Pandemonium! (PAL, 50hz) - PCSXR-PGXP/Pete'sOGL2 TWEAK - Widescreen GTE hack (PAL aspect ratio)

Channel:

TheDimensioner

Subscribers:

337

Published on August 17, 2017 6:07:08 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_jdXyg67n0

Game:

Pandemonium! (1996)

Duration: 6:31

682 views

6

I was wandering how PAL games ran on PSX emulators, since everywhere I look people say Europeans were mistreated when it came to releasing games in their region. But I saw somewhere that Pandemonium! had a good PAL port, and from what I've tested, that's true. The NSTC version runs at 60 FPS, but the PAL port isn't simply a slowed down mess like many other PAL releases. It runs at 50 FPS, but it's optimized for that, giving practically the same feel of the NTSC counterpart. The music plays at the same rate as well, and the extra resolution is noticeable when playing at native settings. I used PSX Mednafen at first (since it's the most accurate PSX emulator yet), and using the PAL settings, and setting my monitor to 288p100hz (since low resolutions need a higher refresh rate to show an image), the game looks gorgeous. Although the image is still squished for some reason (like many, if not all PAL releases), the thinner scanlines, with a little extra resolution and smooth playability, shows how great PAL ports could be, if well optimized.

Then, I used PGXP with the widescreen hack, to see if it looked better with enhancements, and it sure does. I also had set a "PAL" resolution for this, this time 1152x864@50hz (x3 384x288). I've also set PAL specific settings for the emulator, and it ran just as smooth, without the need for overclocking. This game is so well optimized, that I could even record at a higher resolution at the full 50 FPS, with very minor stuttering here and there, when the FPS dipped to 49 on heavy scenes (just when recording). I had to re-scale the vertical aspect though, to fit the PAL look, simply because the game was meant to look like that with this port, and if I had "stretched" the image to fit more inside the 16:9 aspect (due to using the widescreen hack), artifacts related to offset pixels would be visible. At the correct scaling, filtering isn't necessary, so this is the sharpest "high frame rate" video I've done so far.

Recorded at 1152x864@50 (refitted to 1152x759 for the PAL aspect ratio), ResHack X/Y 3, no filtering nor shaders, PGXP "Memory only" mode. Upscaled the video to 2188x1080@50.

I always preferred European games in the past, mainly because it had Spanish localisations, because I didn't know English at the time. I didn't care about lower framerates, but since most of my consoles were modded, I guess they already converted PAL games to NTSC.

PCSXR-PGXP by iCatButler. Pete's OpenGL2 plugin tweak by tapeq. Using the widescreen hack.

PCSXR-PGXP emulator (with Pete'sOGL2 TWEAK and OpenGL 1.78 plugins): http://ngemu.com/threads/pcsxr-pgxp.186369/

Pete'sOpenGL2 plugin tweak (this version does not support PGXP): http://ngemu.com/threads/peteopengl2tweak-tweaker-for-peteopengl2-plugin-w-gte-accuracy-hack.160319/

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