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PCSX2 PS2 Emulator: Progress report Q3 2019 to Q1 2020
- mahrain 6y agoDoes anyone know why the Mac port has not been updated since 2012 (but downloads are still being offered)?
- mister_hn 6y agoIs still Mac a relevant platform for gaming? You can try run it in a virtual machine
- brootstrap 6y agofor indie games yup... been rocking mostly indie, rogue like, single player , 2D type stuff. 2013 mac air still going strong!! 500+ hours of darkest dungeon, slay the spire, isaac... serious bang for buck getting hundreds of hours from 3 games totaling like $60 dollars
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoEven with Catalina, or are you on an older OS? Catalina just seems to have killed an inordinate amount of stuff...
- karatestomp 6y agoCan confirm. Most of what ran well on my older MacBook with Intel graphics were indie games and older games, and those are the same ones hit hardest by the Bitpocalypse. I went from something like 150-200 games on Steam that'd run natively on my MacBook, to almost none.
- bluescrn 6y agoMacs tend to lack decent GPUs, and Apple’s approach to backwards compatibility/industry standards (removing 32bit support and with it half of the Mac Steam library, and deprecating OpenGL) is hardly encouraging people to support the platform when it comes to anything gaming-related.
- danielscrubs 6y ago> Macs tend to lack decent GPU Are you saying the majority of the emulation calculation nowadays are done in a gpgpu fashion in that emulator? For if that's the case, it would be insanely cool.
- wheybags 6y agoNo, it's more that the consoles they're emulating have GPUs, so they emulate the GPUs with the computers GPU.
- danielscrubs 6y agoSo it wouldn't be possible to play PS2 games on my MacBook because it has an integrated Intel Iris Graphics GPU?
- galad87 6y agoIt would be possible. An Intel Iris Graphics GPU is good enough for a PS2 emulator.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> Macs tend to lack decent GPUs In 2012, I played through the entirety of Persona 4 in PCSX2 on a Macbook Air with an Intel HD Graphics 4000. I was using Bootcamp (even back then when it was more current, getting the native Mac version to actually run was a PITA), but clearly the hardware is sufficient. Persona 4 is among the easier games to emulate IIRC, but I'd expect that in 2020 both the hardware and software would be more capable.
- karatestomp 6y agoMy 2014 MacBook Pro with Intel graphics can play lots of Unity games just fine, including Kerbal Space Program. Can't crank the graphics all the way up on all of them (can on some!) but it's fine. Minecraft's good, maxed out. Any older games, of course. Most of the new wave of Baldur's Gate-alikes and sequels, if I don't max out the pretty, run fine. And that's on 6-year-old Intel graphics. Definitely no problem with PS2/N64 emulation or earlier. Only reason I do almost zero gaming on it these days is that they killed 32-bit support, and with it most of my library.
- bzb3 6y agoFrom my experience with open source projects: nobody in the team owns a Mac.
- john_alan 6y agoI disagree with that. macOS is basically BSD and it’s great for Dev. Most of the devs I work with use it.
- Jonnax 6y agoYou have to define what kind of developers you're talking about. Do they work with graphics? OSX doesn't really have many native games running on it. So clearly there's a whole group of developers who aren't Mac first. Like OSX is enjoyed by a lot of developers because it's similar to Linux. However Apple deprecated openGL, aren't using Vulkan but have their own thing called Metal. So that makes it quite OSX specific. Edit: Looks like someone is working on it: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18
- snickerbockers 6y agoApple ditched OpenGL and Vulkan for their own exclusive 3D graphics API. They're a terrible platform to develop for.
- john_alan 6y ago...if you're writing cross-platform games. FTFY
- snickerbockers 6y agoOP is literally asking why PCSX2 isn't cross-platform.
- majewsky 6y ago> if you're writing cross-platform games and not using one of the established game engines that wrap OpenGL/Metal/Vulkan FTFY
- galad87 6y agoProbably because there were no contributor interested in porting it to macOS. There is some activity on https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 , it seems the biggest issue is that the PCSX2 JIT is 32bit only.
- chkuendig 6y agoSee https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 Looks like there's a working build again.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoAnyone manage to build a binary from that tree? I'd be interested to try it.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoPCSX2's JIT is 32bit only, so that's probably one reason at least more recently.
- pedrocx486 6y agoI always wondered why most emulators keep OpenGL/DirectX as renderers instead of porting to Vulkan, I imagine because that would be an insanely tall task to tackle?
- fulafel 6y agoYou can cover most users with OpenGL + DirectX, so it's good to keep them. Vulkan is more rare. Also making software is slow, Vulkan is a new API.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoVulkan is also unpleasant to use directly. If WebGPU takes off, I'd bet that becomes the common API everyone codes against, because it will be everywhere and its a better developer experience.
- MegaDeKay 6y agoEmulators with Vulkan include RPCS3, Dolphin, Flycast, Yuzu, PPSSPP, Xenia...
- pedrocx486 6y agoNice, I wasn't aware of those using Vulkan, especially Dolphin. Thanks for pointing out.
- pantalaimon 6y agoEasy, because nobody has written a Vulkan backend yet. I would expect those emulators would be happy about patches for that.
- jimbob45 6y agoIf your programmers all exclusively have experience in DirectX/OpenGL, you're likely to stick with what you 100% know works and will be fastest for your team.
- Fej 6y agoPCSX2 is a really nice piece of software and often gets overshadowed by more popular emulators, it's really nice to see the devs getting some attention. The feats they've accomplished are substantial - I'd go so far to say that it's the best way to play many PS2 games.
- nyanpasu64 6y agoFrom reading this progress report (I'm not an active user of PCSX2), it seems this emulator uses per-game hacks frequently. On the other hand, Dolphin (which I'm a semi-active user and used to follow development) never performs per-game disk patches and only rarely uses per-game emulator-level hacks.
- djmips 6y agoIt's true but the PS2 is a much more convoluted system to emulate with more moving parts and undocumented behaviour in the timing and interaction between these parts as compared to the relatively simpler Gamecube. This also made the Gamecube easier to develop for IMO (I developed games on both systems)
- twistedcheeslet 6y agoThe PS2 emulation scene is what ended up driving me to IT and eventually software development back when they hosted their forums on NGEmu. Tons of respect to all the contributors for keeping the endeavor alive - incredible what they've managed to accomplish. Unrelated, has anyone ever tried getting PCSX2 to run on ARM chips?
- opencl 6y agoThere's an Android port but unfortunately it's by some company that's selling it and blatantly violating the GPL. https://pcsx2.net/286-the-pcsx2-team-s-statement-regarding-the-damonps2-emulator.html https://pcsx2.net/286-the-pcsx2-team-s-statement-regarding-t...
- colejohnson66 6y agoI was initially gonna say the GPL permits selling your software, and even says you don’t have to release the code to everyone (just those who own your software), but then the developer said they will open source at 80 million downloads? That’s a violation.