ePSXe video plugins: gpuBladeSoft

Mednafen is great.
Mednafen is awesome when we talk about accuracy. But Mednafen has a big problem: it needs cue files (with .bin or .img). And when we talk about front-ends, it becomes a real nuisance.
Specially when you want to organize your PS1 library: multipe cds games are boring. 2 or more entries for only one game? No way.

ePSXe, on another side, has a great solution: it can use .PBP format.
With that, we can add only one instance for any multiple cds game (like a lot of Final Fantasy, Chrono Cross or Resident Evil 2). And reduce the files size at the same time!

With PBP files, launchbox's PS1 collection is perfect.

I'd like to use Mednafen, but ePSXe is trully more comfortable in daily use.
Its accuracy is not bad either, and… well… anyway.

My point is this: I use sweetFX for its crt-shader. In this way, I can always play with the same shader, on almost every emulator, and not only in Retroarch. usefull when you want to use Project64 or ePSXe keeping your own shader.

But on ePSXe, I had an annoying visual glitch: a real bad light bleeding (you can see it mostly on the right).

For a long time, I thought the problem was coming from sweetFx. Adding some curvature can mitigate this effect. But, in fact, the offender was the video plugin of ePSXe: Pete's OpenGL2 2.9.

Pete's OpenGL2 2.9 is a good old video plugin. Good accuracy, great options, but closed source and some settings I truly dislike. “Keep aspect ratio”… Yeah I'd like that. I'd like to play in 4/3 but on some games, Pete's OpenGL2 2.9 decides otherwise. Grandia or Street Fighter Alpha 3 are good examples. Some screens are stretched on my 16/9e monitor, while the rest of the game are in 4/3. I tried, of course, every setting you can imagine, but never managed to solve this issue… (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Until yesterday. \o/

On this forum, they talked about another video plugin I didn't know: gpuBladeSoft.
It's weird because I've never seen this one anywhere. Emulation.gametechwiki.com doesn't mention it. And a lot of people claimed its good accuracy and great modern graphics options. So… Let's try it !

The source and author (edgbla) are there : http://emu-russia.net/en/files/plugins/psx/
And it's surprising but this plugin is always updated! (September, 19, 2015, for the last one).

Two minutes later, all my problems were resolved! Perfect display, every game in my collection seem to work perfectly (although it wasn't the case with Pete's OpenGL2 2.9 , a lot of glitches on Rayman, for example), and no more stretched screens.

I highly recommend this plugin. Really. 

Until the day we can launch .PBP files in Mednafen… ;-)

Unique features:

• Interlace mode emulation;
• Screen settings emulation;
• Final Fantasy 8 pre battle effect emulation;
• Pixel perfect geometry (I hope. :));
• Method of reducing vertex jittering (pcsxr);

Other features:

• 16/32-bit software renderer;
• Increased internal resolution;
• Texture bilinear filtering;
• Support for gpuPeteOGL2 glsl shaders;
• Fullscreen filters;
• High precision GPU commands emulation;
• Correct polygon cutting;
• Precise dithering;
• Correct aspect ratio;
• Controlling the plugin with keyboard/mice/joystics;
• 9 lightgun crosshairs;
• Screenshot creation, video recording;