u/flowersforaerith

Hey y'all! I've been tinkering around with AetherSX2 on Raspberry Pi OS, and wanted to compile a tiny list of games I've tried that, with around 2-3h of gameplay each, all seem to run flawlessly on a 1GB Pi 5 at stock clocks, with most of AetherSX2's settings dropped down to minimum with the Vulkan renderer at the PS2's native resolution running through the Pi 5's composite output into a CRT running at 480i.

• .hack//Infection - Solid 100% speed, no notable issues to speak of.
• Kingdom Hearts - A bit of FMV desync (this may be caused by me running the game from my NAS), but the actual game runs basically perfectly in my experience (made it all the way to the Jungle world). There MIGHT be some graphical issues with the Gummi Ship sections, but I haven't played this game since I was a kid, so I don't know 100%.
• Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 & 4 - Both seem to run perfectly with no notable issues. Blur seems to be overly aggressive in Persona 4, so I'd recommend disabling it there, but other than that, they both look and run great.
• Final Fantasy X - Initially had one crash, but I've put in several hours since with no further crashes, and it looks and runs great.
• Half-Life - Almost perfect, some sounds MIGHT be too loud? But gameplay wise, everything's great, I saw one brief slowdown in a vent with the flashlight on for a split second, but it was like 100% to 95%, nothing dramatic. No idea how well Decay runs.
• Oni - Runs great, looks a bit dark though, and some sounds may be a bit louder than normal.
• Lumines Plus - Perfect, literally nothing to report, I can get lost in this one for hours.
• Jade Cocoon 2 - Only played about 30-45 minutes of this one, but it ran flawlessly in that time.
• Resident Evil Outbreak - Only made it as far as getting out of Jay's Bar in the first scenario, but it ran perfectly during that time.
• Resident Evil - Code Veronica X - I'm awful at this game so I only made it as far as meeting Steve, but it ran perfect during that time.
• Katamari Damacy - Also had one initial crash with this one, but haven't had any issues since in the first two stages.
• Odin Sphere - Perfect, no notes.
• The Operative: No One Lives Forever - A bit of audio stutter (along with the fact that the game's voices sound like they were recorded from the first ever telephone call with Alexander Graham Bell), but no real notable performance issues EXCEPT for when NPCs open windows for whatever reason.
• Devil May Cry - Only played this one for 20 minutes, but it ran amazingly in that time.

You can see there's a bit of a theme of JRPGs running the best in my testing here.

And here's a list of games that DON'T work in my experience.

• Ghost in the Shell - Runs decently with a few minor slowdowns until literally any 2D asset that wasn't there previously appears on screen, then the game becomes a slideshow and usually crashes.
• Magical Pengel: The Quest for Color - Gets to the end of the intro cinematic and crashes.
• Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht - A complete slideshow once any 3D assets are on screen.
• Kya: Dark Lineage - Has a giant weird purple fog enveloping part of the environment, and runs at half-speed.
• Unreal Tournament - Just crashes when a match launches.
• SSX - Runs at half-speed.
• Sly Cooper & The Thievius Raccoonus - Basically a slideshow.
• Rumble Roses - Character models don't render at all.
• Bully - Also a slideshow.
• Arcana Heart - Game runs at half speed and parts of character sprites disappear every time a character changes animations.

What games have y'all tested out that work well? And what ones would you suggest people avoid?

been testing a lot of games on my 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and the most recent of them is World of Warcraft 1.12.1! runs way better than the game did on my actual desktop way back in the day, so apart from the transparency issues (cursor flickering is a VNC issue, not an actual game issue), i'd say this game passes with flying carpets for playability. i'm sure the framerate will dip in crowded towns/dungeons, but it feels great out in the open!

Hey folks, long time no post!

I've recently started dabbling in working on custom map packs and models for the Xbox version of Counter-Strike, but it's been...a journey, to put it lightly. Turns out, virtually every modding resource for this game under the sun has been purged from the internet (csxmaps.tk and csxmoddingforum.tk are both long-dead and have zero working Wayback Machine links), and the only tool that still exists that supports this game in any capacity is Watto's Game Extractor, which is both a paid utility, and doesn't actually provide any usable information on how to deal with the game's assets once extracted.

Does anyone who was there when the Ancient Texts were written have any tutorials on successfully converting map and model files from the PC versions of 1.5/1.6/CZ, with working textures and all? I know XPR texture conversion is involved SOMEWHERE, but where? Who knows.

As you can see below, I've made SOME progress on an .SXWAD unpacker/repacker, which has allowed me to port some assets over, but I've run into headache after headache.

As seen in the photos, the maps don't have textures (the first map I attempted to port was cs_starwars, but that idea was quickly scrapped as CSX does not have func_vehicle like most other Goldsrc games), load times practically triple, the LoD and textures on the custom weapon viewmodels is entirely broken, despite hand textures being 100% normal (the weapons shown here are a CS:S viewmodel pack someone created for 1.6), and other assets like player models and world models immediately crash the game upon loading them in.

This can't ALL be lost knowledge, can it? I remember the CSX modding community being pretty sizeable back in the day, so its' kind of surprising that zero information about it exists at this point outside of 3 different map packs that have survived the test of time.

Look ma, CS:S hands!

Non-euclidean weaponry is SO hot this year.

Stanced UP!