darkSpyro

If you suffer from epilepsy, I advise skipping about a minute into the video. A graphical bug on the title screen causes a seizure-inducing rapid flashing to appear.



I've been playing around with emulation and modding and stuff like that a lot since getting my new PC, and after getting this emulator up and running, I had to try this game out in it. To my great surprise, it runs quite well, all things considered.

The game is seemingly fully playable from beginning to end, but with a few issues. The splash screen and title screen are bugged and have an epileptic fit, so I advise skipping ahead to the 1:00 mark or so if you suffer from epilepsy.

Other than that, all graphics render seemingly perfectly. However, there is no music and sometimes sound effects cut off in cutscenes. Additionally, the game seems unable to delete save data, which also prevents you from overwriting save data. You can save over empty slots though so you could delete the save data outside of the game to always leave yourself empty slots to save over.

I've only used Xenia for a little bit, but it doesn't seem capable of pushing games beyond their natural limits from what I can tell. The game is being displayed at it's native 720p resolution, and runs at an unlocked and somewhat unstable framerate. No amount of horsepower can stabilise that framerate currently, as far as I can tell. However, should this emulator become more developed iin the future, I'd love to push this game to 4K60.

And just to make it clear, I am not here to promote piracy, as this is not the intended function of emulators, they merely offer a way to play your games on PC. The purpose of this post is to showcase that the next gen version of DotD is now playable on PC, though with some bugs. If future Xenia updates ever help this game run bug free or allow it to actually take advantage of powerful PCs to maintain stable 60 FPS and higher resolutions, I will post another gameplay video of that.

EDIT: Since making this topic, I have tried emulating the PS3 version of the game in RPCS3, and I am happy to report that the game actually runs perfectly, and you can even bump up the native resolution to 4K. Frame rates are also seemingly better than playing on console, and load times are instantaneous. So effectively, it is now possible to play a "PC version". RPCS3 is only in alpha, but since the game runs so perfectly already, we can expect performance to improve as RPCS3 is optimised and improved.

Wow, the game looks so much better. Well, excluding all the other stuff that would need a complete rework, but no more fog and you can barely notice the more spotty textures.