Finally got it to work

I finally got a PSX emulator to work on this one lady's 'puter. First,
the problem was with it crashing every time I tried to run it, set up
through the config front-end program. So that meant I had something set
horribly wrong with it.

So I installed DirectX on it.

Here's the thing. For video cards to produce those nice 3-D polygon
graphics and all, it has to support an API of one type or another,
sometimes all the APIs out there. My mom's Dell has an Intel chipset for
video, so the API called OpenGL worked on it, no problem, and that's the
PSX GPU plugin I use there. There's one other I don't remember at the
moment, but anywho Microsoft has theirs called - you probably guessed
it, DirectX.

The GPU plugin I eventually got to work for this lady's system is a D3D
labelled plugin. It needed a few tweaks, but it's finally working on the
Nvidia chipset.

I found out that the emulator could crash if you don't set an interface
method for the CDrom drive. It just plain won't work! So generally, I
have the emulator set to use the CDrom plugin for disks, but I can run
disk images with the emulator itself without having to change the
plugin! I also found out her DVD reader / CD burner combo drive for some
reason can't read game disks fast enough, no matter what I told the plug
in. So I have it set to use the newly installed Sony Optiarc DVD burner.
For some reason, it just reads the CD more smoothly, and I have the
CDrom plug in for async reading, a 4MB Cache, and using the right
commands and all for fast reading.

The problem I ran into is the difference in plugins. The GPU plugin will
remember the settings you place in it if you go back in to check them.
The CDrom plugin kept reverting to some settings it would default to...
ARGH! when you check it.

The problem I ultimately had to figure out was how to turn on XA audio
playback. The plugins themselves don't have this setting. One hidden
screen in the configuration front-end for selecting plugins for a
particular set of plugin configs (heh), not where it should be, has this
setting, but also so does the little dialog box in the emulator itself
that lets you select an audio plug in as well as test and configure it.

So once I finally had that solved, as well as smooth CD reading (disk
images didn't have that problem, so that led me to figure out the CD
reading problem), I was able to play games just fine.

And a little video plug in tweak to make sure leftover graphics didn't
stay on screen when they should be gone. ^_^ Just don't run the emulator
with the front end on her system, but run the emulator itself.