vizskywalker

What this tutorial does not do:Deal with the Playstation 2 (since there are no good emulators for it yet)

If you need a PS2 for Burnout, do NOT run it with this emulator, it's PSX and PSOne only. The best PS2 emulator is PCSX2 which is supposed to be compatible with a wide range of PS2 games. I don't recommend it because the only game I've tried it with (Final Fantasy VIII which is not a PS2 game) caused an immediate program crash. I'm doing more tests with it to look into why, and will report when I figure it out or get it to work.

~Viz

What this tutorial does:
Explains how to obtain and configure an emulator for the Playstation console on a windows computer.

What this tutorial does not do:
Deal with the Playstation 2 (since there are no good emulators for it yet)
Support or promote any illegal activities.
Work with L:inux, although this could probably work as a base guide for Linux machines

Step 1:
Preparations

For this tutorial, you will need:
Software
ePSXe (latest version is currently 1.6.0)
Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8
Eternal SPU Plugin 1.50
P.E.Op.S. CDR Driver 1.4
A BIOS File from a Playstation or PSX
An ISO file for every game you want to play, or the real disc and a DVD drive.

Hardware
Preferably a SCSI CD Drive
An OpenGL2 Capable video card

Step 2:
Obtaining the files

Most of the necessary files can be obtained from the links above.
The BIOS can be obtained by dumping the BIOs from your own console. Please note that a PS2 BIOS will *not* work. Also, if you do not own the console, it is illegal for you to have a copy of the BIOS on your computer. The BIOS file should appear as scphXXXX where the Xs are digits and should be saved to a .bin file.

Games are easy to obtain. It does not matter whether or not you have the real game disc or an ISO although ISOs may run a teeny bit faster depending on how old your DVD drive is. It is illegal to posess an ISO file for a game you do not own.

Step 3:
Installation

Download the zip file (remember, this is a tutorial for windows machines) and unpack it to the folder of your choice. Now, navigate to that folder, and there should be a folder called bios. Copy the dump of your BIOS into the bios folder.

Congratulations, you've completed installation.

Step 4:
Configuration

The first thing to configure is the BIOS file. Fortunately, this is the easiest to configure. Navigate to the folder containing the bios folder (go up one level) and double click the ePSXe executable file. On the menu, click Config, and then click Bios. Click the select button on the dialog that appears, and browse to your BIOS file (should be in the bios folder). Select it and click OK.

Next you should configure the CD plugin. Extract the P.E.Op.S. CDR Driver 1.4 zip file into the plugins subfolder of your ePSXe directory. Now, restart the ePSXe and once again click Config, but this time click Cdrom and select the P.E.Op.S. CDR Driver 1.4 from the drop down list. Now, select the click Configure on the dialog that appears. From the interface drop down, select either the Win2K/XP or 9x scsi interface if you have a scsi drive (most drives are) or else select the raw readning for XP/2K. If you have 9x and a non-scsi device, search the plugins page where you got the other plugins for one that caters to your type of drive, but don't count on it working well. If you plan to run all of your games from ISO files you can just select none.

From the drive drop down menu, select your DVD drive. From the read mode select try autodetection, but be sure you have a PSX game disc in the drive. Do not limit the drive speed, but do check the box to allow for reads when the drive isn't ready. Check both boxes under error handling, and leave the rest of the configuration alone, click okay. Now, click Test. If no error is reported, click okay.

On to the Sound plugin. Extract the Eternal SPU Plugin 1.50 into the plugins folder and restart ePSXe. Click Config, then Sound, and select the Eternal SPU Plugin 1.50 from the dropdown list. Once more click configure. In the Ausio device box, select direct sound from the drop down list, and make the buffer a decent size (mine is 128). For the audio out method, select thread. Under Misc, select wait until the XA buffer is free and cache VAG decode. Leave fine tune at 0 and reverb at 0. Under special game fix, xhexk only the ones you need. Then click okay. Now, check Enable Sound, Enable XA Sound, and if you are playing from a CD, Enable CDDA Sound. Then click Okay. Do NOT check Enable SPU IRQ hack unless a specific game does not work, in which case you should disable the XA Sound.

To Configure the video plugin, extract Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8 to the plugin folder. Restart ePSXe and click Config -> Video. Select Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.8 from the drop down list and click Configure. At the top, select full screen or widescreen according to your preferences. For the first 2 drop down menus, select the setting one, for the third select setting 0, and for the fourth, select setting 2. Then, for texture filtering, for really good cards (NVIDIA Geforce 6 series and above or comparable) select option 6, for good cards select option 5, for decent cards option 4. For the High res textures, select option 1 for good cards and option 0 for decent cards.

Be sure to select frame rate limitation, deselect frame skipping. Now, either select auto-detection of frame limit, or hard set it at 60, since all PSX games are designed for 60 FPS. For Compatibility, select option 1 for the first drop down menu, option 2 for the second, and option 1 for the third. Check only the first box in Screen Filters, leave everything else alone.

For the miscellaneous, disable scan lines, enable everything else. Be sure for special game fixes that you click the button with three dots in it and select only the game fixes relevent to your hardware and games. Then click okay, and click Test. If no errors are reported, click okay.

Now, restart ePSXe.

You have finsihed installation.

Step 5
Configure controls:

Default controls:
No analog
Digipad is the arrow keys
Cross is the "Z"
Circle is the "X"
Square is the "S"
Triangle is the "D"
Start is the "V"
Select is the "C"
Esc gets you out of the game and back to the main ePSXe screen.

To change the controls, click Config -> Game Pad -> Pad 1 or 2 depending on which needs updating. To change anything, simply click it and type the new key or press the game pad button.

Step 6:
Play

To play a game, either click file -> Run ISO or File -> Run CD and navigate to the game. Note that introductions may be a little slow, but once he actual game is started, speed should increase to around 60 FPS. If it doesn't, check your hardware acceleration. If it is at maximum, go back to the Video Plugin configuration and alternate decreasing the settings on Textures and on Framebuffers. If need be, enable frame skipping.

Questions or comments, post.

~Viz
To play a game, either click File -> Open Irun

To actually address the issue of the unmoveable files. Windows, even XP, all build off of previous versions, and all of them still have some hangovers from DOS. This is an unfortunate situation because it leads to "unmoveable files." The reason these files are unmoveable is that some system files are addressed by specific location. When windows installs, it usually places these files near the front of the harddrive, but in rare instances for reasons unkown to me, it places them in the middle or end of the partition. If you could find every file that called one of these system files, update it to point to a new memory location, and then move the unmovable files to that new memory location, then they could be moved. As far as I know, there is no program to do this, but search online and see what you can find.According to some things I just read when doing a search, these unmovable files are also made up of the swap space and the system restore files. So you can try giving windows no virtual ram and clearing all the system restore files and space and see if that gets rid of the unmovable sections.~Viz

I can't beleive no one caught this sooner:

1) Currently, processors are maxed at 3 GHz in speed (of course these are really expensive and mostly used in high-end servers currently. Smaller devices run slower. I don't think there is a hand held computer that doesn't go faster than 500 MHz (correct me if I'm wrong)

Current processors are and were at the time this thread was started, maxxed at around 4GHz. It is very easy to find 3.2GHz processors, though not in dual cores because of the heat issue. Intel actually makes commercially a 3.9GHz processor, but it is very expensive and the efficiency of slower processors makes them a better choice. It is possible in mostly labe scenarios to go beyond 4GHz, but the amount of cooling required pretty much limits these chips to lab scenarios. In addition, processor companies are not working on faster processors. It is pointless to do so. On average in an application, at worst (from the processor's perspective) every 3rd instruction and at best (again from the processor's perspective) every 20th instruction requires data to be read from RAM or worse, and actual port. Because the fastest RAM at the moment runs at 667MHz, under 1GHz so at best 1/2 of most new processors, a faster processor would not have any noticeable difference. However, processor companies are working on more efficient processors that can retrieve and handle more data faster and can skip some data required steps until later.

~Viz

Most FTP programs have a keep alive function. The much talked about FileZilla has keep alive. When asking questions about the availability of functionality, first please check out FileZilla.

~Viz

Ah, yes, agp, any geforce agp card 6 series or better should work fine for you, although I prefer the GTX series of cards, the GT is nice as well.~Viz

I actually got to visit nVIDIA just last week, and we had a nice discussion about their graphics cards. Now, for use with maya, they actually recommend to professional Quadro series instead if the GeForce, but they are a lot more expensive since they are porfessional grade. However, for end users with Maya, it is best to get one of the high end GTX 7 series graphics cards.~Viz

The problem with that is that once again the loaded script has no idea what the title is, instead it must redirect to a known page or force its own title, instead of working with the title of the page it is embeded in.~Viz

Okay, there are hardware limitations other than the lack of available slots. For example, every NIC needs and IRQ, and a computer can have at most 256 IRQs, so at most 256 NICs. Except some IRQs are predefined, like timer, etc., so even fewer. Further, every NIC probably needs to be associated with a hardware port on the computer, which there are 65356 of, but many devices get more than one port, so another possible limitation. But when you think of the fact that 386 and 486 chips can be used to make 24 port switches, 24 NIC cards doesn't seem too impossible.~Viz

I have bpth betas, and they both accept either kind of user as a contact. But WLM never shows the yahoo contatcs as online, and it's a fifty-fifty shot as to whether or not it works with yahoo! and the WLM users. Any ideas?~Viz

File manager allows you to select each individual file to transfer just like ftp and it is less hassle. Whether you use a HTML based one or a software one like FileZilla.

Umm... Filezilla is an FTP program. It ha a GUI which is similar to the Explorer interface, but it uploads via FTP. The Filemanager in cPanel does not use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload, it uses POST data sent via http requests. So your statement make no sense.

~Viz

Although vujsa has made several good points. It is also very important that you do not ramble with your posts. It may get you a lot of credits, but it is more harmful than short posts sometimes. In addition, if the moderators see a post rambling, or off topic, we may edit the post to delete parts or truncate parts. And the credit script has recently been modified so that every edit a post is recalculated for credits, and you usually lose more credits for a deletion edit than the same amount of text earned you in the first place. And as far as how many credits you can earn, there is a cap. Even if you have a 1000000 word post, it may only earn as many credits as a 1000 word post. I beleive that the tutorial forum has a larger cap than the other forums, but I'm not sure. So don't cram everytihng into one post, only relevant material, then wait for questions, or start a new topic specifically about information extraneous but somewhat related to the topic you are replying to.~Viz

Yeah, I hadn't formally decided how I wanted to include it. Right now I've been using a php include, but then again right now I've got the title hard coded. I'd been thinking about using javascript, and I think I will use it via AJAX to call and return the information. That has several added benefits including not requiring the calling page to be a php page.~Viz

Okay, a couple clarification points:1) file_get_contents() and libcurl, fopen, whatever, accomplish the same thing, all require the script to open itself and parse itself, which is something I'd rather avoid, since it is already loaded once, having to load it twice will eat up system resources.2) Since the script is designed to be plug-n-play, the goal is to not need any scripting on the part of the user. So anything requiring the title to be hard-coded into the script somewhere will not work.3) I've thought about using DOM, but as far as I can tell, you'd still need to load the script a second time (the first being when the script is actually run) into a DOM object, which leads to the problems associated with number 1.~Viz

I'm working on a PHP script that is a module of a larger script which is designed to be protable between any website. However, to properly execute in a dynamic fashion, the script needs to know the title of the web page it is included in. Is there any way, via HTTP Headers or another method, other than using libcurl to obtain the page and parse for the title, to obtain the title for a php script?~Viz

I find that perhaps the most confusing thing about objects is the way various languages handle them. C variations does a fine job of treating objects as they should be handled, while I find Java does a decent job. I have not yet written any large scale scripts in PHP that could benefit from the use of objects, so I can't evaluate it. However, javascript objects are handled very poorly, in effect they are treated like special functions. Because of the various ways languages handle objects, after getting used to objects in one language, it is occasionally difficult to handle them in another language. However, if you start in a completely Object Oriented Language, such as C#, it can be easier to grasp the concepts, and once the concepts are grasped, it is easier to handle other languages' variations.~Viz

Okay, I got it working. However, I am not completely happy with the method required to get it working. It turns out that libeay.dll and ssleay.dll do not need to be present in your path, they need to be present in c:\windows\system32. So now that they reside there, it works. I haven't checked with Apache 2.2.2 (and the PHP 5.20 release Apache module (which by the way is recommended by Apache for use with php 5.1.4 (I think))) but it should work fine.Thanks for all the suggestions.~Viz

Okay, I set PHP to indicate problems at startup. I get this alert

PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\PHP\ext\php_curl.dll' - The operating system cannot run %1

twice. And I have PHP installed properly, everything else works, currently running PHP 5.1.4 and Apache 2.058. I have uncommented the line 'extension=php_curl.dll' and php_curl.dll is in the C:\PHP\ext directory. I have set the PATH environment variable to include c:\php which is where I have php. Any ideas would be helpful.
~Viz

actually, they are in the path, as my c:\php folder is part of the path, no that part works fine. The problem is definitely in the compile with -with-curl[=DIR]. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to use the functions at all, and I can, just not through a webservice.~Viz

Yeah, I've seen that as well, unfortunately, it means compiling php on windows, and the manual isn't to helpful on how to do that. If you can find a manual way to do the same thing it would be most appreciated.~Viz

I essentially did that, I have the php_curl.dll and have uncommented the extension. But I still have problems using the curl libraryof functions if I go through Apache. Using the php compiler from command line works just fine. All other php functions work fine through Apache (at least, all the others I've installed).~Viz

The problem with the PHP 5.1.4 module is that it is incompatible with Apache 2.2.x, only 2.0.x. And I was running Apache 2.2.2. I've downgraded to 2.0.58 and am using the PHP 5.1.4 module. Could you explain how to use PEAR or PECL with windows as I'm unclear on how to do that.~Viz

Okay, I guess I could have been a lot more clear, but I was in a rush when I made this initial post. So here comes the big explanation:

I am designing a game which has a PHP written "processor". This processor script takes programs in "machine code" (a language I made up) and runs the programs. (The processor script has yet to be written). Now, players are allowed to write their own programs using the language I made up, except they use the "compiler" I'm writing to turn it into the "machine code" so the "processor" can run it.

The problem is not in code I've written, and I'm not looking for a lost parenthesis, just the end of an already open group.

The compiler runs through each line of code various times, and for certain lines you can have more than one function per line as in the example:

CX=AX-BX+1

Now, after the first run through, the "=" operator has been handled and the partially compiled code looks like such:

MOV(CX)(AX-BX+1)

Due to the nature of the language, after the first partial compile, it would be possible to have a function inside of one of the parenthesis, like so:

MOV(CX)(AX-BX+1+GetStart())

However, because certain lines can get complex, there could be numerous groupings of parenthesis, and when parsing an operator, like the "=" operator, I need to only grab the code to the first unmatched parenthesis and not the entire remaining line of code.

I found my own solution which is actually pretty simple:

$closecount = 0;  $currentpos = strpos($code, ')');  $opencount = substr_count($code, '(', 0, $currentpos);  $length = $currentpos - 1;    while (($opencount - $closecount) >= 0) {      $closecount++;   $currentpos = strpos($code, ')', $currentpos + 1);   if ($currentpos) {		$opencount = substr_count($code, '(', 0, $currentpos);	$length = $currentpos - 1;	   }   else {		$length = strlen($code);	break;	   }     }    return substr($code, 0, $length);

What this code does is find the first ")" and then count the number of "(" that come before it. If there are more "(" than ")", it finds the next ")", adds 1 to the number of ")" and repeats the check.

I have hit a new problem however, where I need to grab a piece of the string holding a line of code to the left of an operator until an operator is reached, an unmatched open parenthesis is reached, or the beginning of the line is reached. Similarly, I need to perform the same sort of grab to the right, only this time with an unmatched closing parenthesis. I think a method similar to what I am doing should work, but your ideas will be helpful as well.

~Viz

I have been running PHP 5.1.4 and Apache 2.2.2 with the PHP 5.2.0 developement phpapache2_2.dll module. I recently installed CURL with php. Now if I run php from the command line, I can use the CURL functions, but not from a webpage through Apache. Also, phpinfo() returns nothing on CURL. I am running Windows XP SP2 and installed PHP manually via the zipped binaries. I really need CURL to work through a webpage and would appreciate any help I can get.~Viz

I'm creating a parser (a small compiler really) and I need to be able to find an unmatched ending parenthesis, the first one, in a string. By unmatched I mean in that string there is no opening parenthesis for that ending parenthesis. Any suggestions would be helpful.~Viz