Make Letters look better

[paraemuladores]

Hi there. I just downloaded version ppsspp-v1.4.2-787-gc12f17134-windows-amd64 and I'm playing Justice League Heroes (I realize at this point there are newer versions of the emulator, but I already started a play-through, and I undestand that it's not a good idea in any emulator to switch versions in the middle of a playthrough). The emulator works perfectly, I just noticed something wierd that I haven't noticed it before. The letters in the start of the game look like this:

   

   

The character faces in the upper left and right corner look like this:

   

The loading images look like this:

   

And here are the pause menu and the characters upgrade menu:

   

   

They all look very low res. However, if I activate the upscale options, any of them, the letters look like this with 3x and hybrid+bicubic:

   

And like this with 5x and hybrid+bicubic:

   

Not only the letters look worse, but the game works very slow after that. Is there any way to make the letters and the low res images look more hi-res?

Hardware Specs:

Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4 Ghz
RAM: 4 GB single channel
Motherboard: Intel DP35DP
Graphics Card: MSI Nvidia N560GTX

[LunaMoo]

If you're an artist see this and just create your own textures.

As for automatic scaling:
- xBRZ is fast upscaler that goals to make things sharper,
- Hybrid is xBRZ + reverse AA that's unoptimized and much slower,
- Bicubic is pretty slow and blurry,
- Hybrid + Bicubic is fantasy of people who doesn't know what they want - extremely slow and mixing 2 counter productive effects which definitely doesn't make it "best" in any shape or form, but often is for some stupid reason taken as such by being on the bottom of the list.

All of them run on CPU and even the fastest one xBRZ is too slow to be active all the time hence PPSSPP tries to avoid upscaling textures that change every frame, but sometimes it still has to scale things constantly which makes it very demanding and definitely not something to be used on slow cpu's. So there's really nothing weird in performance drop when using this, scaling in real time is just overkill.

There are also post process shaders which are much faster and running on gpu like 5xBR which will do similar work, but they force rendering to low res and will look bad in any game with 3D graphics.

There's also nothing weird in how they look. All of such scaling effects are designed to make up pixels where there's none, you can't design an algorithm to make things universally pretty and any screenshots of super pretty algorithms are typically taken on higher res sample images. When used in actual games from platform like PSP which has lots of very low res textures everything will often end up with weird unnatural shapes and look poor, it greatly depends on graphics style as it typically looks bad on any realistic-like graphics and also on your personal taste as some people just hate automatic scaling.


So really if you dislike the results you can't do anything outside of accepting the fact that you're playing very old low res games or using texture replacing as mentioned at the start of this post - which is a feature that requires lots of manual work allowing you to create whatever you want althrough it's not perfect either as some textures might be very bothersome or impossible to replace due to weird ways of how some PSP games abuse textures.

Edit: Oh and also the lines around certain 2D graphics seen there are just artifacts related to using rendering resolution which game was not designed to run in. It will show in many psp games and the only "proper" way of fixing it is by using x1 render res, but both scaling and replacement can work around it.

[paraemuladores]

(11-28-2017 06:22 AM)LunaMoo Wrote:  So really if you dislike the results you can't do anything outside of accepting the fact that you're playing very old low res games or using texture replacing as mentioned at the start of this post - which is a feature that requires lots of manual work allowing you to create whatever you want althrough it's not perfect either as some textures might be very bothersome or impossible to replace due to weird ways of how some PSP games abuse textures.

Edit: Oh and also the lines around certain 2D graphics seen there are just artifacts related to using rendering resolution which game was not designed to run in. It will show in many psp games and the only "proper" way of fixing it is by using x1 render res, but both scaling and replacement can work around it.

I see. Well, thanks a lot for the answer. I think I'll just play like I've been playing so far; knowing what you told me, I think I'm just being to exquisite. Thanks a lot!!