close-to-PSX console emulator

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meesbaker

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Does anyone know an emulator that behaves a lot like the physical console? Epsxe was created for enhanced graphics/sounds and highest compatibility its is so forgiving that troubleshooting is nearly impossible. Epsxe will allow you to do pretty much anything....

Now I dont want to kill a blank whenever I wanna find out why my mod does not work on a physical psx. I thought about getting a psp for that but getting an emulator is much quicker of course as I dont have to copy the isos to a seperate device. A simple example is Kernel.bin. If you dont fix the pieces being even in bytesize (or a multiple of 4) the psx will crash. Most emus eat it though, does anyone know an emulator that will crash on an uneven kernel.bin ?
 
You want the most accurate emulator out there? I'm pretty sure it's either Mednafen or XEBRA. Mednafen is easier to use and has MUCH better audio/video output, but they can both be kind of a pain. Personally, I recommend using the Mednafen-PSX core in Retroarch.
 
the emulator pSX is pretty close, but isn't maintained anymore.
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It's not really all that close. It was certainly the best around at the time of its latest release, but both Mednafen and XEBRA are leagues more accurate these days. pSX is good for playing, but when you are specifically looking to imitate hardware intricacies or debug hacks/homebrew, it's nowhere near enough.
 
If grey PSX support is a deal-breaker for you, I would suggest testing on a physical box. Otherwise I would write for common emulators and test on PSP alone.
 
no$psx is an actual PSX debugging platform that comes with hooks for Psy-Q console output, GPU packet debugging, and I think something to watch the rootcounter strobes, but I didn't play with it that deeply.

It's what I used to figure out why FF7 ran in such a goofy-ass resolution.
 
Cool thx for the replies. As I said I do test on a physical box but Im not the owner of Verbatim so I hope Ill figure out everything with one of the solutions posted here.
 
Cool thx for the replies. As I said I do test on a physical box but Im not the owner of Verbatim so I hope Ill figure out everything with one of the solutions posted here.
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I've ben doing a bit of research into this myself, and here's the impression I've gotten from other people (admittedly mostly in the SNES scene, so they may not know PSX as well):

XEBRA is the most accurate PSX emulator CPU-wise. It's also a pain and a half to use, and its audio and video emulation isn't great.

Mednafen, though not quite as accurate as XEBRA for CPU emulation, is still very close, and does a far better job with video and audio emulation. It lacks any sort of useful debugging features, but it's a safe bet that if something works correctly in Mednafen it will work correctly on actual hardware. That said, it's probably easier to use the Mednafen-PSX core in Retroarch than Mednafen itself.

no$psx is less accurate than either, but the debugging tools that halkun mentioned are damn useful (as is the case with all no$ software). It's also worth noting that it's fast as hell, and you will have no trouble achieving full speed on pretty much any machine.

The tool-assisted speedrun community prefers PSXjin. It's not as accurate as Mednafen or XEBRA, but it's still above average, and its recording features could well prove useful for testing/debugging (though that was not their main purpose). It's got a friendly UI for ram watching, if that's helpful (I assume no$psx does too, though I haven't really touched any of its debugging stuff).

PCSX-Reloaded is still in surprisingly active development and might be worth checking out, but without debugging tools on no$psx's level, or accuracy on Mednafen/XEBRA's level, it probably isn't worth the time. It's worth noting that PSXjin was derived from PCSX-Rerecording, which in turn was derived from this project some time ago; this one is probably more accurate at this point, but not considerably so; they do still share a LOT of older code.

You should quite frankly avoid pSX, ePSXe, bleem!, FPSE, and pretty much any other PSX emulator you find. These haven't been updated in years (except ePSXe which received small updates like once a year, and still isn't particularly good compared to what's out there), are unlikely to see major fixes or improvements in the future, and may be okay for playing games but are near useless for serious testing.
 
Yeah epsxe is an entertainment platform. It just displays the files contained in the ISO on your screen and it does that incredibly well. Im using epsxe a lot because it is the only emulator (including the emulators by sony e.g. for the ps3) that does a PERCECT sound emulation on ff7. Its absolutely great, also playing in hd with upscaled textures is extremely nice and obsoletes all pc releases in my eyes.

Well Ill try mednafen-psx core in retroach whatever that means :D

I will also have a look into no$psx. Im not having any trouble with slow hardware here but debugging features are something very nice Ill look into it.
 
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