Kilauea; Mount Etna; Mount Yasur; Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira; Piton de la Fournaise; Erta Ale.
Not long ago, we covered a Sega Genesis for Windows Phone 8 called. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was a terrific console, but many gamers would still love to play newer console games on their phones. Thanks to EmiGens’ developer, now they can! After months in beta, Andre’s Playstation One emulator is now live on the Windows Phone Store.
The emulator has fairly limited compatibility and can’t run games at full speed on current Windows Phone 8 hardware, but it’s still a very promising release for Playstation emulation fans. Head past the break for full review with video!
The first Sony console The original Playstation debuted in 1994. First planned as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES, Nintendo made the biggest blunder in gaming history and broke ties with Sony.
Thus Sony chose to release the Playstation as their first videogame console, starting down the road that leads to this week’s launch of the Playstation 4. Display modes.
Portrait display modes - Image at right is set to 'Stretch.' EmiPSX supports both portrait and landscape configurations. As you’d expect, landscape is far more ideal because of the larger view it offers.
The only real video option to note is a choice between “Stretch” and “FullScreen” modes. In this case, Stretch actually runs games in their original 1:33 aspect ratio (or as close to it as possible), which video enthusiasts would usually refer to as full screen or pillarboxed. The “FullScreen” option is the one that actually stretches the image to fit the entire phone’s display. This can look okay in landscape, but certainly not in portrait orientation. Since this mode is stretches the display and not the other way around, it would be more accurate for “FullScreen” to be called “Stretch.” Controls. Like EmiGens Plus, EmiPSX allows users to reposition every single button anywhere on-screen in either orientation.
That should make it easy to get them in a comfortable spot. Beyond that, the controls show a marked improvement compared to Andre’s previous emulator. For one, the default buttons and d-pad actually look like those of a Playstation controller. Players can also toggle to a “Simple Skin” in which the on-screen controls become simple white outlines (pictured above). Either way, they just look so much better than EmiGens’ rough controls.
I haven’t played enough games to properly test this, but it even looks like EmiPSX’s d-pad is more responsive. In my short playtime with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I didn’t notice the problem of the d-pad ceasing to work when my thumb exceeded the button graphic. Indeed, the Simple Skin shows a circular pattern around the directions, seemingly indicating that EmiPSX watches that entire space for input instead of just the main directions.
EmiPSX’s other big control improvement is! That makes this the fifth Windows Phone 8 game/app to work with the accessory, and the second emulator to do so ( is the first). Again, we don’t have a controller to test the support, but it should make for a superior play experience compared to touch screen controls. Game selection and in-game menu. EmiPSX’s game selection menu falls a few notches short of other developers’ emulators.
Every time you launch the app you’ll have to select between SD Card and Internal storage before your Roms will actually show up. Really it should default to Internal storage (which everyone has) and just let users toggle to SD Card if they like. The list itself does not support screenshots, which is a shame. It also clutters things up with letters used for alphabetical selection, so that you can only see two or three games at one time. Jumping to letters of the alphabet isn’t bad, but a little reorganizing could allow for 4-5 games to fit onscreen. Pressing the Back button during a game brings up the in-game menu.
From here, players can jump to the “Configure” menu (now listed in English!), save their current state, and load save states. Notably missing is the ability to take screenshots via the menu. Yeah, you can do that with the Windows Phone hardware buttons, but most emulators also let users take pictures using menu controls.
Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to exit the game you’re playing after viewing the menu. Should you back out of the game by mistake, there doesn’t seem to be any way to resume from exactly where you off. Free Download Winrar Zip Archiver. That can be a big deal when you’re 15 minutes into Symphony of the Night, haven’t saved yet, and press the wrong thing by mistake. Frankly, the only way to exit out of a game should be by choosing to do so from a menu. Adding a game to your phone. EmiPSX supports two types of “Roms” -.BIN and.ISO files.
Some sites store Playstation game images in another format, in which case you’d need to convert it to the proper format before the emulator could read it. Of course, you can’t legally play game images that you didn’t create yourself, so quit using them pesky websites, sonny. You can put games on your phone via SkyDrive or SD Card. Note that adding large games via SkyDrive can be a hassle. In my experience, if my screen timed out while downloading a game then the download would fail. I had to turn off the screen time out via my phone’s settings before I could successfully import a game.
If the same experience holds true for others, the app should mention the screen issue within its Help menu. (By the way, it has a pretty good Help menu.) To BIOS or not BIOS? The emulator supports playing games with or without a BIOS file. The BIOS is the core program of the Playstation and can’t be legally distributed with the app.
If you do use a BIOS, it has to be named SCPH1001.BIN specifically, so don’t grab the wrong one. As with EmiGens, the installed BIOS file shows up on the regular ROMs list. That’s a waste of space; its presence should be displayed in the settings menu and nowhere else. The settings menu does allow users to enable or disable the BIOS file. You’d want to do this because some games aren’t compatible with the BIOS for whatever reason.
In my own experience, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night simply wouldn’t accept button presses with the BIOS enabled. That probably shouldn’t happen. Performance and compatibility. Ordinarily I would test several games when evaluating an emulator. Sadly, my phone is all but full so I had to settle for adding a single game: the aforementioned Symphony of the Night. Xbox Windows Phone gamers might remember that the underrated and overpriced is closely based on Symphony of the Night.
The Playstation is a relatively powerful 32-bit console and first-generation Windows Phone 8 devices aren’t all that beefy, so it might take a while for the developer to achieve perfect emulation. As it stands, Castlevania runs at a lower-than-normal but still playable frame rate. The sub-par FPS count would be less noticeable in Japanese Role-Playing Games, which is the genre that people tend to prefer when playing emulators on touch screens anyway. Speaking of which, EmiPSX doesn’t have compatibility with all Playstation games yet. It does support a handful of big titles though, such as Final Fantasy VII and VIII and Gran Turismo 2. To view the full list and discuss compatibility findings, head to the in our forums. Promise for the future EmiPSX has some rough UI edges, but it’s great to see improved touch screen controls and MOGA Pro Controller support in the emulator.
Hopefully those improvements make it to EmiGens Plus soon as well. The most important things with an emulator are accuracy and compatibility. I doubt that EmiPSX will reach 100 percent performance on current Windows Phone 8 hardware. But the Nokia (with a woeful 16 GB of internal storage) will soon debut, touting the much stronger Snapdragon 800 processor.
Emulators like this one should run much better on Snapdragon 800 devices, so we can look forward to that. As for increased compatibility, that can only come from extensive user testing and continued developer support. Let’s do our best to to keep getting more games running on the emulator! • EmiPSX – Windows Phone 8 – 2 MB – $2.49 –. I'm using a lumia 720 and I just can't do anything with this emulator. Dumping roms is a massive chore because I don't have a microsd card so I have to rely on the sluggish skydrive service which takes me hours to download a single damn rom.
Why not just add a way to let you manually transfer it via your computer, which would be - by far - the easiest way to dump roms? And then the emulator takes ages to open the game, but as soon as I close it, I can't open it anymore and the emulator does basically jackshit no matter what I do. I tried many games in this absolutely torturing of a dumping process and I'm glad I decided to try the app before buying it because, as of now, I think it isn't worth a single penny. So many fan boys. Both consoles are gaming consoles, at the end of the day they both play games perfectly and pretty much the same way, unlike mostly everyone commenting I have actually played both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and I thought both Consoles were amazing. Both consoles have great features and games, I've been an Xbox player for 10 years and you don't see me acting like a kid saying crap like 'Xbox is King' or 'PS4 sucks' both consoles are great get over it and grow up to who ever says this kinda crap.
I contacted the author. He said to contact PowerA for support (seriously). I then asked him for verification that he has seen his emulator use a Moga Pro, ever. He said no, he's just been told it worked at some point. I don't think he fully understands the Wp8/powera relationship atm because of him telling me to go to the hardware vendor. (Powera does NOT support wp8.
If the app developer codes support into the app, then it could work, which is why I contacted the dev.) I'll contact the tester directly. The main limitation of WP8 versus Android for example is that it doesn't support dynamic binary translation, this makes the OS more secure at the cost of severly limiting the performance of emulators that rely on this method to achieve the fastest possible performance.
Previous emulators on WP8 have been pure interpretters which are much slower (hence why VBA8 will make your phone melt) but offer extremely good compatibility and can be ported directly from a C/C++ implementation on another platform. EmiPSX represents a significant advance for WP8 because (if I recall correctly) Andre is using an intermediate method called threaded interpretation, this gives much better performance than a simple interpretter while still being possible on WP8. Unfortunately since it requires massive modification of the emulator core it effectively means starting from scratch compatibility wise. TLDR: Don't expect too much in terms of compatibility and appreciate this emulator is significantly different in technical terms to previous releases on WP8. Well, there has actually been a to get at VirtualProtect and other hidden API functions in Windows 8 store apps using.NET reflection. I don't know if this is viable in WP8 since it's relying on Win32, although it may work on Windows RT.
In any case no developers have wanted to waste time trying this method for their own store apps given it's circumventing MS publication rules. Also if I'm reading your proposition correctly (sorry I'm more of an assembly guy) you are suggesting translation to MSIL then relying on the platform's.NET runtime? I feel this would be slower than a threaded interpretter calling well written native code (or even ARM assembly) for each target instruction. Essentially, yes. You'd basically translate the PSX instructions to MSIL and then let the.NET runtime JIT them for you. I'm absolutely no emulator guy, but if that is possible in the WP8 SDK (and it is on the full.NET runtime) then it would be as if you've written the PSX game in C# and DirectX.
I feel like that should be plenty fast, as we know that XNA games run just fine on WP8 (and even 7.5 with its much weaker JIT and GC). Cisco Aspire Keygen. Like I've said, I've never written an emulator, but I can imagine it's like reading the binary of the PSX game, encounter a bunch of instructions that say 'push these triangles into the vertex buffer' using whatever graphics library the PSX used.
With either System.Reflection.Emit or the System.Linq.Expressions namespaces you can emit code that then does 'push these triangles into the vertex buffer' using the DirectX 11 API. You'd 'interpret' the binary once and then compile it to MSIL and use that from then on. On the desktop, you can even store the generated MSIL binary and reload that the next time that you run the game instead of doing it all over again. If done well, then this generated code can be as fast as handwritten C#, which should easily be sufficient for PSX games. To give you some idea, this is the generated expression tree (that is then compiled to MSIL and subsequently to native code by the JIT) to deserialize a JSON-like text to C# classes, for a library I'm working on. Thanks for the explanation, I still don't see how the.NET JIT is going run close to the equivalent native code implementation, each MSIL instruction is going to take up multiple native CPU instructions and use more memory. The JIT compiler will be storing all the native code that corresponds to an MSIL basic block in RAM then running it each time.
Contrast this with a native code interpretter where emulated instructions can be optimised to use specific CPU register sets or SIMD operations (really useful for emulating the PS1's vector maths unit) and informed use of C pointers can directly leverage a CPU's addressing modes. With a good compiler like Visual Studio this doesn't necessarily require the use of intrinsics or assembly libraries, it's quite capable of optimising and auto-vectorising well-written C code by itself. In a jitter these advanced optimisations would have to be performed at runtime, which then becomes a law of diminishing returns. Using a threaded interpretter allows the nested subroutine calls necessary to decode an emulated op-code to be skipped. The fact that even with the above advantages the native coded EmiPSX is struggling to run games at good frame rate is a testiment to the amount of power needed.
I wish I could speak more from experience, but it's honestly more of a hunch. I do know what the.NET runtime is capable of however and I think you're underestimating it. The hardware inside a Lumia 920 is probably at least an order of magnitude more powerful than a PSX. Generally, C# is within 2x the speed of optimized C++ so it should have plenty of headroom in running PSX era games. So going by that, I'd say that if creating a transpiler that translates the PSX code into MSIL which is then JIT'ed is possible on WP8, it's going to be faster than an interpreter in native code.
I think something similar can be seen in browsers: the JIT compiled JavaScript of today is much, much faster than the interpreters that we used to have. Just the improved cache coherency of a compiled set of instructions should give it an advantage over an interpreter.
Again, not saying I'm right, but I'm not sure what the bottleneck here would be:).
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