox has more or less been ignored. EmuCR posts occasional new builds of Cxbx, but from word of mouth these don't seem to have improved on the progress of Xbox emulation very much, if at all.

You would've thought it'd be especially easy to get up and running on today's x86-based architecture. Is it just lack of motivation or documentation involved?

One of the main problems with trying to use today's controllers with older Windows titles - mainly from the 90's and early 00's - is that they weren't programmed to understand the difference and co-existence of traditional joystick axis and the POV hats which make up today's d-pads.

Old-school gaming isn't as great as it could be when you're restricted to using the left analog stick for all movement duties in a game that wasn't designed for analogue in the first place.

I've tried looking around for various solutions to this, and during my travels have come across x360ce, Universal Joystick Remapper, Xpadder, Pinnacle Game Profiler........ the list goes on.

However, it seems none of these do the one simple thing I'm after - the ability to remap the axis to the d-pad and have all games - whether they use DInput, DInput8, or XInput - acknowledge the POV as axis so remapping becomes easier. And I mean proper controller recognition - I'm not interested in a lazy keyboard-to-gamepad solution like Joy2Key. Why would I want to change every config to use a keyboard instead? Not to mention there's bound to be some titles out there with little to no keyboard support. Oh, and running Joy2Key in the background means potentially doing stuff accidentally within the Windows OS itself just by randomly pressing buttons - I'd rather they didn't have to share such a world.

At least someone had the right idea recently: over at the GOG forums, one fellow came up with a DLL wrapper for the 1996 platformer Gex to make it remap axis to d-pad while the game was running - it can be found here for those interested. Only problem is that he programmed it specifically with that game in mind, and said game does its joystick support through WinMM, which is what he patches. Having checked a few other Windows titles from the era, plus the more recent Raiden III (another GOG title), this is not a common way of handling controllers, so the patch would be no good for them.

So anyway. Is it easy and/or possible to program some kind of generic axis-to-POV patcher/wrapper for most if not all games?

Usually, when I set up emulators on Windows I opt to go for fullscreen mode, with the resolution matching my desktop's (1920x1080x32) and all filtering disabled so I get that nice, clean, pixellated sharpness.

Unfortunately, it seems certain emulators do something or other with their upscaling function which means I get end results like this (click on the picture on the new page to expand it):


This was captured in Kega Fusion 3.64. Look around the bottom of the screen. You'll notice tons of misplaced pixels on the edges and whatnot. Certain other parts of the screen have this issue as well if you look closely enough.

This only seems to happen if I upscale unfiltered graphics to my desktop resolution (if bilinear filtering is enabled the odd pixels disappear, but I'd rather not have everything looking blurry or "soft"). Although if I open up KF's INI file and set "EnhancedGFXOpt=1", it seems to improve the picture, but not completely:


Kega Fusion seems to be the worst offender of this I've come across so far. The problem exists in a select few emulators as well, such as RetroArch - which really bugs me off because I don't fancy its own bilinearing efforts either, and the odd pixels issue even creeps into shader filters. If I enable Integer Scaling in RA it eliminates them, but then it tends to leave the main screen too small for my liking, with too much black space surrounding it.

The fact this graphical glitch only seems to happen in certain emulators and not others has left me confused. I'm not really able to narrow it down to the type of driver being used (Direct3D or OpenGL) or the monitor I'm using (ASUS PB238Q), or the type of display hardware installed (integrated graphics), though my heart seems to be thinking the last one. Will I need to move on to an AMD or nVidia card in this case?


Anyhoo, my specs:

ASUS PH877-V LE Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2310 @ 2.90GHz
8GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 2000
Realtek HD Audio
Windows 7

So I got one of these a while ago after being disappointed with quite a few USB card readers of late, mainly for not allowing me to read SD and MicroSD (or alternatively Memory Stick Duo and M2) cards simultaneously when both are plugged in - Windows will only let me read one of them at a time. (I also noticed with some USB readers that they're designed in such a compact way that you can't physically fit both kinds of cards into it at the same time due to limited space inside.)

Imagine my disappointment when I noticed the same thing happen with this StarTech box then. Though perhaps it's made more obvious this time by the fact that the device opens up only four removable drives on Windows despite having 6 slots.

Is this by design with everything these days? I could've sworn like a decade ago you could have internal or external boxes which treated regular card slots and their little brothers as seperate entities rather than using the same SD/MS section.

Okay, here's the basic gist of things:

1) I own a silver PAL Gamecube, first obtained for my birthday back in 2003.
2) It is therefore old enough to sport the digital output port on the back.
3) It is not modded in any way, so any burnt discs or import titles would have to be loaded through GCOS or similar.
4) The official component cable is said to provide the best video quality available, but was marketed very poorly by Nintendo for some reason.
5) So poorly in fact, that it was only available through mail-order and in very limited quantities.
6) And then Nintendo rendered it useless for future GC units by removing the digital output port from said future GC units.
7) To top it all off, no PAL titles are said to support 480p output at all.
8) Not that it stops people from hawking the component cables on eBay for overly inflated prices that rarely ever seem to total below £100 including shipping.
9) Mind you, I also own a red Wii console which can also output component, and for which cables are a lot more common and thus cheaper.
10) Some people reckon that GC outputs component a lot better for GC games than Wii can, though.


Okay, so to really take advantage of the component cable, I would have to obtain NTSC versions of my games, preferably in ISO/GCM form so that I can scrub them and run them off an SD card using Swiss. Given the extra hassle involved in this process (load SD Media Launcher, wait for it to let you use the menu, load Swiss, faff around with Swiss settings, choose game, wait for it to load, cross fingers that it'll work without problems etc), I'm beginning to wonder to myself whether I should still try to shell out the cash for a component cable on eBay for the sake of actual digital quality (since nothing else seems to take advantage of the digital port). Can anyone with experience in all things Nintendo and component shell out some handy advice? Thanking you.