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Revision as of 17:16, 22 November 2014


WINDOWS GUIDE PROPOSAL
http://pcsx2.net/config-guide/official-english-pcsx2-configuration-guide.html
http://wiki.pcsx2.net/index.php/Setting_up_Windows_version
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Official-English-PCSX2-configuration-guide-v1-2-1
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-PCSX2-Wiki-collaboration-thread?pid=415385
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I'm gonna need this for later


Caption



In this guide we will try to explain how to download, install and properly configure PCSX2 1.2.1 on a Windows environment, and also give some tips for running games. The latest version of the guide is to be found on the official forum.
You can also watch the video configuracion guide here. Part of this guide has been translated to many languages, you can find those translations here. The user avih made a shorter version of the official guide here
There is also a Linux and a Mac version of this guide. <br /

Overview

PCSX2 is a Playstation 2 emulator capable of running commercial games. It's an open source proyect and runs on Windos, Mac and Linux. Like its predecessor project PCSX (a PlayStation emulator), is based on a PSEmu Pro spec plug-in architecture, separating several functions from the core emulator. PCSX2 requires a copy of the PS2 BIOS, which is not available for download from the developers, due to the copyright concerns and legal issues associated with it.

Prerequisites

Bios

You will need the BIOS file from your Playstation 2 console. This is not included with PCSX2 since it is a Sony copyright so you have to get it from your console. Visit the tools section on the PCSX2 site to find out how to do this.

Minimum settings

These are the minimum system requirements tu run PCSX2, bear in mind most games will be unplayable slow:

  • CPU: Any that supports SSE2 (Pentium 4 and up, Athlon64 and up)
  • GPU: Any that supports Pixel Shader model 2.0, except Nvidia FX series (broken SM2.0, too slow anyway)
  • 512MB RAM (note Vista needs at least 2GB to run reliably)

Recomended settings

These are the recommended system specifications to run PCSX2:

  • Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit) with the latest DirectX
  • CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.2 GHz or better OR i3/i5/i7 @ 2,8 GHz or better OR AMD Phenom II @ 3,2 GHz or better
  • GPU: 8800gt or better (for Direct3D10 support)
  • RAM: 1GB on Linux/Windows XP, 2GB or more on Vista / Windows 7
Warning: Because of the nature of emulation, even if you meet the recommended requirements there will be games that will NOT run at full speed, due to emulation bugs or other limitations.

Getting PCSX2

You can get PCSX2 for Windows here. There are 3 versions available for download: standalone installer, web-installer and Windows binaries.

Standalone Installer

This will download the installer for the latest stable version of PCSX2. After opening it, you will be able to select the installation options.

PLACEHOLDER FOR PCSX2_INSTALLER 1.png

On the next step, you will be asked to provide the location for PCSX2 to install, the image illustrates the defaul installation path:


After pressing Install the emulator is going to be installed to the chosen location, the installer is also going to create the following folders (that can be set to a different location afterwards) under the user's My Documents folder:

  • bios: This is where you should store the bios file of your PS2, PCSX2 will look for it here by default.
  • cheats_ws: Cheats will be store and read from here.
  • inis: This folder is responsible to hold the configuration files for the emulator. You can make PSCX2 load different configurations for each game creating a shortcut to pcsx2.exe and using command line arguments.
  • logs: Emulator logs are going to be stored here.
  • snaps: Screenshots taken with the F8 key are stored in this folder.
  • sstates: Savestates are stored here.

Web installer

The web installer follows the same procedure than the standalone installer, but it downloads the installation files after the user presses the Install button.

Windows binaries

This option download the folder containing the Windows binaries. Just unpack it at the desired location and run pscx2.exe. This option will not create Start menu entries or a desktop shortcut.
Ideal to keep the application portable, you will need 7-Zip to decompress the file, you can find it here. You need the Visual Studio 2013 redistributable for this version to work. Download it here.
The emulator is going to create the folders mentioned on Standalone Installer at the first run.

Running PCSX2 for the first time

PCSX2 has a first time configuration wizard to help you configure it easier so we'll first go through that. PCSX2 will automatically store all settings, memcards and new files generated in general in your Documents folder if you used the installers, or in the same folder pcsx2-r5875.exe is located at if you used the binary version.

In the first dropdown, simply select the language you want the program to be in.



In the second screen you will be able to choose which plugins you want to use. The default plugins are the ones with the higher compatibility and usually fastest too, so before changing them make sure you know what you're doing. Here you can also specify a different folder for your plugins if you want, by unchecking the use default setting checkbox and selecting a folder of your choice by clicking Browse. Open In Explorer simply opens a file explorer window in the folder you have specified.



In the third screen, you will be prompted to select your BIOS image from the list. If you can't see anything on this list, you need to either copy your BIOS files in the folder seen below, or change that folder to point to where you have your BIOS image saved. For more information about the BIOS, check the BIOS configuration section of this guide. If you can't make a selection, you will not be able to use PCSX2. Click Finish to end the First Time Configuration Wizard.



This is the main GUI(Graphical User Interface) of PCSX2:



From here, you can change the settings or plugins used by PCSX2 as you see fit.
We will start with configuring our plugins then we will move onto Core settings configuration.
Go to Config => Plugin/BIOS selector to select and configure the plugins PCSX2 will use.

You'll see a screen like this:



Plugin configuration

PCSX2 is a plugin oriented program. Your pcsx2.exe is the main processor that can emulate the real PS2 on the PC but it does not work alone. It needs a graphics plugin to display the game graphics and a sound plugin to play game sounds and music, and it also needs a pad plugin to allow you to play using your keyboard, mouse or gamepad. Moreover there may be more than one plugin of each type so you may choose which is better suited for a particular game. All plugins are stored (by default) in the plugins folder of your main PCSX2 folder. Some plugins like GSDX for example can be updated quite often so you may want to renew only this plugin (out of all plugins). In order to do it you'll need to download the updated version and extract it by using the archiver into your plugins folder. The changing of some settings (choosing your new plugin) may also be required.

Graphics

First, you will want to check what version of pixel shaders and DirectX (on Windows) your graphic card supports. You can do that here.
For the time being you will be able to use 3 GS plugins:

  • GSdx v0.1.16
  • ZeroGS v0.97.1
  • GSnull driver v0.1.0

GSdx v0.1.16 is a DirectX 9 and DirectX 10/11 plugin by Gabest which recently got greatly improved in both speed and image quality. It requires pixel shaders 2 and SSE2 to work and Vista/Windows 7/8 with a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card for the DirectX10/11 mode.
ZeroGS is a very old plugin which has not been developed in years. A very small number of games works better with this plugin than with GSdx, you can try it as a last resort.
GSnull is, as the name suggests, a null graphics plugin which will not output any kind of video. It is used for debugging purposes.

GSdx

Select GSdx v0.1.16 and press the Configure button. Placeholder for GSdx screenhot, probably thmbnail

  • First of all GSdx comes in 5 versions,SSE2,SSSE3, SSE4.1, AVX and AVX2.Only IF your processor supports these instruction sets use highest version you can since it will be faster for you in this order from slowest to fastest: SSE2, SSSE3, SSE4.1, AVX and AVX2. The new AVX and AVX2 instructions give a minor speed up only with the software renderers of GSdx and not the hardware ones. Note: AMD users do NOT mistake SSE3 with SSSE3 (1 extra S) and SSE4A with SSE4.1, they are totally different and are NOT supported. In this case use the SSE2 flavor.
    • SSE2 supporting CPUs: Check here
    • SSSE3 supporting CPUs: Check here
    • SSE4.1 supporting CPUs: Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn series (E7xxx,E8xxx and Q9xxx models), Intel Corei3, Intel Corei5, Intel Corei7, AMD Bulldozer/Bobcat
    • AVX supporting CPUs: Check here
    • AVX2 supporting CPUs: Check here
  • To use the DirectX10/11 mode, you will have to be running Windows Vista or Windows 7/8 with a DirectX10/11 compliant graphics card (check previous link)
  • DirectX10 and DirectX11 modes of GSdx for the time being are exactly the same in both terms of speed and compatibility. The only difference is that you will only see the first if your graphics card supports up to DirectX10 and only the second if your graphics card supports up to DirectX11
  • Adapter: Here you can select which graphics adapter GSdx will use. Very useful for computers which have a dedicated graphics card and an onboard graphics chip, so the user can select the much faster dedicated graphics card explicitly.
  • Renderer: Here you can choose how the graphics will be rendered.

By selecting "Direct3D9 (Hardware)", GSdx will use the Direct3D capabilities of your graphics card, boosting the emulation speed significantly.

By selecting "Direct3D10/11 (Hardware)" (only selectable in Vista/Windows 7 with DX10/11 graphics card), GSdx will use its Direct3D10/11 mode which is usually the fastest mode and sometimes even more compatible as well. Highly recommended if your system supports it.

By selecting "Direct3D9/10/11 (software)", GSdx will use its built-in software renderer, which will not use your graphics card at all, but your processor instead. This way the emulation speed is greatly reduced but you get maximum compatibility. Recommended if you encounter graphics bugs with the Direct3D (Hardware) renderer.

By selecting "OpenGL (hardware)", GSdx will use the OpenGL backend, which at this time is a slower equivalent of the DirectX renderers, with the same or worse compatibility. It's the best option for Linux users.

By selecting "OpenGL (software)", GSdx will use the OpenGL backend in software mode, with the same characteristics as described above.

By selecting "Direct3D9 (null)", Direct3D10/11 (null)", "Null (software)" or "Null (null)" the plugin will simply not render anything, thus not giving any output on screen. Use it only if you want to e.g. Hear some music since with this mode you get a dramatic speed increase.

Interlacing: Here you are able to choose between None, Auto and 6 other interlacing techniques, which are used to remove the "shaking" of the display. We recommend leaving this to Auto for most games In parentheses, you can see what kind of effect and maybe disadvantage (e.g. like the half FPS note in blend) each one of these modes have. You can cycle through them when running a game by pressing the F5 key. Scaling Subsection: Only available if a Hardware Renderer has been selected above. Here you can tweak various settings to improve the visual quality of your games by increasing the resolution the textures are rendered at or applying filtering. Do keep in mind that changing the native resolution of games can cause various glitches (from the usual very minor glitches to more serious ones in rare cases). D3D internal resolution: Here you can specify the exact resolution you want resources to be rendered at! This way, if your PC is powerful enough (mainly your graphics card), you can play your favorite ps2 games in much higher resolutions making the graphics crisp and more detailed. Note that the higher the resolution, the more resources the plugin will have to use, thus making emulation much slower. Original PS2 Resolution - Native: If you check this box, the plugin will render in the native resolution of the ps2 (that is why Custom Resolution and Scaling get grayed out) Scaling: Set it to Custom to use whatever you set in the setting below (Custom Resolution). Setting it to 2x-6x will multiply the game's internal resolution by that value and render it. So if a game's native resolution is 640x320, setting this to 3x will render it at 1920x960 (triple of the native resolution). This way some upscaling bugs are prevented which would be present if you set a Custom Resolution in the boxes below. At this time most games and graphic cards can do x2 or x3 scaling fine but get a sharp speed drop at higher settings. Custom Resolution: When Scaling is set to custom, you can input here whatever resolution you want the game to be rendered at.


Enable Shade Boost:

By checking this a new set of options will become available to you via the settings button at the right. Click settings to adjust saturation, brightness and contrast to your liking for the video output of GSdx. You can click the reset button on the lower left to set the sliders to their initial positions. Enable FXAA:

By enabling this GSdx will apply the FXAA anti-aliasing algorithm to improve the visual quality of your games with a usually minor speed hit. You can toggle FXAA on and off by pressing the PageUp key. Enable FX Shader:

Since version 1.2.0, PCSX2 is able to use external shader programs to add various effects and visual improvements. By default, PCSX2 comes with 4 simple scanline shaders (which you can cycle through while running a game by pressing F7). For a huge set of shader effects which include UHQ FXAA, Bilinear FS Filtering, Bicubic FS Filtering, Gaussian FS Filtering, High Quality Blended Bloom, Per-Channel Gamma Correction, Scene Tone Mapping, RGB Colour Correction, S-Curve Contrast Enhancement, Texture, Sharpening, Pixel Vibrance, Post-Complement Colour Grading, Cel Shading, Scanline Emulation, Vignette and Subpixel Dithering you can download Asmodean's shader file from our forum HERE. Open the zip file and extract the PCSX2Fx_Settings.txt and shader.fx files in the same directory with pcsx2-r5875.exe. You can change the settings of the shader by opening the PCSX2Fx_Settings.txt and following the included instructions and finally saving the file with your changes. Use with caution as setting huge values here can have an enormous impact on speed. Note that you can use external shaders even with a GSdx (software) renderer, which is the best way to get higher visual quality with this rendering mode. You can toggle the use of external shaders on and off by pressing the Home button while running a game. Hardware mode Subsection:

Only available if a Hardware Renderer has been selected above. Here you can change some settings for extra performance or video quality.

Texture filtering: This tickbox has 3 states. Checked, grayed and unchecked. When checked, everything on screen both 2D and 3D will be bilinearly filtered. When grayed, filtering will be done as on a PS2. This is the preferred setting. When off, bilinear filtering is disabled completely. Lowers video quality but may help some slower graphic cards. Logarithmic Z: This setting may help when some of the games graphics are "see through". Can be toggled only with graphics cards that do NOT support a 32bit Z-buffer. Allow 8-bit textures: Uses more efficient "palletized textures" for all rendering which reduces the graphic card RAM requirements. On the other hand it increases the processing load and can cause visual bugs. Recommended to try both and see which gives you the most performance. Alpha Correction (FBA): (DX9 mode only) Keep this enabled as it fixes some blending problems that the DX9 mode has. Can also cause some issues.


Hacks Subsection:

Check Enable HW hacks to enable the options described below. Click configure to select which you want to enable. These settings are ONLY for advanced users that know what they are doing. These settings can and WILL cause serious glitches if used in games that don't need them! (only affect hardware modes).

MSAA: Adds Anti-Aliasing of the selected level to every surface rendered. This is highly video card memory demanding and might crash PCSX2 if there's not enough RAM. For more information, read the description at the right panel of the box. Skipdraw: Skips drawing some surfaces altogether, based on how likely they are to cause issues. Specify how many surfaces should get skipped after the first problematic one is found. Try lower values first like 1-3 then use higher ones (the highest the number the higher the chance of broken/missing graphics and effects). This hack may cause random speedups as well! Alpha: Try this if your game has issues with fog like effects or shadows. In general, try it if you get graphics glitches in case it fixes them. Half-pixel Offset: This hack adds an offset to all surfaces so that some common upscaling issues get reduced. Use this when blur or halo effects seem to appear shifted up-left of where they should be. Sprite: Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information. WildArmsOffset: Known to help with lots of games. Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information. Aggressive-CRC: Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information. Alpha Stencil: Read the description at the right panel of the box for more information. Nvidia Hack: Try this hack if you own an Nvidia graphics card and experience strange stretching on and off when using scaling. Disable CRCs: Will disable all the GSdx hacks for specific games. You will usually get more bugs than without having this on, but for certain games like Shadow of the Colossus, you might prefer the output with this on. TC Offset X/Y: As the description explains, these settings can help fix some misaligment issues when using scaling. You can see some example values which are known to help Persona 3, Haunting Ground and Xenosaga. You can try using the same values for your game in case it fixes it, or try your own.


Software mode Subsection:

Only available if a Software Renderer has been selected above. Here you will find options to tweak how many threads the renderer will use and turn on/off the software AA.

Extra Rendering threads: This box is only usable when having selected a software rendering method. Here you can specify how many threads GSdx will use while software rendering, to take advantage of all cores your processor might have, e.g. set it to 3 for quad core processors. Boosts speed significantly in multi-core systems for software rendering with more than 2 cores. Edge anti-aliasing (AA1): This box is only usable when having selected a software rendering method. When checked, the plugin will try to apply a form of anti-aliasing on the game improving the visuals. Use with caution, pretty much experimental at this time.


Movie Capture: This is a hidden(Razz) feature. By pressing F12 while running PCSX2 with GSdx a message box will appear. In the first field you must show the plugin where the captured video will be stored, and type the file name too. In the second field you can choose a compression codec like x264vfw or "Uncompressed" which will not compress the video at all. If you choose a compression codec, you will be able to change its settings by pressing the "Config" button. Note that only codecs already installed in your PC will show up. Press F12 twice at any time to stop the capturing. The video produced will be automatically sped up to 100% for your viewing pleasure Smile If using SPU2-X, the audio file will be saved as recording.wav in the same folder pcsx2-r5350.exe is in.

   Hit Ok to save your changes or cancel to go back to the main Configuration window

ZeroGS

ZeroGS is a DirectX 9 plugin developed by ZeroFrog and is aimed for graphics cards which support pixel shaders 2.0 or higher. As noted before if your card does not meet that requirement you will get an "Error opening gs plugin" message and pcsx2 will terminate. Interlace Enable: When this is checked some interlacing issues will be resolved(screen "shaking") although some games look better with this disabled. You can toggle it while running a game by using the "F5" key. Bilinear Filtering: When this is checked the plugin will filter the display, smoothing out edges. This will generally drop your FPS dramatically except if you own a very powerful graphics card. You can toggle it while running a game by pressing and holding "shift" then press "F5". There are 2 types of bilinear filtering modes: normal bf and forced bf. Sometimes games will tell the GS to render textures with point sampling, not linear sampling. In normal bf mode, ZeroGS will listen to the games. In forced bf mode, it will render all textures with bilinear filtering. Forced bf can introduce unwanted artifacts at the edges of textures in some games, so be careful. However, it most cases, forced bf produces smoother looking scenes. Anti-aliasing: Here you can choose the level of anti-aliasing you want the plugin to use, to make edges smoother. You can toggle this while running a game by using the "F6" key. Note that this might reduce speed.

  • None: Will not use any level of anti-aliasing
  • 2x: Will use 2X anti-aliasing
  • 8x: Will use 8X anti-aliasing
  • 16x: Will use 16X anti-aliasing
  • Wireframe rendering: When checked the plugin will only render in wireframe, so you'll just see some polygon lines here and there Wink
  • You can toggle it while running a game by pressing "F7".
  • Capture avi: You can capture a video of your gameplay just like the GSdx plugin. Press "F12" and a window will appear for codec selection. For the time being you will only be able to use XviD encoding since the rest of the codecs will crash the plugin. After you select it, you can configure the codec by pressing the configure button. Press OK and the recording process will start. Press "F12" again to stop it. The video will be saved in the PCSX2 root directory as "zerogs.avi".
  • Save snapshots as BMPs(default is JPG): What it says, with this enabled snapshots you take with "F8" will be saved as BMP files and not as JPGs files which is the default. The snapshots you take with "F8" are located in the /snaps folder of your pcsx2 directory.
  • Fullscreen: Pretty simple, if you have this checked the plugin will show the output full screen instead of windowed. If you have it disabled and already running a game you can press and hold "alt" then press "enter" to go full screen.
  • Widescreen: Some games support wide screen mode. By checking this, ZeroGS will automatically scale the window to 16:9.
  • Default Window Size: You can check the window size ZeroGS will have when you run it by default. Options are various screen resolutions that your window will be resized to. Choose what you like best and note it will not affect speed.
  • You can press and hold the "shift" key and then press the "F7" key to toggle on and off the Frames Per Second display in ZeroGS's window.


ZeroGS Advanced Options

ZeroGS exposes a couple of extra options to tweak its various settings. Sometimes games use the Graphics Synthesizer in many unexpected ways, and sometimes it is impossible for ZeroGS to predict how exactly it should emulate the GS. Some options can convert a game from a garbage screen going at 2 frames per second to exactly what the game would look like on the ps2 going at 60 frames a second. If a particular set of options works very well for a particular game, then these options can saved in the game's patch file so that they are always applied every time the game is loaded. This is useful when you want these options to be enabled only for that particular game and not to affect other games. Each set of options in ZeroGS has a unique id. To query this id, go into the ZeroGS configuration dialog box, set the particular options, and click on the Compute OR of IDS button. Take the number generated and open the game's corresponding pnach file (usually the game's CRC.pnach). Then add in a new line zerogs=xxxxxxxx where the x's are the id.


GSnull Plugin

As explained at the start of this section this is a Null plugin thus it will not render anything on screen. Press Configure to get a menu with a checkbox where you can check/uncheck "Enable Logging" which will enable/disable GS logging. It should be used for debugging and developers.

Sound

Pad

CDVD

Dev9

USB

Firewire

Bios configuration

Core configuration

EE/IOP

VUs

GS

GS Window

Speed Hacks

Game fixes

Presets

Misc. Settings configuration

Shortcuts/hotkeys configuration

Further reading

The compatibility list

Bug reporting

Other useful guides

Compiling and developement