HD Xploder shmup compatibility list

[matrigs]

persona 3 fes ntsc-u (yoko) 480i :
hdxploder - works and looks perfectly. playable as hell.
gsm - plays double speed. unplayable.

Have you played through a lot of the game? I found Persona 4 pretty playable in 480p too, until some pretty severe framerate drops occurred here and there. Which was weird because there really shouldn't be a performance drop just by enabling 480p.

i'll be perfectly honest - i haven't. but i played through a few fights and different attacks and nothing out of the ordinary happened. there is definitely something off with this game otherwise there wouldn't be that speedup when using gsm.

odin sphere ntsc-u (yoko) 480i :
hdxploder - works but is very squashed on the longer side. even setting 16:9 on my tv it's horizontally smaller than vertically. unplayable.
gsm - basically the same.

Huh? I played Odin Sphere in 480p via GSM a bit, and while aspect ratio might have been a bit incorrect, horizontally smaller than vertically? Don't think that happened here. I'll test later.

every other game i tried with gsm/xploder works in 4:3 on my tv besides odin sphere and zoet 2. in both these games i have to change my tv to 16:9 to make it look senseful.

until today i was pretty convinced that this makes the picture much more off from the original, so i took my scale out and started to measure. my tv has 50cm height of the screen. so at a 1,33 ratio ot should have 66-67cm width to maintain a 4:3 ratio. all the working games i posted above have a width of 64 cm, interlace and progressive. i assume this is due to the ps2 underscanning. that gives a 1,28 ratio. now odin and zoet2 on 16:9 have a width of 68,5cm which gives a 1,37 ratio. now comparing 1,33 and 1,28 and 1,37 you can come to the conclusion that the latter is just 4% off and is more accurate than the former which is 5% off.

bottom line is that there is no need to be anal about this as none of the possible solutions will give me a 100 % accurately sized picture.

still just out of curiosity i would like to know why these two games in particular do this kind of thing. at least on my setup.

[Endymion]

neither a Fat PS2 or IDE drive are required. I am using the OPL+GSM with a Slim PS2 and a thumb drive

That's new to me, because in the past the games larger than 4gb won't fit on a fat32 partition.

Files larger than 4 gigabytes don't fit on a FAT32 partition. Browse your hard disk with uLaunchElf one of these days. All of those games that you installed will show up as folders with files in them, not single files. Even though the total of the game may be 4GB or larger, they will absolutely fit and work because no single file is that huge, nor does any game need anything to be that large. MGS2 Substance is 8GB and has always worked, even back in the bad old days.

[Overkill]

Not in my drive, because i only have isos on it. That iso to usb is doing something else to avoid the iso size over 4 gb limitation. But as said before, the big problem is the loading times. Fat PS2 forever

[ZellSF]

neither a Fat PS2 or IDE drive are required. I am using the OPL+GSM with a Slim PS2 and a thumb drive

That's new to me, because in the past the games larger than 4gb won't fit on a fat32 partition.

Files larger than 4 gigabytes don't fit on a FAT32 partition. Browse your hard disk with uLaunchElf one of these days.

If you're talking about the internal HDD, it doesn't use FAT32.
If you're talking about the external HDD, then connecting it to a computer and checking is much easier than using uLaunchElf.

[blackoak]

I've been trying to use this to deinterlace GIV for a 240p monitor. I can boot GSM into the proper format (SDTV NTSC deinterlaced), but it hangs when I try to boot the GIII&IV disc afterwards. Anyone have any better luck? GIII is already 240p, but it sucks to play GIV in ugly flicker mode.

[antron]

I have played a bit with GIII+IV and GSM, but only the one built into Open PS2 Loader. I could get game to run, but nothing usefull. I recall getting to the game selection screen, but GIV always locking up. I was mainly interested in 480p, but I tried the lower res modes too.

I came up with another plan. Run GIV in 480p with Xploder HDPlayer (which works) then pass the signal through an Extron Emotia. I was shocked to see that the image was STILL bouncing like a 480i image (or even worse maybe). I have no idea how this could be, I gave up there. However, this trick works fine with GV, and is the best I have ever seen that game on a low res monitor.

[blackoak]

Thanks for the reply, antron. Yeah, it would seem the dream of a nice looking GIV is unachievable on my current setup. At least I got FMCB squared away and caught up on the latest ps2 stuff, haha.

[ZellSF]

I have played a bit with GIII+IV and GSM, but only the one built into Open PS2 Loader. I could get game to run, but nothing usefull. I recall getting to the game selection screen, but GIV always locking up. I was mainly interested in 480p, but I tried the lower res modes too.

I came up with another plan. Run GIV in 480p with Xploder HDPlayer (which works) then pass the signal through an Extron Emotia. I was shocked to see that the image was STILL bouncing like a 480i image (or even worse maybe). I have no idea how this could be, I gave up there.

Field rendering games do that on Xploder.

On GSM they just drop half the resolution. I've tried Gradius IV (you need a way to skip movies) and it does just that and looks ugly.


I finished Persona 3 FES in 480p (with widescreen patch), none of the framerate drops Persona 4 had when forced to 480p.

[antron]

Field rendering games do that on Xploder.

I'm not going to pretend I understand what that means exactly, but when I run GIV in 480p with xploder on my TV in componet it looks great. In fact I really want to compare it to some medium res PCB content to see how it measures up.

[SGGG2]

Has anyone figured out a way to get HDTV Xploder working with OPL backups? Ideally with the ELF version. It's worth revisiting because 480p here is sometimes shockingly better than GSM. I mostly use GSM at 1080i for 3D titles, which looks great, but Xploder outclasses even that.

[SGGG2]

Some progress

Launch Xploder disc.
Choose the desired resolution.
Eject Xploder, leave the tray empty, close it, and hit "Start".
After failing to launch, you'll be back in the Xploder menu.
Hit "Start" again, the PS2 will reboot into system menu with the resolution active.

From here, the only way I've gotten games to work is by booting ESR from the system menu, but at least this means we can force video modes on backups without a mod chip.

It'll launch into OPL and HD loader with the resolution active, but won't boot games. Cheat Device is unable to boot back into system menu or boot games through ESR. It's possible adjusting settings in OPL, or something like a different OS format for the HDD could remedy this, but I'm not sure where to start. There could be a RAM conflict.

The ELF version of Xploder hangs on "Starting Game" and this process hasn't been tested with an ISO. I'm running old versions of FreeMCBoot and OPL, so if anyone is interested in this, please start testing.

[SGGG2]

SUCCESS!!!

Confirmed working with OPL 0.9 **without** built in GSM, version 1 **with** GSM hangs even when GSM is set to "Off".

Launch Xploder disc from "Launch Disc" is system menu
Follow instructions in the previous post
In OPL select "Game Options" and enable "Mode 1 = On" (enables accurate disc read speed)

The game will boot with resolution settings active! IGR works, so you only need to do the boot process once (as long as it's an option, some games are incompatible).

Impressions so far: Generally speaking, 480p Xploder looks way better at 4:3 than GSM. Although, this varies by game, some titles may not work at. You'll need a way to adjust aspect ratio as it's usually incorrect. Widescreen patched games look significantly better using 1080i with GSM.

Next step is to figure out a way to force the ISO or ELF version to boot into system menu, so we can eliminate the boot disc. If it's not possible, we'll just have to wait for an ODE.

[bahamutfan64]

Really neat!

Do you have any screen captures for comparison between the two approaches?

[ZellSF]

Or can you explain what is different?

There's no technical reasons there should be any difference.

Which games do you see a difference in?

[SGGG2]

Really neat!

Do you have any screen captures for comparison between the two approaches?

I'll post some screencaps this weekend if I have time.

Or can you explain what is different?

There's no technical reasons there should be any difference.

Which games do you see a difference in?

Gradius V is the big one, it looks amazing with Xploder, and sub par with GSM. Results vary per game.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150320062 ... ty-111435/

I'm a layman here, but I spent a fair amount of time in GSM forums, they're aren't 1:1 the same. For example, field rendering games basically get knocked down to 240p with GSM set to 480p. Xploder does some sort of line offset trick which looks almost identical to "non-interlace restore" of field rendering games set to 1080i (via GSM) through the OSSC pro, which is as good as those games are probably ever going to look without a CRT.

EDIT: According to this Racketboy thread, you can patch an Xploder ISO with ESR, eliminating the need for an original disc. Can someone try it and report back? My drive is dying and will only read one ERS game I burned years ago.

https://racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30389

[ZellSF]

Interesting, it looks to me like Xploder skips a deflicker filter GSM doesn't.

Also fascinating, 1080p mode does not seem to have the same issue. I can't tell GSM 1080p / Xploder HDTV 480p apart.

Edit: 1280x960 VGA also seems to mostly look OK, which I thought since the 2X vertical magnify probably somehow reduces the effect of the flicker filter.

Obviously, there's a lot of issues that means 1080p/1280x1024 is a non-option for a lot of people too...

[ZellSF]

Thought I post the two pictures I made for my own reference, though I'm sure someone with a capture card can show the difference more clearly.


Top is GSM, bottom is Xploder (though GSM in 2X vertical modes does look the same). Look at the top and bottom of the copyright sign. I think that's a flicker filter.