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How to get Skies Of Arcadia (echelon) working properly!!!!

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aika-san

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Elorien said:
Dunno how to do much about the black screen bugs.

I have another version of soa (non-echelon) which black-screens every time when coming out of the inventory. you probably know what i'm talking about.

in the next few days i'm going to do a bit of testing to find out why this version does that. I think that the black-screen problems in this version are related to the same ones we are having in the echelon version.

i also have a few ideas about the hanging problems too.

i got a funny feeling that the blackscreen/hanging/music/sfx bugs are all related to the same problem because they all have 1 thing in common. They don't happen the same way/same place every time. In other words they are not replicateable. They have a tendancy to build up over time. If I can find that problem then all should be fixed except the gfx glitches which are a chankast issue anyway. Maybe they are all related to PLOKTA. I might try keeping the keyboard buffer clear as I am playing and see whether that has an effect on this.


Fina said:
If you set the Chankast CPU setting down to 50, the game will go unusually fast. Almost the entire game will be in fast-forward, which makes it easier to get past parts without the emu hanging.

I think Fina's finding is an important clue towards fixing all these problems.

i will post any positive results i find from these tests immediately.

EDIT - SOAPatcher v3.0 will probably get it's own website/forum too.
 
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dreamer

New member
Elorien said:
Dunno how to do much about the black screen bugs. They've hit me a few times and its really frustrating >_< Right at the end of long sections without save points :p Yay for losing an hour of play!

The text thing is rediculously easy to fix though, in my experience.

After a battle, sometimes you'll get a garbled screen for like half a second, and then after that a lot of text is garbled. Either just a letter here or there off, or sometimes everything looks like bad outputs from a kana translator Q_Q;

Anyways, for that kind of garbled text, just go full-screen (or out of full-screen) and then back again. That always fixes it for me. No need to save/reset or anything.

u think the black screen bugs are annoying :p last night i played through the whole of the dreaded moon stone mountain, i was standing next to the save point about to save, but nooo! i just had to go to the menu and fill up my characters health with sacres, and when i exited the menu i got a black screenie crash! so i will be re-playing moon stone mountain again soon :plain:

another glitch i forgot to mention, at the end of battles, stats are invisible (annoying but not essential)
 

dreamer

New member
Fina said:
Sam I am, Dreamer. :p

The problem I had withe the last boss (3/3) was where the emulator would either black-screen when loading something new (Boss S-Move) or hang on a victory pose.

I've noticed though, when the game starts acting up and the music stops playing correctly, it's going to crash.

Whenever I fight a battle, and the music and sound stop playing, I will ALWAYS get the bug where the victory pose will play, but it will not continue to the victory stat screen.

ah, so it is Sam, i was speaking to someone a while back who made mods with you, he showed me a mod from a game where you'd made a Fina (with a huge gun :p )

anyway thanks for the report, i havent faced the last boss in its entirity yet so i assume from what you've said there are problems.
when i first load the game, music is quite good, but after an hour of so of play, it seems to get worse untill silence, and sometimes a crash.
from experience the crashes are mostly either the black screen crash (with music) or the game freeze (like it cant load). and they are caused from too much happening in the game at once, especially button bashing, i went to the menu and gave everyone health in a few second and exited = crash.
i also got crashes from pressing start (enter) to skip an S.move. so i always watch them and press buttons slowly now.
 

dreamer

New member
Problem

okay, got a problem, seems incurable, i call it the 'everlasting moonstone mine' once you complete the mine, it's impossible to escape.
since vyse can't walk forward, (i run diagonally, is this the same with everyone else?) once you try and exit the mines, it wont work. the best thing i can do is to put my game save up here and for someone else to try and get past the error.

Dreamer
 

Fina

New member
I've had a few strange walking glitches myself.

- With my gamepad, if I walk diagonally, Vyse walks like 50% faster than usual.

- If I am standing still, when I try to move with my gamepad, Vyse will run-in-place facing the screen. It will do this until I "do a circle" with the gamepad, then I can move as usual.

- With the above problem, if I stop walking and stand on the swinging bridge to the lighthouse on Sailor's Island, I will be unable to begin moving (as above) even if I do the circle trick. The only way to begin moving again is to start walking in circles while rotating the camera.
 
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aika-san

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dreamer said:
okay, got a problem, seems incurable, i call it the 'everlasting moonstone mine' once you complete the mine, it's impossible to escape.
since vyse can't walk forward, (i run diagonally, is this the same with everyone else?) once you try and exit the mines, it wont work. the best thing i can do is to put my game save up here and for someone else to try and get past the error.

Dreamer

Just to be sure I know what point you are talking about. Are you referring to the door on the right of the screenshot that i have circled? Whenever I try to walk thru this door vyse turns around and comes back into this room.
 

dreamer

New member
aika-san said:
Just to be sure I know what point you are talking about. Are you referring to the door on the right of the screenshot that i have circled? Whenever I try to walk thru this door vyse turns around and comes back into this room.

yes i am indeed talking about that point, same happens to me, to get past it we need him to walk forward with only the forward button pressed. :plain: it's a damn shame it wont work.
 
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aika-san

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Would've got to this quicker but just got home from camping.

Did the d-pad work for you Fina? Strange. I couldn't do it with d-pad, analog, or keyboard unless i play with the camera view. Anyway, here's how I got past it.

Walk through the door. Dont push left or right otherwise vyse turns around and exits. Now, while standing in the door (1st screenshot), use the camera pan controls to view the side of vyse (2nd screenshot). Now push left and vyse should walk into the tunnel. Sometimes to get this to work you might need to adjust the camera slightly, or you might have to tap left a couple of times before vyse enters the tunnel. Play around a bit. It doesn't always work first time, but it does work most of the time.

This is the best solution I have found so far. It's a similar solution to what Fina reported earlier about walking glitches.

All this has been added to SOAPatcher. Haven't uploaded the new version yet though.

Next bug please.... :party:
 
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Fina

New member
Just played through the same section myself. It's similar to the issue with standing on the Sailor's Island bridge. Rotating the camera and walking seems to fix these.
 
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aika-san

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Fina said:
Just played through the same section myself. It's similar to the issue with standing on the Sailor's Island bridge. Rotating the camera and walking seems to fix these.

The game seems to have a wide variety of control issues under chankast. I tried elsemis input plugin but unfortunately it has the same problem. must be to do with chankast. anyway, at least these bugs can be worked around. we'd be stuck if the camera controls were not a feature of the game.

EDIT - Can someone let me know when they complete CD1. I will upload the revised CD1 compatible SOAPatcher then.
 
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dreamer

New member
aika-san said:
The game seems to have a wide variety of control issues under chankast. I tried elsemis input plugin but unfortunately it has the same problem. must be to do with chankast. anyway, at least these bugs can be worked around. we'd be stuck if the camera controls were not a feature of the game.

EDIT - Can someone let me know when they complete CD1. I will upload the revised CD1 compatible SOAPatcher then.

mm, i'll continue disk 1 soon when i have more time ^_^ i tried the D-pad when i first got there, no luck with that. i will try your method aika san, soon. i trust it works (looking forward to getting to the deserted isle/gilder scene) i'll let you know if i run into more problems.
 

Fina

New member
I'm right past the Maw of Tartas now. I'll continue on a bit later.

I'm noticing that some areas have higher crash rates than others. The desert, while in Bellena's boat, seems to crash in about 80% of the random battles. The Mid Ocean also seems to have a very high crash rate. I find myself saving every few hundred feet just to get past. Very annoying. Thankfully, none of the dungeons so far have crashed on me.
 
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aika-san

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It's a pity about all the crashing problems. Are they black screen crashes Fina, like the original inventory exit ones?

I have been playing around a bit with our modified version to try and stop the black screen ones, but no success yet....

I probably won't have much time for doing this any more till next weekend. I will have CD2 then so I will probably start programming SOAPatcher v3.0 on the weekend.
 
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Fina

New member
Yeah, they're black screens, or randomly they will be the type that hangs the victory poses. Like, if you watch the game's intro scene, the whole thing freezes when Cupil flies around and winks at the screen. You can hit a key to skip past it, though.
 

CiGaR69

New member
I'm having problems patching. I execute the patch, everything seems to go well until i get this message
"C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe
C:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Micrsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application."

Can anyone give me suggestions on what i can do about this.

Thanks
 
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aika-san

New member
CiGaR69 said:
I'm having problems patching. I execute the patch, everything seems to go well until i get this message
"C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe
C:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Micrsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application."

Can anyone give me suggestions on what i can do about this.

Thanks

The errors you are getting are DOS related. SOAPatcher makes heavy use of DOS so it is critical for your DOS to be functioning correctly.

If you are sure you are running XP, then the specific error you are getting is because your Windows XP DOS support is broken. It's a reasonably common fault, and Microsoft have an article on how to fix it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324767

In this article, when they say to insert your CD, they mean your Windows XP CD. This is a technical document, but if you follow the instructions in this article correctly, you will be able to fix the problem. If you do attempt to fix your DOS support, make absolutely certain you follow the instructions in this article correctly. The files you need to repair are very important ones. If you don't feel confident doing it, then get someone who is to do it for you.

As for how DOS support gets broken. Who knows, maybe a virus, maybe someone playing around with something they shouldn't, maybe a rogue install/uninstall.

I'm sorry I can't help you further, but the problem is with your Windows install, not SOAPatcher. There is no way I can make the patcher work for you while your Windows XP DOS support is broken.

As an alternative, you could always do the patch on someone else's PC, compress the patched cdi, burn it onto a blank cd and then take that to your PC.
 

moxing

New member
thanks.....................here I search dc code breaker to play game shot.........

here a save file......................work on Mr/Ms str? 's ips fix file ..............

disk1 ,vs boss ..............................................code breaker imcomplete...................
 

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