SPU2ghz Public Beta 1.5 (somewhat experimental)
Rant:
It has been more than 4 years since I started this plugin. Back then pcsx2 didn't have any sound plugin except for spu2null. I remember getting into the pcsx2 IRC channel (#pcsx2 on efnet) and asking for help to make a sound plugin. One of the pcsx2 developers kindly gave me some documents and wished me luck, and I promised I would do my best.
After some days, or weeks, I had enough registers implemented that the bios would start to play sounds. It was a revolution. First sounds ever to come from pcsx2!!
Too bad the sounds were completely wrong, as I had misunderstood the ADPCM algorithm. I kept working on it after that, but not regularly at all: I can spend a few days working on something, but once I'm stuck debugging for too long, I get bored.
After me, there were a few other attempts at doing spu2 pugins. One of them, ps2sp, was a bit more successful than mine. These attempts caught pete's attention, so he decided to hack up a spu2 plugin too.
For some time, pete's plugin has been the best choice to many, and recently Zerofrog, annoyed by the relatively bad results of our plugins, also decided to code his own.
With so much competition, it has been hard for me to get my plugin to have acceptable results, and even if I'm releasing, it still fails to compare with zero's in most games. But on the other side, my plugin has always been coded with compatibility in mind, so even if it's few, there's some games where it gives better results.
I want to make clear there's some known problems with the plugin:
If the game runs slow, the plugin will be all loopy. This is the expected result given the way I coded it. I might improve the output system someday if I get better ideas.
Some games seem to have "clicks" and noises while playing music, videos and speech. I'm clueless as what coudl cause it.
Some games seem to have robotized sound. I don't know why yet, but I will look at it if I get reports of games doing it.
Some games don't like to work with the plugin. I'm specially interested in knowing about them, so I can fix the problem(s).
Some people seem to get problems with audio output. Make sure you are using FMOD, and your sound card supports 48000hz output correctly.
When the emulator crashes, there's some chances that the ASIO output plugin will not have the chance to shut itself down. In those cases it will leave the device used, and a reboot is required in order to "unlock" it.
Savestates are broken. Specially the plugin will ignore a save if it wasn't created by itself. Blame the lack of a proper standard save format.
Note 1: As of version 1.4, fmod.dll is no longer required to use the plugin, but it is still required to use the FMOD output system.
Note 2: The plugin has its own speed limiting system. For some reason when the emu limits the FPS to 50/60, the sound plugin still runs a tiny bit too slow so if the game generally runs stable at 100% using the framelimiter, it's recommended to use the limiter on my spu2.
Note 3: If anyone is interested, the code can be downloaded from the SVN server in SourceForge.net .
http://forums.ngemu.com/ps2-plug ... u2ghz-releases.html |