Crisis Core Set Up, First Timer

[LunaMoo]

PSP games have very low res textures originally, high res textures can be achieved via texture packs(link for FF:CC texture pack) or texture upscaling which is PPSSPP option, but the latter is unfitting most artstyle, does not apply to all textures and easily can cause stutter even on very powerful gaming PC's as it runs on CPU and even with best case scenario(new high core amd cpu's) it's often slow enough to kill frame time and drop some frames even when not affecting FPS.
We do have experimental GPU-based texture scaling, but it's available only on Vulkan backend and currently requires editing ppsspp.ini to add/change under [GPU] tag the following:

Code:

TexHardwareScaling = True

It also requires texture scaling to be on and set to a higher level like x4. This will scale everything and on a powerful gaming GPU might even avoid stutter of the cpu based filter, but it's unfinished and has a bug which doesn't work properly with transparent textures, resulting in black artifacts in some games.

The above also requires higher rendering resolution which you can switch in PPSSPP graphics settings x4 is enough for HD resolution, best just set it to auto which will match your display, if you really want more, better use a post process shader like SSAA which automatically sets render res twice more than your display res and makes use of it for anti-aliasing as otherwise res above display res is just a placebo wasting power.
I would recommend to combine higher render res with a hack "lower resolution for effects" as PSP did not had a shader support and used many archaic methods to achieve some "post process" effects like bloom which break above x1 render res, unfortunately the hack can't recognize/fix all of them, sampled at high res, those effects typically look like a ghost following the affected geometry. Sometimes fan made hacks exists to remove such effects completely as they tend to be ugly either way.

Don't remember what Crisis Core runs at, but most psp games never supported 60 fps, you can use fan-made patches to force 60 fps, but most of them will cause glitches, sometimes crashes or freezes, commonly breaking physics or timing in-game and in general I would not recommend using them especially if you never played a game before as the game might break in a way you will not recognize and get stuck on something which normally was easily passable.

Take note that FF:CC has a lot of cutscenes and they're 3 types:
1) run on game engine,
2) pre-rendered FMV's,
3) pre-recorded FMV's running on game engine.

While the first will be affected by rendering resolution, second will be low res, but still pretty just a bit pixelated, the last ones are just awful looking and you can't do anything about it.
We have a post process effects like Video Aware AA which can smooth some graphics in the FMV's artificially reducing pixelization without doing the same for the rest of the game and in latest PPSSPP versions we even support multi-pass shaders where you can mix many different effects together, but overall the pre-recorded game engine videos will always stand out with their ugliness so you will have to live with that.

Render duplicate frames(graphics settings) to 60hz and/or Force real clock sync(system settings) are things I would recommend as well althrough unless your system is affected by some rare stupid issues with framepacing chances are you will not see much if any change from those. If your setup is modern, that is if you use a variable refresh rate display duplicating frames might be better disabled and I would also disable Vsync as that's an archaic option for archaic systems, add's delay and is meh in general.

Post process shaders mentioned twice already are another enhancement you might use and for those you either make use one of the AA mentioned above like SSAA or VideoAwareAA or change colors whatever you want, if you are really into shaders and want more things at once I'd recommend grabbing latest version as it allows to create multi-pass shaders easily, in not that distant future it will also allow mixing existing effects through UI.


There are also some less "game breaking" enhancements possible via cheats than fps patches mentioned above, adding proper analog support to games that only used digital input for example, will also mention we allow vibration cheats and in not so distant future shader cheats, but those are both new and nobody really used them for any game yet, the first currently only support windows Xinput devices and allow vibration from in-game events, the latter will work pretty much same way, but instead of vibration will be passing uniforms to post process shader. For example in the future you could mod a game to shake the screen or vibrate a gamepad when you receive damage etc.

PPSSPP project in general is more about enhancing the original experience than replicating it, so with time it might have more things, but in the end don't expect to see quality of modern games in PSP emulation, that will never happen, even with beautiful texture pack, you'd have a low res geometry, outdated animations or game mechanics etc..


Tried to make my post complete, but in short, you could just activate SSAA post process effect for 3D or 5xBRv2 for 2D games and be done with the enhancement, most settings we do have are for performance reasons on potatoes with very limited power and "best settings" are on by default.