Make PlayStation PS1 Games Look BEAUTIFUL with DuckStation | In Depth Guide

in today's in-depth tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to visually upgrade your PlayStation 1 games using the dugstation emulator and because this is an in-depth tutorial I'm going to be showing you every single relevant option along with giving you side-by-side examples of exactly what it does so by the end of the video you're going to know exactly what all of these functions do and how they look I'm also going to be showing you how I like to set up my Global defaults and showing you my process on how to apply these visual upgrades on a per game basis which we absolutely want to do because one enhancement may work for one game but it might not work or even look good for the next game there's actually quite a lot to cover here so let's just get straight into it so I'm going to start by showing you how I like to have my Global defaults as a baseline And as we go through the list I'm going to show you what all the visual enhancements do and how they look so we're just going to go into the settings and we're going to start with the general tab here so you're pretty much good on defaults but we want to make sure that apply per game settings is active automatically load cheats is active because we're going to be using some widescreen cheats and for obvious reasons start in full screen now we can move on to the display tab so we're going to start at the top of the list and work our way down now with the renderer you may be restricted on Choice depending on the graphics Hardware you own however if you hover your mouse cursor over this box here it will recommend one for you in the bottom right hand corner so you can see for me it's recommending direct 3D 11. but you don't have to use the recommended one if you don't want to if performance was my main concern I'd select Vulcan if compatibility was my main concern I'd select opengl and directs 3D 11 and 12 are a kind of Middle Ground now in terms of the way these look you'll be hard-pressed to tell them apart however some games just don't like Vulcan or direct 3D so for those ones that appear really janky for no reason whatsoever I'd select opengl but for the purposes of this video I'm going to go with what darkstation is recommending and select diary 3d11 now the adapter is your graphics hardware and you should be okay at default however I do recommend setting your main GPU here to make sure that it's being used now full screen mode I fully recommend borderless full screen however if you need to use any resolution or Hertz rating it's pretty much got you covered so if you need to use that for any reason it's available to you and with vsync obviously we want this enabled to avoid any screen tearing when it comes to aspect ratio if you're using a Modern Display you should be using Auto game native this generally gets the best results now these widescreen aspect ratios will appear stretched like this and for me this looks like garbage however when we're hacking into widescreen like this we will need to select 16x9 but because not all games work in widescreen we're going to be using this at Auto game native by default and selecting 16x9 on a per game basis the crop function is how duckstation is cropping into the image so back in the day on CRT TVs the overscaling area would be hidden by the edge of the screen and developers would use this space to hide screen effects or other things that you're not meant to see or in the case of Crash Bandicoot here absolutely nothing they'll just be black bars in the overscan area and for these games setting the crop 2 only overscan area is the way forward to maximize your screen space however not all developers made their games that way some developers made their games to display all the way to the edge of the screen including in the overscan area and for those games you can squeeze out a few extra pixels by setting the crop To None however for myself I'm happy to leave this on only overscan area as this is pretty much how these games were intended to be played screen position obviously we want that to be in the sensor now into upscaling can make some 2D games look a bit sharper however it does reduce the viewport size so I personally tend to stay away from it now linear upscaling uses bilinear texture filtering to smooth out the entire image and for me that's just fine because I do like to smooth things out a little bit but if you're into Super sharp pixels turn this off by default and stretch to fill does exactly what it says on the tin with the on-screen display stuff I like to enable everything except the show controller input this is because I like to keep track of exactly what these enhancements are doing especially when overclocking and the most handy one of these is the show settings overlay this allows us to keep track of exactly what we're doing as we're doing it now we can move on to the enhancements tab which contains the majority of the settings that we're going to be covering and we're going to start with internal resolution scale the higher you set this the better the graphics is going to look and I recommend that you set this to the resolution of your screen but some people do just like to set it to 4K so I'm going to show you every single resolution up to 4K and if you notice as we go along the way that the higher the resolution the more anti-aliasing is also applied with texture filtering I recommend you keep this on nearest neighbor to be honest I'm not a big fan of how any of these other ones look at all now down sampling is an excellent feature this is generally used at higher resolutions for games that use 3D and 2D and we've got two options here we've got box which down samples all of the 3D elements and Smooths everything on screen and we have the better adaptive which doesn't do anything to the 3D elements and only Smooths the 2D stuff so that's things like Huds guis menus and anything else that is 2D now I do leave down sampling disabled and just enable it on a per game basis as and when I need it true color rendering when enabled disables the infamous dithering however it is at the cost of some color accuracy however I'm happy to do that because it gives you way better gradients and transitions between colors and it makes them just look a little bit smoother so I'm going to enable this by default and disable it for the small amount of games that it breaks so if you do come across a game that this setting breaks you can deactivate it but make sure that you're using scale dithering instead using this on its own does mitigate some of that divot pattern so I'm just going to turn that back on the widescreen hack does a really really good job however for a lot of these games there are widescreen cheats available which generally yield better results because these have been made for the game specifically so we're going to leave widescreen hack off by default and only turn it on if a game doesn't have a widescreen cheat disable interlacing is another excellent feature there are a number of games that were made to display in 480i more than what you think and activating this gets them to display in 480p which is so much better for digital displays as interlacing was meant for CRTs so I will activate this by default and if it does break a game I'll just deactivate it for that game and I'm going to put a link for a list of all of those 480i games in the description below for ntsc timings is something I personally don't find a use for if I have a choice between pal and ntsc I'll always go with ntsc because it runs natively at 60 hertz and European exclusive games are meant to be run at pal timings so I personally don't find a use for it now the force 4x3 for 24-bit display which disables the widescreen for fmvs when we're hacking into widescreen I'm going to enable but if you don't mind having those stretched when we're hacking widescreen just leave this off and I'm also going to turn on chroma smoothing because this reduces the FMV color blockiness now pgxp are the options that fix all of the wobbly polygons and textures and the main thing that you need to know about this is that when you have this active you might as well be using coloring correction and perspective correct textures at the same time because if you're fixing the geometry you might as well fix the textures as well and color correction plugs up any holes that using this option can create for the most part just activating these three options does do the job however you might come across some games where preserve projection Precision needs to be enabled say that three times and perspective correct colors you might even come across in games where perspective correct textures doesn't look that good and coloring correction might break some stuff so really you might need to use a mix for some games to get this to work correctly but for the most part I will just leave these three on by default and see how it looks and then make any adjustments from there and we most definitely don't want to be using this with just pure 2D games because there's no polygons now after playing around with CPU mode I've realized that it applies itself automatically for the games that need it so you can leave it off and know that it's going to be automatically applied when it's necessary now there's one more option that I need to show you in the advanced Tab and that is multi-sample anti-aliasing now to be honest this is one of the last visual upgrades I'd apply to any game and that's only if I feel that it really needs it and this is because increasing your internal resolution and or applying texture filtering does a head of a lot of anti-aliasing on its own however we do have up to 32 times msaa and 32 times ssaa the only time I've really found this functional is if I want to use a lower internal resolution but still get rid of some aliasing so of course I'm going to leave this disabled and only turn it on for the games that absolutely need it so we've discovered all of the options to do with visuals and enhancements now of course you can set up your defaults however you'd like for me personally I'm happy to turn the majority of these on and turn them off for the games that it doesn't work with other people like to have all of this off and incrementally turn everything on to make sure it doesn't break anything so it really just comes down to personal preference where your starting point is but just remember that everything that you set here is what you're dealing with by default now we've got all of that out of the way I can show you how to change and save all of your settings on a per game basis and also show you how to properly set up widescreen and I'm going to be using Quake 2 as an example just because a remake came out recently as soon as you're in game you want to press escape on your keyboard to bring up this menu and we're not going to be using the settings option here we're going to be using the game properties option because this is the one that changes and saves everything on a per game basis so click on this one and the tab that contains all of the visual options is this one right here so click on that and that will bring up every single option that we have just gone over now the first thing I need to mention here is how these slider buttons work on the right hand side if the button is in the middle position it means that it's using the global defaults if it's blue and on the right it means that it's on for this game only and if it's orange and to the left it means that it's off this game only so because I know that vsync is on by default I'm going to leave it in the middle now one of the best things about duckstation is that all of your visual enhancements are updated in real time with no need to restart the emulator when you change any of these options so I'm going to change the internal resolution scale down to 1x just to demonstrate this let's go back to the game and you can see that we're now running at the original resolution so I'm just going to change that back to my Global defaults because that's how I want it there we go so you can go ahead and change any of these to your heart's content and it will be updated immediately which makes it really easy to make any game look exactly how you want it now the last thing I'm going to show you in today's video is how to set anamorphic widescreen per game so we want to set 16 by nine so just go back into your game properties enhancements find aspect ratio there it is and change this to 16x9 now for the moment this is only going to appear stretched until we set a widescreen cheat or activate the hack so we want to go back to this menu and we're going to check the cheat list first scroll down to the bottom and we can see that we've got a widescreen 16x9 key however I know ahead of time that this cheat doesn't actually work and sometimes the cheats won't work for various reasons so turn it on check it if it doesn't work come back out go back into your game properties enhancements then turn on the widescreen hack let's go back to the game and there we go we have proper anamorphic widescreen there we go that's how to visually upgrade your PlayStation 1 games and save everything per game now I do like to keep these guides as definitive as possible but without wasting anybody's goddamn time and if you like that format slam me a subscribe and if today's video has saved you some time slam it a like and apart from that go play some games adios

Channel: Warped Polygon

Views: 132,171

Keywords: emulation, gaming, warpedpolygon, arcade

Id: 7d9Qckngso0

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023