PSX Short Draw Distance, specifically in Crash Team Racing

George Spiggott

I overclocked my Pi4 by following the instructions in this ETA Prime video:

over_voltage=4
arm_freq=2000
gpu_freq=600

CTR now maintains an unwavering 30FPS on every track I tried. I think the slowdown on the victory laps etc. may be accurate emulation of the PS1's slow GPU.

BillyH

It's as they say, if at first you don't succeed, try try again with better hardware.

George Spiggott

We're probably at the peak of what can be done with the current core. If/when Beetle makes it to ARM systems we will see some improvements there with even higher resolution and removal of bending issues.

George Spiggott

The saga of the perfect CTR play experience continues.

On my current build (Weekly 4.5.13) the sound cuts in and out on CTR if I have enhanced graphics and interpreter selected (but not if I only select one of them). I'm overclocked on the CPU to 2000, the GPU is unmodified as AFAIK it has no affect on PSX reARMed.

Can anyone replicate or fix this with the existing settings?

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott if you are running enhanced resolution and running interpreter at the same time you are probably pushing your cpu too hard and the game is slowing down, which is why the audio is getting choppy. A dynarec is much faster but causes issues with this game. So I would recommend not running the enhanced resolution option if you are also running interpreter.

George Spiggott

It's not just that the game is slowing down/skipping sound. I did had a pi4 build run CTR flawlessly in hi res without the dynarec (under Lakka). I appreciate Lakka may have different overheads that isn't the issue here. The thing is that one very other retroarch/lr-psxreamed Pi build I have had (both on my pi3 and pi4) CTR and other games would slow down and the music would distort rather than cut out which is less noticeable when you're playing.

I think this cut out sound vs distort sound may be a settings question.

George Spiggott

After a little testing I found thst keeping the dynarec off, enhanced graphics on and switching on the speed hack seems to be the least graphically intrusive option. Sound still cuts out, but only very occasionally, and a couple of weapons look odd but the rest of the game looks extra pretty.

I could also overclock more but I'm already at 2k on the CPU.

cagusch

@langest said in PSX Short Draw Distance, specifically in Crash Team Racing:

I tried disabling the dynamic compiler on my RPi4 and the game runs smooth and the draw distance issue is gone.

How exactly did you do that? I don't see any option for dynamic compiler in /opt/retropie/configs/psx/retroarch.cfg

cagusch

@cagusch
Ok, I found it, you have to open the in-game RetroArch menu and there are these options. The menu opens with a hotkey that can be definied in Retropie, e.g. select, and then the triangle key (on a PSX controller).

However, disabling the DynRecompile doesn't solve my problem of the characters not displaying correctly once they are a little but further away and should become smaller. This ONLY happens in multi (two) player split screen!

pjft

@cagusch Have you tried it on lr-duckstation?

Also, not saying that that's the case, but it is quite normal for games to reduce polygon count and drawing distance when rendering split screen. What's the atual behavior you're observing?