MagicEngine

Kaminari · Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2002 2:48 pm Post subject: Gulliver Boy

The game freezes when you look at the Atlantis Tapestry in the Venice Royal Palace (after the flooding). Too bad I don't have a save state to help hunting this bug.

Kaminari · Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2002 1:41 pm Post subject:

The problem seems more generic and related to streaming PCM (again).

In Gulliver and many other games (Kabuki, etc) with streaming PCM, I'm experiencing random 'freezing' during spoken dialogues. The freezing typically occurs during the CD access between the end of a dialogue and the loading of the following one.

Usually, when ME encounters a CD read error (because of bad ASPI or whatever), the game resets to the Super CD boot screen. But here, there's no such thing. When I say 'freezing', it's more like the game stops accessing the CD and the pad becomes inoperative (except for the soft reset). The strange bit is that the game itself is obviously still working (you can see the people walk around and so on).

I'd say this happens one time out of five and isn't easy to track.

I'm sending you a batch of save states of different events in the game. For each event, the first save state is the one that will allow you to (eventually) experience the problem, the second save state is the one when the game has just frozen.

I tried to check every possible hardware and software culprit outside ME. I tested on my CD-ROM and my CD-R; I tested in UDMA, PIO, 40x, 4x, even 1x, BIOS Plug'n Play activated or not... debug log activated or not Wink

Same result each time. Whatever the setting, most of the time it works, but one time out of five it freezes. The only thing I couldn't test is ASPI versus SPTI, since ME forces SPTI under W2k. But I suspect it wouldn't do much of a difference.

Incidentally, I also experienced some curious dropouts in PCM dialogues. The sound suddenly stops in the middle of a dialogue but the text continues to display, and the next dialogue is OK again. It might be related to the problem above.

Hope you can find something from this.

PS: sorry for the mail, it's quite big in size Sad

Kaminari · Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2002 2:15 pm Post subject:

Mmm, your mail server didn't like it Razz

I put them here temporarily:

[links removed]

dmichel · Admin Joined: 04 Apr 2002 Posts: 1166 Location: France

Kaminari · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2002 2:15 pm Post subject:

Cool, I'll test in ASPI mode as well.

Good luck, I have complete faith in your capabilities Wink