Ways to counteract sprite glitches caused by upscaling / texture filtering?

[Kolrath]

I've only recently gotten into using PPSSPP, but I've been using the Playstation 2 emulator PCSX2 for quite some time and theres something I've been wondering about...

I was curious what all ways exist in PPSSPP, or could be implemented into PPSSPP, to counteract the glitches that can occur from upscaling / filtering of the 2D sprites in games.

The glitches I'm refering to are things like the lines that appear sometimes on menus, or the one pixel wide gap that appears between menu sprites, or things that commonly occur on RPG dialogue sprites (particularly on the animated section) in some games.

A good example of dialogue sprite glitches would be the faces of the characters in the game Unchained Blades. For reference, look at the first and last screenshots in the initial posting in this thread - forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=1866
(Sorry, the http:// part is missing, but it wouldn't allow me to post my thread if it had clickable links in it.)

In these pictures it seems that the animated portion of the character sprites is its own seperate sprite, but when filtered it ends up having a gap between it and the rest of the character sprite. It looks like if the animated sprite portion could just have its height and width boosted by a pixel it would be a perfect looking image.

In the Playstation 2 PCSX2 emulator there were various ways to deal with these kinds of issues with varying degrees of success and quality. Often times there were "offset hacks" available to fix the issue in specific games or even the ability to adjust your own offset to attempt to correct them. I remember the PS2 Atelier series, Mana Khemia, Ar tonelico, and just about every other 2D heavy RPG needing some for of tweaking, changing, or offset magic to minimize the glitches from upscaling and filtering.

I'm curious if there is anything like this that is currently in PPSSPP to address these kinds of glitches or if its possible for this like this to be implemented into PPSSPP?

The only thing I know of so far to address this in PPSSPP is to either run the game in native resolution as a whole or to change "Texture Filtering" from "Auto" to "Nearest".

Using the method of changing filtering to nearest seems to address most if not all of the sprite glitches while still allowing the 3D stuff to be in higher resolution... but it sadly results in the 2D sprites looking heavily pixelated. Its a real shame too because more often than not the filtered sprites, aside from the minor glitches, look fantastic.

Are there other methods I'm unaware of or perhaps just a way to adjust the level of FXAA that can be applied to the whole screen via post processing to try to cut down on the pixelation?