mupen64 Save State Failures...

I have been recently trying mupen 0.4. It plays well, but save states seem to be hit or miss.

I will sometimes save a state, then try to load it, and the game freezes. Just video and input though. Sound still goes good. I have only played with the Windows port very much, so I'm not sure if it also happens under Linux.

I searched the forums and only found one thing that might be related. Someone once said (over a year ago, back in mupen 0.3 or earlier it would have been, so I wasn't sure if it was still relevant) that it would sometimes take 20 or more seconds to load a save state. He had a worse computer than mine, and I waited over a minute and a half after reading this, but to no avail.

When they work, they simply work. When they don't, they don't. It's very annoying to have to make sure to save 4 or more save states just to make sure one of them will load. But I would like to use an emulator that will work in Linux or Windows, and mupen seems to be the only one that plays well in both.

Has anyone else experienced this? I can post a save state for Mario 64 that will not load for me, and one at the same spot that will if it would be helpful.

I only have 3 n64 games (zelda ocarina of time, mario64, and wheel of fortune -- well 4, but mk trilogy doesn't work too well).

More to the point, I have only played mario64 very much in mupen. I was not able to reproduce the problem in zelda or wof in the 2 minutes I played them. But in mario, the problem is very prevalent, and can be reproduced very easily.

I attached a zip file with 2 save states. state 1 will not load, state 2 will. They were within 3 seconds of each other. e.g. I presses F5, 1 F5, 2, F5. The default save (~) and 1 were both bad. I generally do 4 to make sure, as I have had 3 bad saves before.

The ROM is good, verified with GoodN64.

Load state 2 first. You will see (and hear) several things. The butterflies are flapping their wings. The water in the waterfall is flowing. You can hear Yoshi's footsteps on the roof of the castle. You can also hear birds.

If you load state 1 (after state 2, but I think the same things happens before as well), input stops responding, the waterfall comes to a halt, the butterflies stop flapping, and yoshi's footsteps can no longer be heard. You can still hear the birds though. This makes sense though as Yoshi would have to move for you to hear footsteps, while the birds are just bg noise.

Changing it to pure interpreter or interpreter made no difference. I also tried the RSP plugin from Project64. This did not help (and made Zelda crash). I am using the Jabo DirectX plugins (video, sound, and input) as they work very well in PJ64 and mupen. I was previously using the glN64 (video) plugin, Azimar HLE (audio) plugin, and NRage DirectInput (input) plugin, and the states crash with these as well, so I don't think it is related to the plugins. Also, the Jabo plugins work great and I have no problems in PJ64.

There is no problem playing the games (as far as I can tell, I only played mario through bowser w/ 70 stars), only in loading save states.

Maybe a timing issue in the load state? Maybe the n64 GPU crashed? These are just vague guesses. I have no evidence to support either of these theories.

Hacktarux said:

Thanks for the details, can you try this binary and tell me if it's better:

Click to expand...

Sorry. That doesn't fix it.

And I was wrong before. If you load state 1 first, all you get is sound. No video display at all.

Sorry. I misunderstood. Let me go try again.

The new binary works great. Thanks.

I was able to play from beginning through 12 stars and Bowser in the Dark World, saved many many many times and not one was broken. Whatever you did should be added to 0.4.1 soon.

I can finally dump PJ64 now. Keep up the good work.