So in testing and looking at other runs, I have noticed major differences between how certain emulators run the game. For me personally: The IGT from psxfin is always longer than RTA as opposed to epsxe where it is the exact opposite. In addition, I tried to replicate an exact run as best I could on both emulators and notices that epsxe runs about a minute faster than psxfin, probably due to the random fps dropping that causes lag spikes throughout the game. Is this anything to be concerned about given that it looks like some of the runs on the boards do look like they use psxfin and others appear to be epsxe with all the enhancements. Of course, I can provide all of my testing data for whoever needs it, just wanted to put this forward since I have been testing quite a bit lately with the new categories. Thanks Everyone!!
I was told that psxfin ran faster, I don't know the difference but I ended up just running it on psxjin because I couldn't get fin to work.
So is epsxe actually better? I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to decide on one good emulator for this game because the timer's kinda whack from what I've seen for both console/emulator and its different versions anyway.
Yea the only way to know for sure would be to play on console and time it and see which emulator for a decently mirrored run is most accurate if we did choose one or the other. I don't know if epsxe is better, I just know it does something different with the frame rate because the fps will randomly drop in certain parts. The situation that arises is that if the community runs on psxfin for most if not all the categories and then someone comes with epsxe and demolishes the boards. That's not a problem with me per say because it can encourage more competition, just wanted to bring up that the problem does exist.
Some communities have designated emulators that they recommend for emu runs. As a community we could take a vote or even do some testing and decide which emu runs the game best. Especially if some emus give drastically different times than others. Just so everyone is uniformed when it comes to racing and what not. Just a suggestion though. I rarely run this game anymore but if you guys need help with testing emus and coming up with a primary emulator for these runs, I'm more than happy to help out. Although, we would need a moderator to approve this and edit it into the rules just to make sure its official.
I think its a great idea to discuss this especially since most of the runners run on emu, rarely do I see anyone run this on console. Thanks for bringing it up Max.
I always ran the game on psxjin and after some tests it seems that epsxe is indeed faster (no surprise here tbh) but at the cost of weird technical inconsistencies (like framedrops). It's hard to decide on this but personally I would rather stick to an emu that is NOT modular like epsxe.
ePSXe has had a lot of massive differences through it's development I think. Earlier versions are faster than some newer ones, probably because they tried to replace load speed with some stability since maybe some games were crashing or something. I tried RE1 at least on ePSXe 2.0 a while ago and the load times, if I remember right, were longer than when I used 1.8/1.9.
If jin or fin work well, and neither of those are being updated it's probably best to use those. With RE1 the reason we chose psxjin is cause its a level playing field on account of it being the same emulator version, with no updates since it is discontinued, which would result in almost identical loads between all players.
All depends whether you want accessibility to run the game or fairness.
Accessibility = Allow all. ePSXe is the undisputed most accessible PS emulator out there. Fairness = Only 1 of the later mentioned: PSXjin, PSXfin, Bizhawk.
This is awesome information maybe we could all have a discussion runners, lovers of the game, and mods on the issue and just hammer it out to be consistent. New runners ask me about this game almost every day so I think we can make it into an awesome community!!
Just my observations from my play throughs and watching others' vids. I run ePSXe 2.0. What I have noticed from watching Becks' and Brando's Easy Any% runs is that their games run faster e.g. from start to freezer room they save about 3 secs even though we have the same strat and runs to that point were pretty mirrored. The difference between Becks' RTA and IGT was 3 mins whereas it is always about 2 mins 20 for me.
However, I did a run earlier today which had almost perfect RNG and barring getting stuck in the magnum room which cost me about 15 secs had a pretty seamless run and still only got 37:44 which equalled my PB. IMO I don't think I lost any more time than Becks and Brando on their runs which makes me think ePSXe has a slower IGT than psxjin (which I think they are running). Also, from watching mrmaximus' run I am 100% that I cannot save the 27 secs between our runs with my current setup. However, as I am a new runner this may be more to do with my setup on ePSXe.
Anyway sorry for the brain dump, make of it what you will, just thought I would give me observations :) I am happy to use any emulator but think it makes sense for us to use the fastest one as if we go for a slower one we may never have a chance to beat PBs.
Thanks to @TheDementedSalad we now have an autosplitter for the game! You can find a setup guide for it under "Guides" and some pre-made splits for it under "Resources".
Now that we have a working autosplitter, we should talk about the timing rules for Duckstation. For New Game runs, it starts and
