sudden hangs with black screen

[juwb]

Hi,



first of all, great work on this emulator. I had a lot of stability issues at first, but after fiddling a bit with the configuration settings most of them were solved.

I was finally able to play Zelda:OoT as far as Hyrule castle town, to the first room where you can get a lot of money by smashing all these pots. But when I left the room, the screen turned black and mupen64 hang.

This happened extremely often before when I had the 'no audio delay' option unchecked. Screen suddenly gets stuck or turns black while memory comsumption rises from 20-40% to over 90%... and the only way to get out of it is kill -9.

Is there some debug option I could turn on to see what the hell is happening? And, more important - how can I save/restore states in a fullscreen running game? If I had a hotkey for that, I wouldn't have to remember to save the game all the time ;-)

EDIT: Just found out that it can be done with the F-keys... F5 seems to be save and F7 restore... is this documented anywhere?

Great work with the emulator. :-) I'm so happy I can finally play this game in linux.

[Piko]

I also have been playing Zelda: OoT, and I also hang at parts!

Though I can only get as far as into the great Deku Tree, then anytime after that, crashing occures.

Though for me it hangs, whatever music that was playing, is still playing, with a frozen image.

Also to get into the menu, there is a long delay while it makes that background image, or at least that's what I think is doing it.

[juwb]

Yes, at first I had hangs like you describe in the scene where Navi flies from the tree to the boy for the first time (Image froze, music continued playing), and later when the Deku tree opened.

But it doesn't happen anymore. I think the "no audio delay" was responsible, but I changed a lot of configuration options, so it might be just as well something else. In any case, that option improved sound a lot, it was rather sluggish before.

Here's the plugins I'm using:
video: glN64 v0.4.1-r2 (800x600, 16 and 32 bit, everything else unchecked)
audio: JttL's (latest version from the forum, but I don't get no config dialogue...)
EDIT: Whoopsie, just found out the one on the Plugins-Forum is actually quite old ^_^ so version 1.2 it is...
input: blight's
rsp: hacktarux

As for the waiting time for the menu:
I think that's the game's fault. Every emulator I tried so far took a very long time to display that menu (one even took 5 minutes until it showed up... made equipment switching quite a pain). Mupen64 is quite okay there, takes about 5 seconds.

But as for speed in general, there's a lot of room for improvement. With UltraHLE, I played this game on a PII-233 with a 3dfx Banshee card. Of course, it was without sound and I only had about 10-15 fps, but still, it was playable. Mupen64 taking 90% CPU to display 20-30 fps on my XP2000+ / GF4Ti sounds like a bad joke in comparison. (But I guess the sound playback actually eats a hell of a lot of CPU, since the game runs way too fast when I switch to a broken sound plugin)

[juwb]

Oh yeah, and state save+restore using F5/F7 doesn't seem to work reliably... sometimes it works, sometimes F7 loads a different extremely deprecated state and when that happens, I can't seem to find the previously saved one...

So now I'm using F1 (which switches fullscreen I found out) and then save the state a few times to be sure using the GUI.

EDIT:
Found out what the problem was... I use the numpad to play, but the number keys also select which save slot is being used...

Oh well, I guess things work out in the end *g*

[ciruZ]

Well, I had that problem with Mupen 0.3 in the past, too. But Mupen 0.4 fixed that for me? No problems anymore with Zelda: OoT. Hasn't crashed for a long time now.

[juwb]

Well, it's the settings. Mainly the two checkboxes on the interpreter/dynamic recompiler page are dangerous. With the right configuration, it's pretty stable. It still hangs, but only in extreme rare cases.

For example, earlier in OoT after getting the ocarina from Zelda [sequence with gray / foggy background], the screen was stuck (everything gray). Loaded a save state from earlier and on the second try it went through normally...

From time to time, something like this happens, so I have to save often and go back one step and retry... it usually works the second time.

[juwb]

Another problem I'm having now with OoT... when using the bow to shoot, literally half the screen goes black (or grey, or other single-color polygon). It's really annoying because this way you have a hard time seeing your target. The effect is especially bad in the shooting game of Kakariko village, where you have to aim fast... I'm using glN64 plugin for video output.

I'd post a screen shot here but I don't know how to make one... the record avi function gives me the sound, but a completely black screen... ;-)

Oh yeah, the sling shot had a similar issue, but there the polygon had a kind of flickering effect, which allowed you to see.

[juwb]

Attached a screenshot made with gimp in this case with the Slingshot. Happens all the time using the bow...

[Hacktarux]

It can very possibly be a problem with gln64...

Btw, most of your problems with the core in zelda will probably be fixed in next release.

[ciruZ]

Well, it's the settings. Mainly the two checkboxes on the interpreter/dynamic recompiler page are dangerous. With the right configuration, it's pretty stable. It still hangs, but only in extreme rare cases.

For example, earlier in OoT after getting the ocarina from Zelda [sequence with gray / foggy background], the screen was stuck (everything gray). Loaded a save state from earlier and on the second try it went through normally...

From time to time, something like this happens, so I have to save often and go back one step and retry... it usually works the second time.

I had no problems at this part of the game? The GFX was ok for me, too.
Just use Glide64, it's the best for Zelda IMO. It even renders the ingame menus correctly which all other plugin don't do.