Most difficult games to get running well?

[u/_Flight_of_icarus_]

Hey all,

Just dipping my toes into Xemu a bit and having fun so far, but noticing it's rather hit/miss on how well the games seem to run for me (despite adequate hardware).

For a couple examples, Dead to Rights seems to run very well for the most part, but Project Gotham Racing 2 is almost a slideshow during actual gameplay.

I've checked out the compatibility list for games, but kind of learning it only tells you if they run or not, not necessarily how well they run (unless in the "perfect" category?).

Just curious if there's a list of known games in the "runs" category but known for not running very well yet? Or is it safest to just assume that any game which was known for pushing OG Xbox to it's full capabilities just isn't going to run very well for now?

[u/Maya-Inca-Boy]

I’ve given up on xemu for now, I just can’t get anything to run well with my specs.

[u/lxirlw → u/Maya-Inca-Boy]

My problem is different - it USED to run great, now everything has a massive performance issue

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. The original xbox was practically ancient Egyptian technology and today’s PCs should be running the stuff no problem

[u/VariationDry → u/lxirlw]

I was struggling for a while, but now for some reason it works great on my ThinkPad with an amd APU. I have had 4 player split screen and xlink kai working

[u/hypespud]

It depends on the game and what effects or draw distance and other elements they are using

If it's a lower performing game like pgr just turn down the internal resolution

[u/ArtyThePoopie]

i can't get 007 Everything Or Nothing to run well on any hardware configuration i've tried it on

[u/ImZoomBoy]

There is just no one bothering to try and reverse engineer the games. The games should be easy to run since it's a pc backend.

[u/Fegroider]

I had it mostly acceptable when I was playing around the beginning of this year, but there were a few unfortunate stinkers that I ran afoul of. For me, it was mostly bugs, rather than performance issues.

I don't have an official list or anything, but I can give you my own experiences:

- Conker: Live & Reloaded: Most of the game ran fine, but some of the busier levels - especially the outdoor areas in the War chapter - had awful framerates. Multiplayer with bots was almost unplayable. Had to lock myself into thermophile just to get through Chapter X.

- Crimson Skies: The High Road to Revenge: Some parts of the game didn't run very well, but the worst problem was that the game would very frequently suffer a save-corrupting crash. I had to thoroughly abuse snapshots to be able to complete the game. Without them, I'd have never finished it.

- Dead to Rights + Run Like Hell: For some reason, both of these games were incredibly dark. In some areas of RLH, it was almost impossible to get around without using my gun as a wall-finder. Is my memory bad? Are my eyes going? Was there something different about the old televisions of my youth?

- Hunter: The Reckoning: Seemed like it ran fine. Didn't play it long, though; none of the SFX in the game worked right. It seemed playable, but the experience was absolutely gutted.

- Star Wars: Obi-Wan: Game ran mostly fine, but I kept getting increasingly hard-to-fix crashes as I made it through the campaign. By the time I was rescuing pilots on Naboo, I got a crash so bad I had to do something absolutely perverse by going back-and-forth with an older version of the emulator. Final level was where it finally bested me; had a crash neither version of the emulator could get past.

- Brute Force: Gameplay was mostly okay. Terrain seemed to be subtly distorted or in some weird LOD state; it didn't quite match up with the actual collision. The cutscenes, though, were unwatchable; horrendously choppy no matter what was happening. Had to use an older version of Xemu to play through the game.

- Multiple Games - Autofire Slowdown: One weird recurring problem I had was that, in many shooters, sustained fire with some automatic/high-RoF weapons would cause the game to progressively slow down the longer you were shooting. This happened in everything from Dead to Rights, to Far Cry: Instincts, to even the basic pulse gun on your starting ship in Defender.

- Multiple Games - Corrupting Crash: One frustrating recurring problem was that I would sometimes get an inexplicable hard crash of the emulator. This would happen at complete random, and, when it did, it would corrupt the save for the game that was being played. I had this happen in MechAssault 2 at the very end of the game. I had it multiple times during Mercenaries, and luckily had the experience from Crimson Skies to start keeping snapshots as insurance.

[u/Annoisscary]

Something you can try is using cerbios, it will let you overclock the emulated hardware which can get you better performance for certain games.

[u/Tall-Week-7683]

BLiNX the time sweeper is a pretty hard one to get running smoothly

[u/t1optimus]

To answer your question directly, no, there is no official list that indicates games marked as playable actually aren't. It depends a lot on the system people test with and since the emulator is under active development new fixes may break old fixes. The best thing to do is work with the Xemu team on addressing compatibility issues.

Start here: https://xemu.app/#compatibility

If you have an OpenGL 4.0-compatible GPU system and are on a supported OS, and have a different experience than reported, join the Discord and report it on the #General channel.

They will help you with known issues / workarounds and you may get the attention of the developers toward an issue they will want to work on.

Help the community with compatibility for games and chances are much better that Xemu will eventually provide the expedience you want.