New PlayStation1 core SwanStation now available for RetroArch!

Libretro Team

SwanStation is a totally new PlayStation 1 (aka PSX) emulator focusing on playability, speed, and long-term maintainability. Accuracy is not the main focus of the emulator, but the goal is to be as accurate as possible while maintaining performance suitable for low-end devices. “Hack” options are discouraged, the default configuration should support all playable games with only some of the enhancements having compatibility issues. A “BIOS” ROM image is required to start the emulator and to play games. You can use an image from any hardware version or region, although mismatching game regions and BIOS regions may have compatibility issues. A ROM image is not provided with the emulator for legal reasons, you should dump this from your own console using Caetla or other means. SwanStation includes hardware rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan and D3D11), upscaling and 24-bit color and a 64-bit dynarec.

It is currently available on the Libretro buildbot for the following platforms:

  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Android (AArch64-only)

Features

  • Relatively high degree of compatibility
  • Has three hardware renderers: OpenGL, Vulkan, and Direct3D11
  • Allows you to internally upscale the resolution
  • Has a dynamic recompiler and cached interpreter CPU core
  • Ability to run PSX CDROM emulation on a separate thread, reducing frame time spikes

    • How to get it

    There are two ways to install and/or update the SwanStation core:

    a – If you have already installed the core before, you can go to Online Updater and select ‘Update Installed Cores’.

    b – If you haven’t installed the core yet, go to Online Updater, ‘Core Updater’, and select ‘Sony – PlayStation (SwanStation)’ from the list. It will then download and install this core.

    BIOS required

    SwanStation, like Beetle PSX, requires a real BIOS in order to work. There is no HLE BIOS like PCSX ReARMed.

    A “BIOS” ROM image is required to start the emulator and to play games. You can use an image from any hardware version or region, although mismatching game regions and BIOS regions may have compatibility issues. A ROM image is not provided with the emulator for legal reasons, you should dump this from your own console using Caetla or other means.

    Recognized BIOS images:

    • scph5500.bin
    • scph5501.bin
    • scph5502.bin

    Benchmarks

    System specs: CPU – Intel Core i7 7700k | GPU – Geforce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB VRAM, 2018) | 16GB RAM

    We’ve performed some basic performance tests between SwanStation and Beetle PSX HW. We are using the same baseline resolution (1x) for both cores, and we try to make the test as fair as possible by disabling features such as PGXP and texture filtering for Beetle PSX HW (both features which SwanStation lacks).

    SwanStation

    Title Direct3D11 Vulkan OpenGL
    Tekken 3 396fps 414fps 335fps
    Alien Trilogy 538fps 552fps 499fps

    Beetle PSX HW

    NOTE: Beetle PSX HW does not have a Direct3D 11 renderer

    Title Vulkan OpenGL
    Tekken 3 326fps 229fps
    Alien Trilogy 480fps 473fps

    As you can see, on average performance is overwhelmingly in SwanStation’s favor. It does have to be said that Beetle PSX HW right now has some unique features that SwanStation lacks, such as PGXP and texture replacement.

    Conclusion

    You should definitely give SwanStation a go if you want a high performance PlayStation1 emulator. If you find Beetle PSX HW to be running too slowly for you on your system, you should check if SwanStation is faster instead.

Preview of custom texture replacement pack for WipeOut 2097/XL (Beetle PSX HW)!

Libretro Team

Here is a sneak peek of LyonHrt’s upcoming texture pack replacement for Wipeout 2097/XL! You will be able to use this with the Beetle PSX HW core on RetroArch! Experience Wipeout XL/2097 with never-before-seen fidelity!

NOTE: To use this texture replacement pack, you will need to use Beetle PSX HW and in specific the Vulkan renderer.

Beetle PSX HW – Experimental texture replacement now available!

Libretro Team

DISCLAIMER: Libretro as a group or entity has no affiliation or involvement in the creation of assets contained in any texture pack

So this has been a project that has been cooking in the oven for about a year in the form of a bounty. The goal is to come up with a way to not only dump all the textures of a PlayStation1 game, but also to replace them with user-supplied textures.

Doing this is hard with PlayStation renderers due to the general low level of abstraction of these renderers, which is why it’s not exactly a commonplace feature in many PS1 emulators.

So far we have let it cook slowly in the oven. However, the recent release of people preparing a Proof Of Concept demo in the form of a Chrono Cross texture pack and the circulation of a modified Beetle PSX HW core that adds support for custom texture injection has led us to make the decision to include this feature already in the buildbot cores rather than wait it out. We hope by doing this, that this feature can organically grow and that more people start taking an active interest in making their own texture packs this way for their own favorite content. Libretro is all about enabling people the power and freedom to do what they want with their legally bought content, after all.

Requirements/Availability

Should only require the Vulkan renderer and a graphics card that is compatible with the Vulkan API. Will not work with either OpenGL or software rendering.

Android, Linux and Windows are all supported targets.

How to get it

The usual. Either you have Beetle PSX HW already installed, in which case you would just go to RetroArch’s Online Updater and select ‘Update Cores’. In case you don’t have it already installed, go to ‘Online Updater’, select ‘Core Updater’ or ‘Core Downloader’ (depends on the version of RetroArch you’re using), and then download Beetle PSX HW.

Explanation of core options

Two new core options have been added.

Dump Textures

While the game is running, it will dump all current active textures it comes across to a directory. The name of this folder is [gamename]-texture-replacements, and it will dumped inside the same dir that your content (ISO or other image format) comes from.

Replace Textures

It will attempt to use all HD textures from the ‘texture-replacements’ directory. The name of this folder is [gamename]-texture-replacements, and it will try to read this directory from the same dir that your content (ISO or other image format) comes from.

NOTE: Later on, we might add another option that allows you to point the dumping and injection path to somewhere else. Right now this is a problem for instance when you have your content stored on a slow disk device like a HDD but you want your texture replacement files to be read from your much faster but smaller SSD instead. Right now, you are forced to move the image to your SSD as well, because otherwise it just dumps and/or reads these texture replacement files from the same dir as the image, in this case the mechanical harddrive.

How to make it work

Make sure you have the textures extracted already in your [ganename]texture-replacements dir, and make sure that the dir is in the same dir that your game content file (ISO or other image format) comes from.

Start Beetle PSX HW, make sure that you are using the Vulkan renderer (it won’t work with either the software renderer or GL renderer), and then make sure the ‘Replace Textures’ option is enabled.

If it works properly, you’ll start seeing low-resolution textures replaced by higher-resolution ones.

Screenshots

Future

We hope to provide you with an article in the near future that goes into how to create your own texture pack for a game.

Is the format set in stone? Is it complete? Probably no to both. It is a Work-In-Progress. However, we hope that by putting it out there already, the community can already start experimenting with the option, putting it through its paces, and see what its limitations are and how far it can be pushed.

PCSX ReARMed now has dynarec support across multiple platforms!

Libretro Team


If you can recall, a few days ago, Beetle PSX gained a dynamic recompiler based on Lightrec/GNU Lightning. We are happy to inform you that the latest version of PCSX ReARMed now available on the buildbot also has Lightrec support enabled for x86 (32bit and 64bit) and Aarch64 (64bit ARM).

How to get it

There are two ways to update your PCSX ReARMed core:

a – If you have already installed the core before, you can go to Online Updater and select ‘Update Installed Cores’.

b – If you haven’t installed the core yet, go to Online Updater, ‘Core Updater’, and select ‘PCSX ReARMed’ from the list. It will then download and install this core.

So what has changed?

Before, PCSX ReARMed only had a dynamic recompiler for 32bit ARM-based systems. Every other CPU architecture would instead have to revert to a CPU interpreter core. This mean that for every other achitecture, it would be far slower than the optimized 32bit ARM versions.

What has changed now is that x86 (32bit and 64bit) and Aarch64 (64bit ARM) now use the Lightrec dynamic recompiler. ARM 32bit will still use the Ari64 dynamic recompiler because it just happens to be much faster than Lightrec.

Other things important of note – the 32bit ARM version uses a different renderer, NEON GPU renderer. All the other versions use P.E.Op.S. Soft GPU. NEON GPU Plugin has an enhanced resolution which gives you a 4x upscaling, while P.E.Op.S. Soft GPU doesn’t have any such feature. We’d like to bring the NEON GPU Renderer over to the other platforms but right now, the C codepaths are pretty bad compared to the optimized 32bit ARM NEON codepaths. It would require a lot of work to bring it up to par and get rid of the graphics glitches, so Pete’s Soft it is for now.

Current limitations

  • Right now it won’t work with the HLE BIOS feature. The dynamic recompiler only works right now with a real BIOS.
  • Runahead won’t work reliably right now.
  • Right now, Lightrec in PCSX ReARMed uses the Cycle Timing Check mode. If you can recall from our earlier article on Beetle PSX, this is a dynarec mode with additional cycle timing checks, which makes it significantly slower than the ‘Max performance’ mode. Hopefully PCSX ReARMed can eventually use the ‘Max Performance’ mode soon, giving us an additional speed boost.

We hope these issues can be resolved soon.

Performance tests

Test hardware: Desktop PC – Core i7 7700k, Windows 10

Game Interpreter (No Dithering) Interpreter (With Dithering) Dynarec (No Dithering) Dynarec (With Dithering)
Final Doom 246fps 245fps 621fps 616fps
Resident Evil 250fps 248fps 642fps 639fps
Tekken 3 190fps 175fps 279fps 250fps

Beetle PSX Dynarec Update – Switch alpha port plus runahead support – lower latency than original hardware!

Libretro Team


As an addendum to our earlier Beetle PSX dynarec post, a lot has changed in a couple of days:

  • Several important bugfixes have been pushed for ARM v7/AArch64. This should benefit Android users and ARM Linux SBC users.
  • Runahead support is finally working
  • Alpha release Switch version now available

Runahead support – lower latency than original hardware

Runahead is one of RetroArch’s crowning features as a frontend ever since we debuted this revolutionary feature in 2018.

Most systems more complex than the Atari 2600 will display a reaction to input after one or two frames have already been shown. For example, Super Mario Bros on the NES always has one frame of input latency on real hardware. Super Mario World on SNES has two frames of latency.

Runahead allows RetroArch to “remove” this baked-in latency by running multiple instances of a core simultaneously, and quickly emulating multiple frames at a time if input changes. This strategy has some analogs to frame rollback, similar to how GGPO handles high-lag connections. For it to work reliably, you need to figure out the amount of lag frames a game has, and then set Runahead frame count to that value. When done correctly, not only can you eliminate any perceptible lag, you can actually achieve latency that is quantifiably lower than when played on the original hardware [yes, with a CRT]. Surely that is the stuff of miracles on display technologies that have inherent far higher latency than any CRT screen, plus all the added additional latency of modern day PC OSes on top of the typical overhead brought about by emulators.

So up until now, runahead was not possible on Beetle PSX. Why not? For one, runahead relies on savestates. If serialization and savestates are well implemented, runahead can be used on a libretro core. Second, for runahead to run at fullspeed at any amount of frames, your hardware has to meet the demands of running a game at well above fullspeed. So the lower the FPS, the less conducive that core will be for runahead purposes even IF savestates are well implemented.

A couple of days ago, runahead would not work with the dynarec. This required some modifications. Zach Cook has since managed to fix these issues, and now we can use runahead just fine.

How to use it

First, make sure that you set Hardware Renderer to ‘Software’. Unless you are using a very high end CPU from the last two years, we recommend you leave Internal GPU Resolution at 1x. Combining the dynarec with runahead is a very CPU intensive task. You need all the headroom you can get.

To tinker with runahead settings, go to Quick Menu -> Latency.

Enable ‘Run-Ahead To Reduce Latency’, and set ‘Number of Frames To Run Ahead’ to a value of your choosing. For runahead to run as intended, this value shold match the amount of lag frames of the game.

NOTE: ‘Runahead Use Second Instance’ can give a big performance improvement. Consider always enabling it unless you have reason not to (for instance, some game related issue requires you disable it for whatever reason)

Alpha Switch version available

m4xw has done a quick port of Beetle PSX with the dynarec to the Switch port. He has already uploaded a build that you can try – you’ll have to pass the time with this core until we start deploying this on the buildbot properly.

To use this, extract the contents of this archive into /retroarch/cores/ (assuming RetroArch is already installed).

Performance has dramatically improved over interpreter before – just as an indication, Pepsi Man reportedly runs at fullspeed at 2x software rendering. But be sure to put this build through its paces yourself!