Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops

[timAtPPSSPP]

A few things of note, that I've found being midway-through my playthrough of MGS Portable Ops. First up, my rig, since I can't figure out how to edit my sig right now:

CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k @ 4.3 GHz
RAM: 2x4GB Kingston HyperX 1333 MHz
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Rev 3.1
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black Edition 1 TB
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 290X
OS: Win7 64 bit

The game runs smoothly without issue as far as I can tell using most of the enhancements PPSSPP offers -- except the post-processing options since I see no need for them. 10x upscaled resolution is plenty, no need for FXAA, etc. However, it did take a few tweaks to get it to work right, which I'll explain in my replies to these two posts..

(02-07-2016 08:24 PM)Abdu- Wrote:  

(02-07-2016 05:48 PM)Blackbird Wrote:  Are you using the 60 FPS patch? It breaks this.

Oh, I never thought the patch breaks it. Thanks for the info.

Yes, the 60 FPS version of the patch breaks the game in this way - BUT: You can still play with the 30 FPS version of the patch without issues (I think - so far I haven't encountered any but I haven't finished the game yet).

Here is the code for the US version (code for the EU version is posted elsewhere on this forum I believe - posting the US code since I haven't seen it on this forum before, only on a comment on this youtube video: youtube[dot]com/watch?v=7o_W_S7HwoE (note - I got the codes not from the video, but rather from a comment that was posted to that video by youtube user HeartlessSeph. So just ignore the video; I'm pretty sure it shows the EUR hack that is already posted here. Just look at the comment from HeartlessSeph))

Code:

_C0 MGS OPS Force 20 FPS (US)
_L 0x201F5210 0x00000003
_L 0x201F4FD8 0x0000000F

_C0 MGS OPS Force 30 FPS (US)
_L 0x201F5210 0x00000002
_L 0x201F4FD8 0x0000000A

_C0 MGS OPS Force 60 FPS (US)
_L 0x201F5210 0x00000001
_L 0x201F4FD8 0x00000005

Use the 30 FPS option and it shouldn't cause problems. And even the difference between 20 and 30 FPS is quite noticeable. Personally I'm a stickler for smooth framerates and anything less than 60 I notice a lot, but 30 at least makes it relatively smooth and gives decent input response.

(02-09-2016 10:13 AM)Jetstream Wrote:  

(09-15-2015 02:07 PM)somebodyarather Wrote:  

(03-05-2015 08:59 AM)dayman Wrote:  I've been playing this on v1.0.1 on a good PC.

It has run very well for most of the game until the final boss, Gene [...]

I'd like to confirm this bug [...]

yu are fortunate its only at final boss. mine is bit different crash. some movie cutscenes i watch make the psp crash. this is really weird. even with latest version i used, it still crash.

I encountered this issue, too - the first cutscene where the bad guys are talking about the soldier who needs to incubate, or rest or whatever, right after someone (I think it's Gene?) says the line 'make all necessary preparations' or something like that, the game crashes, I get some strange visual artifacting across the whole PPSSPP window, and then my whole PC freezes for a bit until I can end-task out of it with task manager.

After a lot of pointless fiddling with settings, I came across a very simple fix which requires changing only one thing: set the PPSSPP's rendering backend from the OpenGL renderer (which is the default) to the Direct3D 9 renderer. As soon as I did that, while keeping all my other settings the same, the game stopped crashing on that cutscene.

Also:
Some people have mentioned graphical issues being caused by Catalyst AI (part of AMD/ATI video cards' drivers) - but I couldn't figure out how to disable it. In newer versions of the driver it isn't so clear how to do that (I'm using the latest version of Crimson released a few days ago). I came across mentions of using RadeonPro to disable Catalyst AI, but I'm still not really sure how to do that.

TL;DR
1. You don't have to play the game at its default 20 FPS - you can play it at 30, just not 60 (see code above)

2. Using PPSSPP's Direct3D 9 renderer (rather than the OpenGL renderer, which is the default) seems to have resolved the cutscene crashes for me.

EDIT: Followup to the above:

Regarding the crashes during the final (Gene) boss fight a few other people have mentioned:

(03-05-2015 08:59 AM)dayman Wrote:  I've been playing this on v1.0.1 on a good PC.

It has run very well for most of the game until the final boss, Gene, who does a special charge attack. This seems to have a 50/50 chance of causing PPSSPP to crash. As he does this move often, it basically makes it impossible to finish the game.

I've been fiddling with the settings, disabling enhancements and trying to increase compatibility with whatever is causing the problem, but so far I haven't had any luck.

I have a screenshot if anyone is interested, but the forum won't let me include it in my post. It's at: i.imgur.com/j7IAu0Y.jpg
I can also provide a saved game/state if it would help.

The last thing in the debug console is:
e[G3D]: GPUCommon.cpp:226 sceGeListEnqueue: can't enqueue, stack address 08A545D0 already used

---

Just an update, that this doesn't seem to happen when I test on android with my Nexus 7. As expected it's too laggy to be playable, but it doesn't seem to crash from that charge attack.

(03-07-2015 04:00 PM)dayman Wrote:  I was finally able to test on another computer. The problem did occur there as well.

For future reference, I was about to at least save scum my way through the fight by saving state after every time I hit him or he charged without causing a crash, to slowly work my way through it.

Here are the save states and saved files just before the fight if anyone wants to work on or test this issue in the future:
dropbox.com/s/yme9a7ns02m9vzf/PortableOpsGeneFight.rar?dl=0

(09-15-2015 02:07 PM)somebodyarather Wrote:  

(03-05-2015 08:59 AM)dayman Wrote:  I've been playing this on v1.0.1 on a good PC.

It has run very well for most of the game until the final boss, Gene, who does a special charge attack. This seems to have a 50/50 chance of causing PPSSPP to crash. As he does this move often, it basically makes it impossible to finish the game.

I'd like to confirm this bug - I've had the exact same thing (1.0.1). Sort of disappointing after playing the whole game bug-free till the very end - only to find it crashes during the final boss fight!

Ah well

It happens specifically after the boss does a charge-run attack thing, just as dayman said.

I just finished the game, using the 30 FPS hack, without any crashes/bugs/complaints including during the end boss fight with Gene. The FPS does drop from 30 to about 24 or 25 when he does the attack, but there's no crash. So, this makes me think that if you get the crash during the Gene fight - try using the Direct3D 9 renderer - I'm betting this is why I didn't experience the crashes (though I could just be lucky I guess).

I'm using PPSSPP version 1.2.1.

Settings are as follows:

Graphics:
(pretty sure most of this is at defaults except the D3D9 backend, the 10x upscaling, 16x AF, and 4x texture upscaling - but I don't know for sure, so I'm posting it in case)
Rendering mode
Backend: Direct3D 9
Mode: Buffered Rendering
Simulate block transfer effects: checked

Framerate control
Frameskipping: off
Auto frameskip: not checked
Prevent FPS from exceeding 60: checked
Alternative speed: 200%

Features
Postprocessing shader: off
Fullscreen: checked

Performance
Rendering resolution: 10x PSP
Vsync: not checked
Mipmapping: checked
Hardware transform: checked
Software skinning: checked
Vertex cache: checked
Lazy texture caching: not checked
Retain changed textures: not checked
Disable slower effects: not checked
Spline/Bezier curves quality: High

Texture scaling
Upscale level: 4x [note that unlike OpenGL, you can't set this to 5x with the D3D9 renderer - maybe this is what is wonky with OpenGL mode in this game? No idea, just speculating]
Upscale type: xBRZ
Deposterize: not checked

Texture filtering
Anisotropic filtering: 16x
Texture filtering: Auto
Screen scaling filter: Linear

Hack settings:
Everything set to unchecked/off

Audio:
All at defaults

System:

Emulation
(again, pretty sure this all at defaults)
Fast memory: checked
Multithreaded: not checked
I/O on thread: not checked
I/O timing method: fast
Force real clock sync: not checked
Change emulated PSP's CPU clock: Auto
Rewind snapshot frequency: Off

again, playing with the 30 FPS hack enabled the whole game, with the D3D9 renderer - no crashes at all.

(was on easy difficulty, using save states liberally - just playing the game for story mostly, not challenge - but anyway)

I hope this is useful/helpful.