Playing the Xenosaga games with the PCSX-2 emulator...

I was just curious as to how many people here have tried this, given that an HD remake of the Saga games probably isn't very likely. Anyway, I am working my way through the first Xenosaga now, as I finally got this emulator working properly on Linux (it's a piece of cake to set up on Windows, though, so don't be intimidated). My graphics card is only an NVIDIA GTX 660, but I was blown away at the improvement. It really makes Xenosaga look like an early PS3 game, and upscales to 1080p quite well. You will need a pretty spiffy processor though, something in the ballpark of 3.6 ghz. Check out this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7XxpLSUtk

http://pcsx2.net/

I know in Primantis' early days on Godsibb, he was posting screenshots of his playthroughs, but he's moved on since then. :D I haven't had a computer that can handle it, but I do know of its existence! :D Thanks for sharing!!

I played through the entire trilogy using PCSX2 last year, without any major problems. I think I had some very occasional slowdown, and I had to fiddle with some settings to get the shadows to display properly in Episode 2, but other than that it worked very well. As for specs, I have an Intel i7 2600k (@stock) and GTX 560 Ti.

I could always go grab some screenshots if you want them...?

Gwendal wrote:I played through the entire trilogy using PCSX2 last year, without any major problems. I think I had some very occasional slowdown, and I had to fiddle with some settings to get the shadows to display properly in Episode 2, but other than that it worked very well. As for specs, I have an Intel i7 2600k (@stock) and GTX 560 Ti.

I could always go grab some screenshots if you want them...?

Thanks for the feedback;

I just was going off of what they said on some forums I read (one of the developers claimed that Xenosaga was a really difficult game to run at full speed and said 3.6 ghz), it's nice to know that actually isn't a hard requirement.  I finally got around to trying it because the Linux version of that emulator hasn't seen updates to its OpenGL plugin for a long time, but they're finally putting some work into it.  Anyway, I would be interested to see some screenshots if you feel like bothering, just to see the difference in the Direct X plugin and the Open GL one.  No big deal if you're too busy though, I'd just be curious to see how far this Open GL plugin has to go yet, and since our cards are very similar it should give me a good idea.

*Also, on a side note, I just replayed Xenogears with the PCSX-R emulator (with the PEOPS plugin and simulated bios).  I was amazed at how smooth it runs now, and how great it looks in 1080p, I actually think that emulator has surpassed ePSXe as the best way to play PSX games.   It didn't even crash in the battle against Deus like the PS2 and older versions of PCSX/ePSXe did!  I should point out I used the OpenGL plug in, so I can't guarantee your results would be the same with Direct X, but I'd imagine they would be.

Daaaamn, I'll probably never use it (I've got the games themselves, and I have no clue how to use emulators) but the existence of it certainly makes for high quality clips! While watching that video, I felt like I could reach out and touch KOSY's beautiful hair. uvu

I still need to upgrade my computer to be able to play Xenosaga with it. I tried, but it lags here and there, but particularly bad on cutscenes. Same with trying to use Xebra for Xenogears, except the only thing that lagged there was the audio.

I think my issue is my graphics card, since I read that Xenosaga is both CPU and GPU-intensive. Mine is.. okay. My CPU isn't all that bad considering it's age. I'm using an AMD Phenom II 4X overclocked to 3.8GHz, and a GeForce GTS 250.

At first I was going to try to use the emulator to practice strategies for speedruns, or even TAS the game (Until I learned how the PS2 processes RNG. Dream now shattered, haha), but it lags a little too much in certain areas. Playing it in 1080p is quite awesome I bet.

About psx2, I played a lot on emulator in Xenosaga after my console dead 3 years ago.

I can tell you that for first time I beat all 3 episodes on Intel 3,2 GHz dual core. It lags, but with 1x native graphic (one like in console) it was fully playable.
Most problematic was ep1, it was slowing down on cutscenes a lot, don't mention the mechs fight because that was nightmare, but that problem was fixed with 0.9.8+ emulator version and it was nice to play.
I even played a lot ep2 and ep3 with 2x native graphic on that dual core, it mostly slow down on scenes when Shion talk with u-do waves, it was hard for computer to emulate.

From what I read around year ago, ps2 emulator works only on 2 cores max, they didn't think about improve it so it would use more cores because "they need to rewrite whole emulator". I don't know if that change.

After I beat Xenoblade on my AMD 6 core computer (I started to play it because that computer wasn't used for months... XD ) that works amazing good even on 2x Native graphic, I plan to replay all xenosaga episodes in 2x Native too, year without playing xenosaga is lost year XD, So I will tell you how it was.

What interesting fact that I saw on both emulators that DirectX 11 make graphic in emulator disappear. In Xenoblade whole location disappear (snow one) and as for xenosaga, friend of mine, when we turn on ep3 the characters models disappear XD. Invisible characters...

Okay, here's a few screenshots from the trilogy. The FMVs don't look too great, but everything else upscales nicely (apart from the UI elements, to an exent).

Edit: I tried the embed image function, but it didn't work too well. So you'll have to go here instead: https://imgur.com/a/VuWtj#0

I've had some trouble with shadows in ep. 2 and 3, sepia-tone filter and the last dungeon in ep 3 (specifically, it either looked very nice but slowed down fps in half or looked and sounded smooth but displayed some of the video effects wrongly); there were about two boss fights with giant mechs in ep. 1 that slowed fps down when the camera turned towards them.

I have no idea if that was because I needed better hardware or I was not thorough enough in choosing a proper emulator and plugin versions or something though. My setup was tuned according to the advice I've seen for making Front Mission 5 work and I was hesitant to experiment too much in case I needed to play that but forgot how to  . I am not very good at this stuff, to put it mildly.

What version of emulator are you using?
Latest one is 0.9.9 and so far I remember it was working fine, as far I checked.... As I said before ver 0.9.7 had this mech problem since it render all reflection from them and it was crazy, like 5-10 ftp. Ver 0.9.8 had this problem fixed but it lag on battle scenes in ep 3 in both character and mechs fights. I wasn't slow down, but before you choose to attack emulator need time to "think" and it was 2-3 seconds of wait before animation of attack turn on. It wasn't big problem but it start to annoy after some time.

I think that best episode to emulate was ep2. Whole gameplay was sometime even faster then it was on console (walking around, fights). Only problem I had with ep2 it was little slow down on sidequests, and one with cleaning windows of repair etc when you have second to do it was really hard to do, I had to change some emulator settings to do them.

Right now I'm using version 1.2.1, but I'm not sure that one was released when I played through the trilogy. Looking through my Pcsx2 folders, it was probably version 1.1.0.5557 (svn).

oh, I had to check it...
Well I don't see big difference on my 2 core (I checked that 1.2.1 ver and my 0.9.8. that I keep for ripping models textures)
With 2x native graphic I had 34-40 ftps, not bad but after instaling that visual studio c++ soft that is need to turn on 1.2.1 emulator it totally messed up my 0.9.8 ver, it freeze now after I get into save/load menu... :/ not nice...
0.9.9 version seems good... Now I'm not sure if keep new one or not since I heard that you can't rip textures with old way on 0.99. but that's only my problem XD normal player won't care about it...