[RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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Hi! I did a bunch of research and hacking and, basically, put together nearly-perfect widescreen 720p for PSO EpI&II on Xbox, including completely stock hardware. I'm releasing it here since this is the primary server for Insignia users.
Proper expanded widescreen (H+) is already implemented, and multiplayer modes work too. (These are night-and-day from the original!)
Singleplayer seems rock-solid visually with a stretched HUD. Multiplayer HUD is sliiiightly-WIP but otherwise fully functional.
This hasn't undergone much extensive testing, so I'm not sure if late-game/EpisodeII areas will make a stock system run out of memory, etc. I wanted to get a build out since it's been mostly-playable for a few days now!
There's also a 4x-antialiasing-enabled 480p version included for fun. This seems to be a direct improvement over stock with no drawbacks, albeit at 1/3 the pixel count of full 720p.

Installation notes and extras are in README.TXT. Don't forget to enable 720p in system settings.
Hope you enjoy!

DOWNLOAD:
0.85-BETA2, 11/25/2022: https://www.mediafire.com/file/33w3dbye ... 2.zip/file

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Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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SunkenSkunk wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 1:41 am Hi! I did a bunch of research and hacking and, basically, put together nearly-perfect widescreen 720p for PSO EpI&II on Xbox, including completely stock hardware. I'm releasing it here since this is the primary server for Insignia users.
Proper expanded widescreen (H+) is already implemented, and multiplayer modes work too. (These are night-and-day from the original!)
Singleplayer seems rock-solid visually with a stretched HUD. Multiplayer HUD is sliiiightly-WIP but otherwise fully functional.
This hasn't undergone much extensive testing, so I'm not sure if late-game/EpisodeII areas will make a stock system run out of memory, etc. I wanted to get a build out since it's been mostly-playable for a few days now!
There's also a 4x-antialiasing-enabled 480p version included for fun. This seems to be a direct improvement over stock with no drawbacks, albeit at 1/3 the pixel count of full 720p.

Installation notes and extras are in README.TXT. Don't forget to enable 720p in system settings.
Hope you enjoy!

DOWNLOAD:
0.85-BETA2, 11/25/2022: https://www.mediafire.com/file/33w3dbye ... 2.zip/file

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Hi, The original Xbox doesn't have sufficient RAM to handle 720p. Players have reported massive slow downs in episode 2, especially at Barba Ray, and Seabeds.

I'd venture to say it occurs duing Gol Dragon as well.

Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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Kayak wrote: Tue Dec 06, 2022 5:56 pm Hi, The original Xbox doesn't have sufficient RAM to handle 720p. Players have reported massive slow downs in episode 2, especially at Barba Ray, and Seabeds.

I'd venture to say it occurs duing Gol Dragon as well.
Would you say this is an issue that could be resolved with the 128MB RAM upgrade? And would the PSO xbe also have to be patched in order to take advantage of the expanded RAM capacity?

Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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King of Dirt wrote:
Kayak wrote: Tue Dec 06, 2022 5:56 pm Hi, The original Xbox doesn't have sufficient RAM to handle 720p. Players have reported massive slow downs in episode 2, especially at Barba Ray, and Seabeds.

I'd venture to say it occurs duing Gol Dragon as well.
Would you say this is an issue that could be resolved with the 128MB RAM upgrade? And would the PSO xbe also have to be patched in order to take advantage of the expanded RAM capacity?
Xbe would need to be patched to take the full 128GB, and hard to say if that's even enough.

Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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Interesting test results! Things are much better than I was worried about, honestly. Here's some food for thought.

Slowdown in this situation, if frames aren't being dropped, is likely from the CPU falling behind due to memory bus oversaturation. Xbox is notorious for this, and 360's GPU was even designed specifically to avoid it.
I suspect if more RAM were needed, the game would just crash (it does this, for example, with 720p combined with 2x supersampling, and not before entering a complex zone). Xbox doesn't have swapfile mechanics to shore up maxed-out RAM. The extra memory on 128MB systems is installed on the same channels as the stock 64MB, so memory bandwidth isn't increased upon expanding it fwiw.
Most Xbox games don't do the type of dynamic memory allocation that would lead to them automatically improving with increased RAM availability, unless their stock memory usage is already very close to 64MB and the engine is e.g. already throwing out texture mips to keep enough memory free. I suspect PSO doesn't behave this way due to its engine heritage, but Also I could try adding a simple bar overlay showing total memory usage or something if I get the time. Just for the sake of having hard data to push forward anyway.
It's almost overwhelmingly likely that GPU read-modify-write from alpha textures is simply starving out the CPU, though, and neither extra memory nor a faster CPU will alleviate that much (increased CPU cache size would technically help, in a way I'm unable to meaningfully quantify).

There actually are already some options to improve this 720p patch on stock systems, namely:
A) Render at anamorphic sub-720p onto a 720p backbuffer. 960x720 would reduce fillrate by 25% for example, but still be significantly higher-res than stock
B) Watch frame-present-times and engage direct3d dynamic resolution scaling to keep a certain amount of CPU-time headroom per frame (did you know the xbox supports this? it lies dormant in very very many games, as part of the D3D driver)
C) Just kinda tell end users that episode 2 can lag and gesture quietly at the improved-480p mode instead (what I'm doing until I can explore this more!)

Speaking of the 480p version, I /do/ have interest in making it widescreen, but I'd also want to fix a strange quirk Sega committed to. Basically, Xbox's presentation buffer is 720x480, always, and PSO is 640x480. To scale the image, Sega uses a GPU mode which merely centers the image within the framebuffer, leading to this game having black vertical bars which other games generally lack. The aspect ratio is 4:3.3 then, and the camera is thankfully adjusted for this.
Basically, I want to unlock the extra 13% resolution since it's actually very noticeably sharper when pulled out to widescreen, at least to my eye. This should be low-hanging fruit given how the existing set of patches works, and I'd expect it as part of the next release (when I get time to pull that together). If that works as expected, 720x480 4:3 (non-widescreen) may be included too, basically pulling the left and right screen borders out 6% on each side. 4xMSAA should still be fine in these situations, too. I'm a bit curious to know if the existing 4xMSAA-480p build induces much lag in stress-points, as 2xMSAA is an option as well.

Anyhow, thanks for the input!

Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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SunkenSkunk wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 1:41 am Hi! I did a bunch of research and hacking and, basically, put together nearly-perfect widescreen 720p for PSO EpI&II on Xbox, including completely stock hardware. I'm releasing it here since this is the primary server for Insignia users.
Proper expanded widescreen (H+) is already implemented, and multiplayer modes work too. (These are night-and-day from the original!)
Singleplayer seems rock-solid visually with a stretched HUD. Multiplayer HUD is sliiiightly-WIP but otherwise fully functional.
This hasn't undergone much extensive testing, so I'm not sure if late-game/EpisodeII areas will make a stock system run out of memory, etc. I wanted to get a build out since it's been mostly-playable for a few days now!
There's also a 4x-antialiasing-enabled 480p version included for fun. This seems to be a direct improvement over stock with no drawbacks, albeit at 1/3 the pixel count of full 720p.

Installation notes and extras are in README.TXT. Don't forget to enable 720p in system settings.
Hope you enjoy!

DOWNLOAD:
0.85-BETA2, 11/25/2022: https://www.mediafire.com/file/33w3dbye ... 2.zip/file

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Download no work. Thanks for create the patch.

Re: [RELEASE] PSO EpI&II Xbox: 720p + Enhanced-480p Patch

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SunkenSkunk wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:56 pm Speaking of the 480p version, I /do/ have interest in making it widescreen, but I'd also want to fix a strange quirk Sega committed to. Basically, Xbox's presentation buffer is 720x480, always, and PSO is 640x480. To scale the image, Sega uses a GPU mode which merely centers the image within the framebuffer, leading to this game having black vertical bars which other games generally lack. The aspect ratio is 4:3.3 then, and the camera is thankfully adjusted for this.
Basically, I want to unlock the extra 13% resolution since it's actually very noticeably sharper when pulled out to widescreen, at least to my eye. This should be low-hanging fruit given how the existing set of patches works, and I'd expect it as part of the next release (when I get time to pull that together). If that works as expected, 720x480 4:3 (non-widescreen) may be included too, basically pulling the left and right screen borders out 6% on each side. 4xMSAA should still be fine in these situations, too. I'm a bit curious to know if the existing 4xMSAA-480p build induces much lag in stress-points, as 2xMSAA is an option as well.
So this is basically a holdover from the Dreamcast? The DC did something similar, generating a 720x480p signal but only using the inner 640 horizontal pixels of that image. Kind of interesting that Sega retained this strange aspect ratio, but it kind of makes sense since PSO Ep.I&II are based off of those original Dreamcast versions. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

Either way, it will be exciting to see the end result, looking forward to an update on this project!