Frame Advance not working right?

[thefinaluptake]

I'm trying to mess around with TASing Xenoblade Chronicles, but the frame advance and the TAS input are behaving oddly. It takes two presses of the frame advance key to be able to advance 1 frame, and when I try to use autofire by right clicking an input in TAS input, it just doesn't really work. The frame counter also goes 2 frames at a time, as if it's a 60fps game when it's only 30fps.

I'm using 5.0-11827. I hope there's a solution to this issue, since I've been searching around for a while and haven't found any kind of solution to this issue.

[JosJuice]

If you have the setting Skip Presenting Duplicate Frames (in Graphics > Hacks) turned off, does turning it on affect this?

[thefinaluptake]

If you have the setting Skip Presenting Duplicate Frames (in Graphics > Hacks) turned off, does turning it on affect this?

It affects it slightly. I had it on to begin with, and turning it off causes the frame counter to actually count properly and not go by 2s instead of 1s, but it still takes 2 frame advance presses to reach the next frame. It's as if each frame is up for 2 frames instead of actually each being 1 frame like you'd expect for a 30fps game.

Could VPS being at 60 be the reason why this is happening?

[JosJuice]

The VPS is supposed to say 60 (unless you're running the PAL version at 50 Hz, in which case it's supposed to say 50), and that's how it always has been. I don't recall frame advance always having behaved in the way you describe, though. Do you know if there's an older version of Dolphin where it isn't like this, like 5.0? (Not that I actually recommend using old builds, but just for the sake of finding out more about what's wrong.)

[thefinaluptake]

It works as you'd expect it to on 5.0, advancing 1 frame forward every time you press the frame advance hotkey.

Additionally, I tested on a fresh install of 5.0-11827, and the issue was still there.

[thefinaluptake]

Alright, I did some testing. The final version that frame advance appears to work as I'd expect is 5.0-11229. 5.0-11231 seems to be the update that made frame advance not work as I'd expect.

[JosJuice]

Ah, I see... It makes sense that that update would affect the behavior of this. I'll have to see if something can be done about the problem. Thanks for finding the specific version where it started happening.

[JosJuice]

I have a fix in progress at https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/8730, but I'm not sure when it will get merged.

[thefinaluptake]

Wow, thanks! I wasn't expecting the emulator to potentially actually get a fix for this, I was expecting to realize that there was some setting somewhere that I had just completely neglected to check.

Thanks for putting in the effort for attempting to fix my issue. Looking through that thread, it definitely seems like there are some reasons why it doesn't work the way I'd expect, but that's fine! Needing to press frame advance twice for every frame isn't a huge inconvenience, anyways. The biggest thing for me with this issue is that it prevents the TAS input autofire from working correctly, as it alternates every frame, but due to every frame taking 2 frames to get through it's effectively the same as just holding down the button.

[JosJuice]

Ah, right, there's the autofire too... I think that isn't handled correctly in my pull request right now.