I hope this doesn't come off as rushed or pretentious, but since we usually give plenty of time during the depecration process, I wanted to go ahead and get this going.
With the
official release of the PSX core of Bizhawk, we want to move away from PCSX-rr and PSXjin for publications at TASVideos.
BizHawk uses the mednafen PSX core which is VERY good. It is highly accurate with a good architecture with long term value. PCSX, on the other hand, is a lost cause and below the minimum standards we generally have. Because it was the only option, we reluctantly supported it many years ago. TO give an idea of accuracy, note the results of these
accuracy tests. Mednafen tops the charts at 81% (as of this writing) where PCSX-R is only 48.9%. Note that PCSX-R is the reloaded fork, which is an improved version compared to the PCSX core used for rerecording!.
Note: we try to be emulator agnostic. We aren't saying that BizHawk is the only option. But the mednafen core itself is the only open source core that is up to our standards. We are saying mednafen-based emulators are approved, and PCSX-based emulators are not.
Like the
depcreation of Mupen I want to set hard date such as December 31, 2016. But, like that thread, I don't want it to be a hard date. If you are currently working on a TAS using PCSX-rr or PSXjin, please report it here, and I want to accommodate your needs, within reason.
There are many problems with PCSX and PSXjin, including horrible unreliable sync, and horrible emulation (such as all the extra lag in some games in PSXjin). So I would encourage everyone to consider restarting rather than continuing with these emulators. You will probably save time in the long run.
One of the main reasons we want to no longer accept these emulators, other than accuracy, and the subpar TASing experience, is the difficulty of encoding. Our publishers are amazing and very dedicated. But their time is very valuable too. And the time it takes to get movies to sync, and to fight the bugs in order to get a decent encode is tremendous with these emulators. Accepting PCSX-rr and PSXjin movies means a big cost to our publishers time.
Anyway, feel free to discuss here, and again, please report any TASes you are wanting to finish on one of these emulators.
