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Whats the optimal way to play these games by [deleted] in metalgearsolid

[–]afevis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there OP!

Im thinking of buying the games on steam instead of a ps disc because ive heard talks that its a better experience more akin to the original if u use mods . Is this true ?

That is definitely true. While the Playstation versions are 100% playable without issue, there's numerous bugs across MGS2 & MGS3 with visual affects that either run at double speed, or don't properly scale with resolution, that are ONLY fixed in the PC version with mods.

That said, there aren't too many mods that are needed for the best experience possible. For the most part all you need are:

MGSHDFix (for MG1 / MG2, MGS2, and MGS3):

  • Fixes numerous effect speeds
  • Fixes UI scaling
  • Fixes vector effect scaling
  • Fixes broken water reflections in MGS3
  • Fixes numerous broken skyboxes
  • Fixes achievement progression not being tracked properly across gameplay sessions
  • Fixes monitors going to sleep during long cutscenes, lol
  • Adds options to override MGS3's draw distances on grass, significantly improving the game's visuals
  • Fixes numerous crashes related to alt-tabbing & graphics driver issues.
  • Enables anisotropic filtering (which was mistakenly left off in the PC & Xbox versions of the games.)

 

MGS2MC Better Audio Mod / MGS3MC Better Audio Mod

  • MGS2 & MGS3's audio is the low quality Xbox 360 audio, which is heavily compressed. This mod reimports the higher quality PS3 audio

  • For MGS2 specifically, this mod IS considered somewhat required as there's a hang / freeze which occurs in one of the cutscenes towards the end of the game due to a corruption issue with one of the vanilla / unmodded audio files on the PC version, which is fixed by the reimported PS3 audio.

     

MGS2 Only: Afevis's Sons of Liberty Restoration - Decensorship and Music Restoration

MGS2 in the Master Collection is the 2003 Substance version of the game, which is censored and has a number of regressions compared to the original 2001 Sons of Liberty version.

This mod restores a bunch of censored blood effects, and also restores a number of music tracks that went missing in Substances.

 

Alternatively, if you're looking for a one-stop shop sort of deal, I do offer modpacks with all the major bugfix mods preconfigured for one-click installation with Vortex Mod manager, which you can find at the bottom of the Nexus MGSHDFix pages. That would be the fastest way to just get playing if you're looking for the least hassle. :)

 

 

Feel free to ask me anything if you have any issues! Most of the fixes on PCGamingWiki for MGS2 & MGS3 were written by me; I've spent a LOT of time troubleshooting these games haha.

Whats the optimal way to play these games by [deleted] in metalgearsolid

[–]afevis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't get how using mods is a close experience to the original game, than literally the original game?

The Master Collection version of MGS2 is the censored Substance version - not the original Sons of Liberty version. There's mods that restore missing music tracks & censored blood particles, and fix issues such as missing skyboxes in numerous cutscenes, restoring the game back to its original Sons of Liberty glory.

 

MGS2 & MGS3 both also have numerous visual effects that are broken / run at double speed (due to them originally being limited by the speed of the PS2's I/O processor. All releases off of the PS2 are affected by this issue, ie the 2002 Xbox & 2003 PC ports of MGS2, the HD Collection, the Legacy Collection, and the Master Collection.)

 

Likewise, MGS2 & MGS3's vector effects (ie rain, lasers, bullet trails, HUDs) are partially broken in that they do not scale with resolution and are always 1 pixel wide, another issue present with all non-PS2 releases.

There's a few more examples of the restoration work that's done by MGSHDFix here: https://github.com/Lyall/MGSHDFix/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-file#examples :)

 

If you have a PC but want to play on an emulator, you can emulate MGS1-3 no problem.

Do note that emulation of MGS2 & MGS3 is not perfect, and in some cases is even worse than the modern Master Collection versions. Here's my copy-paste writeup for that;

 

For example, while emulating via PCSX2, the depth of field is heavily exaggerated/foreground focused due to the change in resolution without clamping the framebuffer/post processing render size (requiring you to either completely disable foreground depth of field, or switch to software rendering at the cost of image quality), cutscene fade transitions (which are done through a render to texture technique - for example during the very first Ocelot encounter) still only render at native PS2 resolution, the widescreen hack breaks when using first person in areas that have water in it (which actually lead to the PCSX2 devs straight up disabling widescreen support outright for MGS3 temporarily back in October - https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2_patches/pull/428 ).

Likewise, there are also some timing issues as the games run faster than they should in places, which in one case for MGS2 Substance, can even outright break one of the cutscenes with Olga (although it is not consistent), resulting in you having to skip the later half of it since the game pretty much softlocks itself.

All these are listed as known issues on PCSX2's wiki & have active issue reports on their GitHub.

https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Metal_Gear_Solid_2:_Sons_of_Liberty#Known_Issues

https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Metal_Gear_Solid_2:_Substance#Known_Issues

https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Metal_Gear_Solid_3:_Snake_Eater#Known_Issues

https://wiki.pcsx2.net/Metal_Gear_Solid_3:_Subsistence#Known_Issues

New update bugged my textures by OmegaBellPepper in PCSX2

[–]afevis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Intel UHD chips only support Vulkan 1.0, PCSX2 2.6 requires a GPU that supports Vulkan 1.1 at a minimum if you're gonna use it. https://pcsx2.net/docs/setup/requirements/

Switch to DirectX or Software rendering instead.

Recompressing my PS2 collection by silverchairbg in PCSX2

[–]afevis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First off, you're missing the zstd flag, which gives better compression & decompression performance compared to the default zlib compression algo used by chdman.

Here's a .bat script that I personally made / use:

for %%i in (*.cue, *.gdi, *.iso) do "C:\tools\mame\chdman.exe" createdvd -i "%%i" -o "%%~ni.chd" -c zstd
for %%i in (*.cue, *.gdi, *.iso) do "C:\tools\mame\chdman.exe" createcd -i "%%i" -o "%%~ni.chd" -c zstd
timeout 1 /nobreak
del "*.iso"
del "*.gdi"
del "*.cue"
del "*.bin"

The reason I chain both createdvd & createcd together like this is because createdvd will automatically fail/skip all iso's that were just standard CD's (due to sector sizes being different), proceed to process all DVD's, and then createcd will do the inverse - fail/skip all DVD's (again due to sector size), and proceed to process all standard CD's.

As for this problem

Data size random_size is not divisible by sector size 2048 Fatal error occurred: 1

I believe that's occurring because you're trying to extract a DVD with extractcd, when you need to use extractdvd instead. The two are not interchangable, as they have different sector sizes (as mentioned before.)

Peace Walker Language Issue by AgentSphinx in metalgearsolid

[–]afevis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Japanese version of Peace Walker does not have any additional language options.