Shoutout to the GTA V Online team for inspiring this post.
The fifth generation of home consoles popularized the use of disc media in consoles. Cartridges were more expensive and unreliable to produce - publishers would have to predict how many units would sell and order that many cartridges - and discs had far greater capacity. T...
2021-03-05 01:04:36 +0000 UTC View PostI'm not interested in making a sappy post, so I'll get to the point: I haven't had much motivation to do anything over the past several months, DobieStation included. I suspect that this is due to the world event that's been happening since last year, but I digress. I'm sorry that I don't have anything to show for all of this time, and I know I ...
2021-02-27 21:10:18 +0000 UTC View PostThe PlayStation 2's design seems almost reactionary to that of the PSX's. While the PSX GPU has a low fillrate, the Graphics Synthesizer (GS) outputs so many pixels, it can compete with the PS3's GPU in some cases! This increased fillrate requires a lot more bandwidth, so much that a single data provider isn't enough. Thus, the PS2 has not one, ...
2020-10-26 23:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostIt's not often you get a game that disables an interrupt and expects it to remain enabled.
Greetings, dear reader. Sins of the PS2 is about all those games with crippling bugs that just happen to work on a real PS2 but fail horribly on emulators. Today's article is a real doozy, involving a rather decent boxing game called Knockout Kings 2...
2020-10-02 07:20:28 +0000 UTC View PostYou may recall on the last post that I mentioned a super secret project. We've made faster progress than we expected, but it's still not quite ready for a release. Have an image:
I'll give a hint, too. It's something that's useful for every PS2 em...
2020-08-14 17:57:35 +0000 UTC View PostI am pleased to announce a compatibility list for Dobie that is being maintained by RedDevilus, as well as a few loyal testers. Let's jump right into the numbers first.
As of this writing, 353 games have been tested. This means that 78% of games g...
2020-08-02 17:43:51 +0000 UTC View PostEvery console has its sins, and the PS2 is no exception. Whether it be caused by tight deadlines imposed by the publisher or bad design practices, video games often have bugs hiding in them that are only exposed when running them in an emulator. Older consoles tend to be quite forgiving when a game uses undocumented or illegal behavior, which is...
2020-07-12 22:41:49 +0000 UTC View PostSometimes, bugs just have no reason to exist.
Welcome to Sins of the PS2, a series that exposes the horrific crimes against humanity that lurk within video games. This is dedicated to problematic games that break on emulators but only work on real hardware due to coincidence. Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future is one of those games, ...
2020-06-19 01:06:30 +0000 UTC View PostTo sum things up, we are planning to have an official v0.1 release, though there is no deadline on this. What we have in mind is more a list of features that are either essential or nice to have for the first release. DobieStation has been in development for over two years, and in that time it has went from barely scraping by trying to boot a fe...
2020-06-01 17:18:45 +0000 UTC View PostWhat happened to [this game] was a true crime...
The most enjoyable thing about PS2 emulation is how broken PS2 games are. It always seems like there's something new to uncover, and each game is different from the last. Some games are so broken, they deserve to have an article written about their sins. True Crime: Streets of L.A. ...
2020-02-24 22:29:08 +0000 UTC View PostBoasting a library of thousands of games, the PlayStation 2 can be taken to two extremes that cause trouble for emulators. The first end is one of optimization: using every trick in the book, and many more unwritten tricks, to bring about the best performance and graphical fidelity possible. Games like Jak and Daxter as well as Ratchet and Clank...
2020-01-29 07:13:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe Vector Units (VUs) are the soul of the PS2. They are SIMD processors embedded in the Emotion Engine (EE) responsible for quickly performing vector and matrix operations. VU0 and VU1, as they are called, have different responsibilities: VU0, being available as a coprocessor and having more limited memory, is intended for physics, AI, and othe...
2020-01-23 07:08:43 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been a little while, hasn't it? We've been working hard and haven't had time for any updates. To get straight to the point, Shadow of the Colossus has gone from 1 to 5 FPS on my 2015 Mac laptop.
This is thanks to the GS JIT that I've been wor...
2019-06-01 20:38:04 +0000 UTC View Post
As of today, the VU recompiler has been merged. You can check out the PR here, if you wish: https://github.com/PSI-Rockin/DobieStation/pull/129
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2019-03-01 19:36:42 +0000 UTC View Post
After spending a week trying to figure out why the ground refused to render, I'm proud to announce that the VU JIT works for Final Fantasy X. This is significantly faster than the interpreter, going at double speed in most scenes. Note that the EE interpreter and software renderer remain bottlenecks for full FPS.
FFX is a fairly simple gam...
2019-01-28 05:55:25 +0000 UTC View PostAs the current description states, I'm working on the EE and VU recompilers. DobieStation has achieved an acceptable level of accuracy for its first release: it's also become difficult to find bugs in games partly because they take so long to execute. I already have the framework for the IR, x64 emitter, and code execution set up; all that remai...
2019-01-06 18:15:34 +0000 UTC View Post