Ace Combat 6 emulated with Xenia

Never thought I'd see the day to play this masterpiece to see the real potential of CFA-44 that not just available in Assault Horizon. And I better hope that plane will also come to 7 as an additional DLC.





2 years ago, I wanted to have AC6 run on my PC, but seeing that it requires Vulkan Runtime on a GPU, I have no idea if it works on my RX 470. Unfortunately, compared to this day, FPS sucked really hard and my PC bluescreened (BSOD-ed) showing GPU driver crash. I stopped using it at this point until Xenia (not the Daihatsu Xenia) is updated.

Today, I found it really interesting to see. Not gonna lie. I've been trying to run latest version of Xenia for few hours, but it's just straight crashing (CTD) without error reports. Examined and it's the vibration control issue for my USB to PS2 joystick. Updated the drivers using the new one and guess what, it works! And the game itself? No questions asked.

Xenia seemed to receive update to make use of DirectX 12 (DX12) for Windows 10, or Vulkan to GPUs that doesn't support DX12 or OSes older than Windows 10. And my GPU seems compatible since it has DX12 support.

The drawback, however, is FPS (still sucked hard, but not as hard as the old version I got 2 years ago), (almost) near high CPU usage (yeah, this X360 Emulator is using unlocked FPS, but yet hear this, 15 FPS makes the CPU processes at about 50 to 60% full), glitched music/cutscene (duh, like, Ik this is a development project, but does anyone else have this issue?), and stiff controls. Yeah, just like AC7, but even light input is treated as high input; got problems with it since it can crash my plane sometime (when flying in the tunnels).

What's most interesting is the transparent triangles on the surface. Most likely it's some kind of glitch or something that my GPU can't render.

The glitched music is fixable by turning off the BGM (move the slider to 0), and cutscenes can be skipped since it has no sounds. Well, no music, but since it's an emulator for PC, I can listen in on some random music with Winamp (is anyone still using this?) or any sort of music player. Alt-Tab is always a thing.


Despite that, I have fun trying out with this game, though seriously, I'm gonna need a real Xbox controller. Xenia seemed to use Xbox controllers as an input, but can be circumvented using X360CE, which can detect my PS2 controller as an Xbox controller using an injectable DLL. If you listen in or read recently on Kingdom of the Skies Discord server, I've posted something there. I want to beat this game on harder difficulties and see how I "sucked hard" on playing this game.

Stiff controls made me having a hard time to score a kill with a machine gun, even against Strigon team. Also note, FPS that's like I'm playing Fallout 4 on my old laptop. Sucked really hard unless if I use high-end GPU. And well, that's it. What I wished for has come true. Now it's only a matter of time to play Project Nemo (not Finding Nemo).

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