Pcsx2 0.9.8 You Need To Update Some Directx Libraries
Thora Buckner
Hello Windows XP gaming community. I have what i believe are good news for you, if you are into emulation.
I'm a developer and i've recently modified the latest version of the popular PCSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator to make it run again under the Windows XP operating system, since they removed that compatibility by 2016. The development to my modified version of PCSX2 started in May 2020, just when the latest stable official release was made public (v1.6.0), confirming it wasn't indeed compatible with XP. I wanted to do something about it, so i started peeking the code and considering the options i had. Well, after months of testing and patience, i got the latest v1.6.0 stable release from May 2020 running perfectly fine under XP. This project is called "PCSX2 XP" and is been made available from my website:
-xp/
and there is also a github repository:
_XP
You may also join to my discord server, where you can find about my other projects and chat with other xp fans:
I will be answering any questions you have regarding my project down below.
I hope you all find this useful.
Thanks for your attention.
Would it even run at a playable speed on such hardware, though? You're looking at a pre-2004 CPU here pretty much, I might be wrong when paired with a good graphics card but I imagine more recent versions of PCSX2 are more accurate - thus requiring more powerful hardware to run the same content? I might be wrong, I've seldom if ever used it (though have heard negative opinions about its codebase, lol).
I haven't yet, but it should run perfectly fine under XP x64 edition. Also, the emulator can't be completely compiled for 64-bit platforms, however, i've published a guide on how to compile certain components for 64-bit platforms, as some parts can successfully be compiled in 64 bits. here it is: _XP/blob/master/COMPILE-TESTING.md
I've done a couple more advancements towards Windows XP. In special, i was interested on making the DirectX 11 renderer work under XP. It is true there is no native DirectX 11 for Windows XP, but there have been attempts in the past to partially implement it on the system, unofficially of course.
Most didn't seem to work in my context, but there was one that caught my attention and really helped me to partly achieve what i wanted. It is the WineD3D wrapper library, that converts DX11 calls to OGL. Obviously with a performance impact and with occassional bugs, but is interesting nonetheless. Down below you can see a screenshot of the DX11 renderer running with WineD3D. There's a bug with the bios colors but most game runs without any bug at all. I could find about this thanks to posts of fellow MSFN members, so i discovered XomPie's WineD3D libraries, the only ones i could make work. If you are any interested on trying this by yourself, all the information related has been posted on github: _XP/issues/2
Surely interesting find, and extremely impressive! You should show off a few pieces of homebrew and commercial games running in DX11 mode somewhere... if only a YouTube alternative existed that wasn't full of 'le redditors trying to be cool by mocking 2008 YouTube' or literal fascists/communists.
Hi there, im mostly more interested in game emulation, than am i with PC gaming in general. like nes/snes/gb/ds/Ps2/wii etc etc I apoligizing for bumping a thread 1 year later, but i just now decided to try out your custom version, and it works great except for 1 small issue that's been present since older versions, only until it was "finally" fixed in some update for 1.7.0 i think.
It's about the game Megaman X7. The audio seems to always run like 3x faster than normal, and i've confirmed searching all over google and other forums people on other PC platforms experiencing too, and the only solution is to use an older version of the audio plugin from 0.9.x
I tried to copy that r4600 file to the plugins folder but your custom 1.5.0 wont add it to the list or recognize it i guess - so then i made a backup of the current file that was there, and renamed the r4600 file to "Spu2-X.dll" just like yours was named...but the emulator throws an error that it cant detect it or not supported or something. If that makes sense.
Did you remove the ability to have more than 1 plugin type avaiable to choose from on the list ? For the audio dropdown. if it's possible for me to add that older plugin to the list somehow. I dont know why it's only "forced" to use the 2.0.0 dll
I have tested spu2-x-r4600.dll from PCSX2 0.9.8 with other original PCSX2 versions (those provided by the original developers at pcsx2.net), and that issue indeed happens with 1.4.0, 1.5.0-dev and 1.6.0, showing the error "The configured SPU2 plugin file is not a valid dynamic library(LoadCorePlugins)". My PCSX2 builds happen to also have that same issue because it was already present in the originally released versions.
I don't know the exact cause of it, but it probably is down to changes in the emulator plugins code, making some of the old ones incompatible. The latest version to work with spu2-x-r4600.dll is PCSX2 1.2.1, so you can use that one to play Megaman. Does the game runs well with 1.2.1?
And yea actually the 1.2.1 is the one i've had on my computer for many years ever since, until i discovered your thread/github page. And yea i could select the r4600 from the list on there, so the audio works just fine.
I dont have a very good computer in terms of specs - Dell Latitude D620 - Core 2 Duo T7600 2.3 GHZ which is the highest this laptop can support. Integrated Intel Graphics -- i get about 45 to 57-ish depending on where/what on screen and so on. I might be considering a slightly better laptop sometime in the near future (still windows xp only, but a 2nd gen Core i)
This is for the GPD Win2, it uses a 720x1280 (yes that's the correct order) cell phone/tablet style LCD. And it's used in landscape mode. So the vertical refresh goes from left to right, instead of top to bottom.
In older directx games, such as DX8.x, as well as many other older apis, it only displays on the left side of the screen. So if a game is supposed to display at 1280x720, only the left 720 pixels are displayed and the rest of the screen is black/blank.
This is on the newest DCH as well as all drivers, even the 15.x series.
Due to the low power of this device, it's usually great for older games, but this particular issue is rather frequent. There's dx8.dll files that can SOMETIMES mitigate this, but it's very hit'n'miss. So i'd like for it to be fixed for all games.
Thank you.
Best i can offer is a DX Diag. The graphics drivers i have to swap between newer and older ones as newer drivers have atrocious openGL performance. But regardless of the drivers, it still causes half screen when using a verticle 720x1280, 9:16 aspect ratio screen.
I can try to find the driver/device ID for the LCD if possible. But this problem happens on all vertical screens used in landscape mode.
The computer/laptop/handheld is called a "GPD Win 2". A few google searches will show you what it looks like so you get a better understanding of it.
@Alberto_Sykes
Yes, for this specific scenario, you mentioned that the games are working with Direct X8, if you are using Windows* 10, just to let you know, that Operating System works with Direct X 12 and as per Microsoft it is not backward compatible, meaning that some problems are expected when using those games on Windows* 10.
So, it is not an Intel Graphics driver problem, is just that the games were not build to support certain resolutions, the scaling feature on them was not build to support them, they were build to work with smaller resolutions.
In the following link, you will find further suggestions on this matter, where it is suggested to try the compatibility tool, please follow the steps in there and once you get the chance, please let us know the results:
The problem does seem to be specific to this screen orientation on intel drivers. Also it's specific to full screen mode.
Testing a hdmi 800x1280 7" LCD with an nvidia device on my desktop, it worked fine. But when using the same screen as an external display connected to the Win2, it suffered from that half screen issue.
The games i'm playing do support wide screen due to being patched for it, as well as using DX8. So they work fine in windowed mode, but not fullscreen mode. But the games don't support a (fake) windowed-full screen like many modern games.
Furthermore, there's that other problem i linked to, that never got resolved in which newer drivers would half the gpu speed and performance when used on a vertical display in landscape mode with OpenGL software. This doesn't happen with older drivers, only newer ones. So i have to switch to the old drivers when i'm using OpenGL stuff, and i have to switch to newer drivers when using the vulkan API.
And i do have the older directx libraries installed. Such as the famed june 2010 directx redist.