Topic by JXQ

Posted: 4/2/2007 12:16 PM

Post subject: Sometimes freezing upon load state while recording

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JXQ

Experienced player (750)

Joined: 5/6/2005
Posts: 3132

Bionic Command (U): Movies play back fine, but during a laggy part of this game (such as the end of Area 6 or Area 9), loading a state while recording can cause the game to freeze, stuck on the same frame with a music note just playing. I've had this happen both with 100% speed play, 50% speed play, and when using frame advance. Note that this isn't the emulator freezing, as the frame counter still goes as normal - I'm guessing it's improper loading of the state, which when emulated is just garbage. Sometimes this can be undone by loading the state again, or previous states. Sometimes not. Sometimes, I can load the same state over and over, and every 3rd or 4th time will not freeze, and the others in the chain will freeze with different screens, but follow a pattern. It makes TASing some parts of this game very tedious, as I'm loading states to try and recover, then stopping the movie, closing FCEU, reopening, replaying the movie in read-only, and loading a previous state to watch up to the point of freezing, and trying again, hoping it won't freeze this time. This happens in 0.98.16, 0.98.15, and even 0.98.12. I haven't seen this behavior with other games, though I haven't been looking for it.

<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)

Posted: 4/2/2007 10:40 PM

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Randil

Skilled player (1886)

Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden

I know exactly what you mean. This happened to me all the time when I made the "Guerrilla War" movie. Well, not "all the time", but at least 200 times throughout the making of the movie. It seems like this is a problem that occurs on laggy parts - you mentioned it happened during lag, and for me... well, all of "Guerrilla War" is one big laggy mess. ;) I couldn't find an easy way to solve this, so here's what I did (this is just an example to Illustrate): 1. While recording the game freezes at frame 5000. The frame counter is still counting up, but the game is frozen and just one note is playing. 2. I stop the movie-recording, and replay it in "Read-only" mode. 3(optional). I load a savestate that's pretty close to the frame the game froze, say frame 4500 or so. If you don't have any you can just fast-forward. This step is just so you won't have to replay the entire movie. :) 4. When reaching frame 4990 or so, a few frames before the game crashed, i savestate to state 5. 5. Now, I stop the movie and replay it without "Read-only" and load state 5. So now I'm back into recording business (recording at frame 4990), without a crashed game. Usually the game doesn't crash this time when it reaches frame 5000. If it does, just redo all this again. I know what you think - this is tedious business. And I can only agree. It would be nice to know an easy solution to this problem.

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Posted: 4/13/2007 5:40 PM

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