Emulating VF3 on the PC

Maybe someone could help me out: I'd really like to emulate VF3 on my PC. So far, I've tried Demul emulating the Dreamcast version of the game, but it's running far from perfectly, with lots of lag spikes.

Wasn't there a fine, new way to emulate the original arcade release with a locked smooth 60 FPS and no hiccups?

 

Your best bet is Demul. What are your processor specs? Demul runs super smooth for me.

 

I'm all prepped up for this hopefully: i5-2500k, 8 GB RAM, HD 6870.

 

The DC version runs fine on Demul with the odd slowdown here and tehre. It's very underwhelming in the face of the arcade version.

The model 3 emu Supermodel is capable of running VF3 (arcade release) at full 60 fps, but really loathes ATI GFX cards and is still fairly buggy/glitchy regarding graphics. It doesn't help that AMD has fucked up the OpenGL portion of the last couple of Catalyst driver releases.

EDIT: Fixed my Demul problems. Runs butter-smooth now with 2-pass FXAA.

 

yeah, I wish Supermodel was working better but in the meantime I'm digging Demul.

 

So I've been experimenting with Demul's video options a bit to find the best settings for an optimal image quality. The emulator is indeed awesome and despite that very resource-friendly.

Here are a few pointers to those that want to get the maximum out of the Dreamcast version of VF3.

First of all, don't use the gpuDX11 video plug-in. It's not working properly yet.

Instead, use the gpuDXv3 video plugin with the following settings:

• Enable List Sorting (if not enabled already)
• Enable Modifier (otherwise there won't be any character shadows)

Leave everything else as is and best play the game in a 4:3 resolution ratio or else the characters could look a bit stretched...

Onto the topic of anti-aliasing. You can further boost the image quality by enabling anti-aliasing manually in your graphics card driver, since the DXv3 plugin doesn't support it out-of-the-box. (Only the buggy DXv11 plugin allows for 2-pass FXAA, which looks very underwhelming in comparison though.)

This can be driven even further depending on what your graphics card and driver support.

Here's a comparison shot with my results so far. Note that Super Sample AA is superior to both MSAA and Adaptive MSAA.

 

GE, could you get Demul's netplay to work with VF3tb? Somehow no DC game I've tried so far was selectable in the P2P dialog.

 

haven't yet tried it. we can give it a shot

 

I tried it with sal already. We couldn't get it to work.

 

How do you guys think this would run with an i7 2600k and no graphics card?

 

only one way to find out! I once ran (Slowly) Demul on a dual core laptop with integrated graphics.

 

Sandy Bridge's integrated GPU is quite capable. If you call the Z68 chipset your own, your PC might run Demul quite formidably even without separate graphic card.

 

I personally find that NullDc(v1.0.4) runs VF3 better then demul on my system. I get sound and frame rate stutter in demul which is virtually absent in Nulldc.

 

If you havent tried latest version of supermodel 3 you should try it right now. VF3 to me is perfect. the only bugs you find is about music. nothing more!!! i couldnt believe how great this emulator runs VF3