games freeze with swiss

[nox_123]

Hi,

why do some of my games freeze, when I play them with swiss? Some work perfectly fine and never have any problem (viewtiful joe, it seems wind waker in compatible mode but not fast!) , other freeze very regularily when something is loaded (going into a room in Wind Waker, prince of persia: warrior within in game, star wars rogue leader loading level, tales of symphonia loading something).

regarding wind waker I believe, that is happens more often in Fast-Mode. Also my Gamecube seems to freeze more easily than my Wii, but I am not sure about these things. With DIOS MIOS (on Wii) it does not happen at all (same SD card, same files). So the SD card (class 10) is working great! It is just latest DIOS MIOS has some issues again with PAL games like prince of persia warrior...

Is it maybe my SD Gecko? I use v0.3 now.

Kind regards
nox

[Apache Thunder]

Some of that (audio freezing while loading) is due to slow SD cards. You can fix some of it by using a faster SD card. However the memory card slot is on a slower connection then the DVD drive, so any backup you run may run into this issue even if you got a really fast SD card. Now much Swiss can do to get around this. So if you run into games that do this a lot, the best solution is to simply burn them to mini-dvd and run them from the DVD drive.

[nox_123]

I am not sure, if we talk about the same problem:

Not only the audio freezes, but the whole game. It won't react to any input after the freeze. Sometimes the audio also freezes where it played and sometimes there is no audio, probably, if there were none before.

The SD card is perfectly fine as it works in the Wii with DIOS MIOS like a charm! So yes, the bottleneck is the Gecko!

Burned DVDs cannot be read anymore and I am afraid of killing the whole console by doing the laser tweak!

[emu_kidid]

Yes your card works fine in DIOS MIOS because it/Wii has the ability to use DMA (Direct Memory Access) transfers from the front SD slot, but I have to use PIO (Polled I/O). DMA will fire an interrupt when the transfer is complete, whereas PIO I have to keep checking if the bytes are all done (and transfer them myself).

A good example is, imagine if your phone didn't ring/vibrate to interrupt you, and you had to continuously check it? You'd be a pretty busy person (read: CPU) constantly looking at it.

The bottleneck is that to use the Gecko I need to take precious time away from the games while I tell the bytes to hurry in across from SD card to GC RAM where as DIOS MIOS tells the Starlet to do it via code running on IPC in its own separate thread, and then automagically when it's completed, the GC game is informed that it's completed.

I've tried to simulate DMA by doing tiny reads over a span of time rather than holding up the CPU for a larger amount of time but it hasn't appeared to have made it 100% better (yet, or ever).

[tueidj]

Build your own combination USB/SD gecko that doesn't suck, you know you want to.

[emu_kidid]

I know I want to and it shouldn't be too hard to do but I'd need to learn hardware pretty much from scratch at this point.

[nox_123]

Thanks for you answer you all!!

Hmm yeah... I have noticed to get for the critical games far better results with DIOS MIOS.

I also noticed that the loading times are maybe longer and you can hear that at the audio! But if that happens, why can the game freeze?! Are these reading errors? I remember the streaming-method with PSO and the loaders showed . for a good transfer and x for a failed transfer. x's while loading also made some games freeze.

Could that have anything to do with the freezes or is it just a coincidence?!

And is this USB gecko thing really better??? Without an included controller or something that can hardly do anything different?!

[emu_kidid]

When you say freeze, are they freezing to a complete stop?

[nox_123]

Yes, the games crash completely. Some are more critical than others. I think Star Wars Rogue Leader was the worst with all the videos and stuff! But I am note sure if you can reproduce it if you never saw it before...

I will try another SD card, too, but I am quite sure these are even(?) slower...

My SDHC card is 16GB Class 10 from semi-brand Platinum.

[nox_123]

Speedtest: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/202/a9ps.png/
The SD card seems good enough to me... 64KByte Blocksize btw, not sure if bigger or smaller is better...

with another SD card (2GB noname) it was the same if not worse.

Am I really the only one with this problem???

[emu_kidid]

Use the latest version when it's available here viewtopic.php?f=25&t=1375 (r240 or r241) and try again.

[nox_123]

r240

- BBA bug is fixed, great, thank you (I transfer the dol with PSOload to the Gamecube btw)
- Star Wars Rogue Leader seemed way more playable, I made it through the (video streaming) menu, but ingame at some point it did crash again after some minutes (at compatible speed)

btw:

I played Sonic Adventure DX from the noname SD card without any trouble for some hours (with v0.3 still). It sooo depends on the game...

(but as the star wars game was one of the launch titles, it does not look like some sort of copy protection to me either...)


and I will check on this viewtopic.php?f=25&t=1399 although my SD fits properly into the gecko and the gecko into the gamecube. putting in and out is with some resistance and of course I do not touch the sd card or gecko at all!!!

okay, I have put some tape below the platine, but it did certainly not help with Rogue Leader. it is like before. I doubt more tape would change anything.
although their problem with resident evil is really strange and similar to my problem!

[nox_123]

Hmm yeah...

r240 is way better, but still not stable though. After Star Wars Rogue Leader I tried Prince of Persia Warrior Within and I could not crash it at one scene, where I always could crash it before within 3 times. So I decided to play it and at the very next scene it did crash.

The game has dynamic level loading and I guess at that part stepping forward loads the new one, and going back the old one and it seemed I was right in the middle because the game stumbled continously (what it does when I believe it is loading)...

Well and at one point it just stops!

For Rogue Leader you could just boot the game and wait, it does even crash while showing some demo gameplay. Or ingame... (just that game is still playable with DIOS MIOS, Prince of Persia is not...)

[emu_kidid]

Can you try not using the "Compatible" mode as it's probably becoming far too slow, have you tried "Fast" mode at all?

I strongly recommend "Fast" as the default.

[nox_123]

Yes, I have tried it. Now Prince of Persia is doing good (fast mode, r240, taped gecko). I finally passed this one passage after 5 years. And I continued playing, what also worked quite nice. While loading there are slowdowns of course, but it does not freeze anymore. Except until now. I also kept the old savegame and tried once more to provoke a crash, but I could not, neither at the first nor the second problematic place. (I am happy!)

Star Wars Rogue Leader on the other hand also crashes in Fast Mode with r240 and my newly taped Gecko! I'd say it's the game, the files something like that if I did not know exactly that file on exactly this SD card works fine with DIOS MIOS! But as it works with DIOS MIOS I do not care that much. I just liked testing this game, because it is crashes so reproducible!

Let's hope the other games I currently play do good!!

[jlo138]

Have you tried the problematic games shrunken and full sized 1.35gb? Some prefer to be full sized but not everyone has the same issues with the same games. But as posted before me, try burning to mini DVDs as you'll have better compatibility. More than likely you'll need a pot adjustment but I've been lucky before. In my experience with pot adjustments, if the game loads slow or hangs on black screens you'll need to readjust. I've done my pot adjustments without a voltage tester. I turn the screw to the left just a tad. 1/16"-1/8" at a time, then test. Repeat if necessary.

[nox_123]

Luigi's Mansion just froze.... Guess, that will be another DIOS MIOS only. Just hope it is compatible, as I never tried this one on the Wii.

I am aware of the option to do the laser tweak, but I don't want to risk to kill my Gamecube. I need the DVD drive for PSO to boot swiss, so even for games from sd card. And I can play most games quite perfectly on the Wii with DIOS MIOS.

I just like the idea of having another TV to play the games. And of course try to help improve swiss, if I could be any help...