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Post by Xeogred on Oct 5, 2018 18:23:35 GMT -5
- Second reason, screenshots. I love being a Retro Gaming Photographer taking snapshots of things I love in games or whatnot. All those little screenshots I post in the Games Beaten thread here at HRG are 99% of the time my own saved and uploaded screenshots. It's a joy. I've been doing this with anime/fansubs for years and it's always cool to revisit those folders and look at personally saved screenshots. Same with gaming now. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who does this! That's awesome! <high fives> I really dig your work, man!
I'm pretty in to this as well. In fact, I may have gotten a little bit ... uh ... compulsive about it, to the point where it can have an impact in determining what to play next should that decision come down to a choice between playing a game where I can capture screen shots and one where I can't. Okay maybe it's not a major impact, but I've gone to some lengths to ensure I can capture screenshots on most of my gaming systems. Obviously emulators are a huge boon in this regard. Retroarch really captures some beautiful screenshots and as with most things in Retroarch it has the benefit of working the same way for every emulated system. For the purposes of other PC gaming, Nvidia Experience does a really nice job as well (I really like this one because it somehow detects the 'target resolution' of the capture meaning it doesn't capture the 'black bars' for an image in 4:3 aspect ratio for instance). I actually have a keyboard macro set up for this last utility; one key press, one click of the shutter, lol. I've also used Steam for image capture, but I've found that the Nvidia utility is actually a bit more robust.
But that's not all! I also have my handheld systems setup for this as well. I have my 3DS running on Luma3DS CFW, which has a built in screen capture function (it's slow, kinda clunky, ... and it has caused games to freeze up on me a couple of times ... but hey it totally works!). My PSP is also running on CFW (ProCFW) and for that one there's a tailor made screenshot plugin available. Thankfully this plugin runs like a champ; to the point I was actually surprised at how well it does (although it does tend to take shots in 'burst mode' so depending on how quickly you execute the button combo, so you tend to end up with a fair number of dupes).
Any hoo, that's a whole lot of preamble just to confirm that I too am a game photography enthusiast! It's a whole lot of fun trying to capture dynamic, beautiful, or iconic shots from games, kind of like a 'meta-game within the game' . And much like keeping a 'review archive', a 'screenshot archive' provides a really nice point of reference when I'm trying to remember the details for a particular game. Nice to run into a fellow enthusiast! Dang null, I have a lot to learn as Novice Gaming Photographer, you sound like a Pro.
Oh and yeah I've got like a thousand screenshots from Steam over the recent years haha. Got a decent chunk uploaded but plenty more on the HDD as always:
(so yeah, the trend among my screenshotting in games and in anime is that it's usually environments, architecture, and sci-fi that draws me in the most!)
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Post by nullPointer on Oct 5, 2018 18:43:15 GMT -5
Dang null, I have a lot to learn as Novice Gaming Photographer, you sound like a Pro. Well as with anything it's not the amount of 'gear' (or widgets in this case) that make you 'good', it's your talent for using it. And your screenshots are rad!
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Post by Sarge on Apr 3, 2019 17:20:05 GMT -5
So, I'd never heard of this Genesis emulator before, but it's apparently quite good. It's called BlastEm, and John Linneman mentioned it in the tests of the Mega Sg. It strives for cycle-accurate emulation, and apparently is the only emulator that properly runs the Titan Overdrive II demo, which is quite the impressive feat. It also apparently doesn't need exorbitant system specs to run, although I'm sure it's a bit more than stuff like Kega Fusion or Gens. I'm going to give it a go the next time I dive into some Genesis gaming. www.retrodev.com/blastem/
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Post by toei on Apr 3, 2019 17:36:27 GMT -5
I tried it a while ago because I was getting a bit paranoid after reading about emulator inaccuracy and lag and so on. I didn't see any improvement over Kega Fusion, personally, and I thought it made music sound kind of weird.
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Post by Sarge on Apr 9, 2019 13:06:05 GMT -5
I tried it myself, but I think my computer didn't like it very much. I'm running a pretty old laptop at this point, and the framerate seemed a bit off. I'll probably still stick with Fusion at this point, but will keep check on BlastEm. Especially interesting is that the author is also potentially looking to port to ARM devices, which would make for a really nice core in RetroArch.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 27, 2019 18:20:01 GMT -5
So I was surprised by something last night: the performance of PPSSPP on even my older laptop. I booted up a newer Falcom game, and it seemed to run very smoothly, and at a higher resolution than the PSP screen. I was pretty impressed, honestly! For those in the know, how accurate is the emulation these days, and if it's really good, I have to wonder what use my PSTV is going to get in the future... not that it gets much right now as it is.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 27, 2019 18:36:23 GMT -5
Maybe I should just switch to emulation for my ultra rare PSP gaming... I couldn't get into that version of Valkyrie Profile, I have an older model so the d-pad is atrocious. I bought Crisis Core and Tactics Ogre, I'd like to check out that newer version of FFT someday too, but yeah maybe I should just emulate this stuff haha. The hardware seemed cool but not as comfortable to use as Nintendo's stuff.
I beat the Gradius collection, FF2, and FF4 Complete on the PSP. Think that's entirely it.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 27, 2019 19:15:25 GMT -5
That PSP-2000 was legit, though. Even had a good d-pad and better analog nub.
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Post by toei on Jun 27, 2019 19:15:33 GMT -5
So I was surprised by something last night: the performance of PPSSPP on even my older laptop. I booted up a newer Falcom game, and it seemed to run very smoothly, and at a higher resolution than the PSP screen. I was pretty impressed, honestly! For those in the know, how accurate is the emulation these days, and if it's really good, I have to wonder what use my PSTV is going to get in the future... not that it gets much right now as it is. I only messed around with it a bit, but my impression is that it was very good for the games it runs. The problem is that there are still many games that crash or won't boot, and sometimes those crashes can happen deep into the game. So you'd better look up anything you want to play on a compatibility list, search for issues with it on the forums, etc.
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Post by Ex on Jun 27, 2019 21:13:58 GMT -5
PPSSPP / run very smoothly, and at a higher resolution PPSSPP was originally developed for mobile devices (Android), so it was coded to be efficient from the ground up. That efficiency mindset extrapolated to the Windows port. I'm glad it's still in development, I hope that it becomes the equivalent of ePSXe someday except for PSP games obviously. By that I mean super high compatibility with the power to up-res polygon games and make them look nicer.
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