[GC] Skies of Arcadia: Legends

[elegyempty]

There have been many threads about this game, but none of them have been granted official status; I figured I'd take a stab at it.



SKIES OF ARCADIA: LEGENDS
(NTSC-U)

---------------------------

About

Skies of Arcadia, released in Japan as Eternal Arcadia , is a role-playing video game developed by Overworks for the Dreamcast and published by Sega in 2000. Skies of Arcadia Legends, a port, was released for the GameCube in 2002. (...) The game's story focuses around Vyse, a young pirate in a Jules Verne-inspired fantasy world, and his friends as they attempt to stop the Valuan Empire from reviving ancient weapons with the potential to destroy the world.

Settings Used
(assume anything not listed is set to "default")
(The [color=#FF0000]red[/color] stuff is important!)

Revision

• Dolphin 3.0-354
  

General

• Framelimit: Audio
  

DSP

• [color=#FF0000]DSP LLE recompiler[/color]
  
• [color=#FF0000]DSP LLE on Thread[/color]
  
• Audio Backend: XAudio2
  

Graphics

• Backend: Direct3D9
  
• Force 16:9
  
• Internal Resolution: Auto (Window Size)
  
• 9x SSAA
  
• Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
  
• Force Texture Filtering: On
  
• OpenMP Texture Decoder: On
  
• Widescreen Hack: On
  
• [color=#FF0000]EFB Copies: RAM[/color] (Enable Cache = ON, Fastest)
  

Game Properties

• [color=#FF0000]Accurate Vbeam Emulation: Checked[/color]
  
• [color=#FF0000]Custom Projection Hack: Checked[/color]
  
• (under Custom Projection Hack settings) [color=#FF0000]zFar correction: 1.99998[/color]
  

Emulation Status

Emulation Speed:

• This game is heavily CPU dependent, and requires a very fast, modern processor to emulate with LLE. (Probably over 4.0 GHz) If you run the game in HLE, the sound will be massively corrupted, to the point where you might as well keep the sound off. If you're willing to make that sacrifice, however, the game will run on practically any machine at full-speed in HLE mode.
  

What needs to be fixed:

• The Audio - Even with LLE, instruments drop in and out occassionally. Now, the game does have sound problems on actual Gamecube hardware, but within the emulator these problems seem worse. The results are the same in both XAudio2 and DSound.
  
  
• Menu issues - The start menu in the overworld seems to "pick up" parts of the screen and repeat them, while the party menu will occasionally corrupt, as seen below. (Closing and reopening in a different location tends to fix the issue with the party menu) Use [color=#FF0000]EFB to RAM[/color] to fix menu glitches.
  
  
  
• Red-Cyan Shadows - Shadows of characters seem to split into two parallel red and cyan ovals, as if the game were being played in 3D. Not a huge problem, but weird nonetheless.
  
  
  

Screenshots
(click for full size)











...and more!

Videos

Courtesy of Tukka:


Additional Notes

None at this time.

[punnett]

yea. i got lle working and stuff and tried a lot of different things out but my computer couldn't handle it :[. there's a guy who made a youtube of this game fully working saying he did nothing to fix the audio...

can anyone confirm what he did/said was legit? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afYet7uGT5w

[Shonumi]

yea. i got lle working and stuff and tried a lot of different things out but my computer couldn't handle it :[. there's a guy who made a youtube of this game fully working saying he did nothing to fix the audio...

can anyone confirm what he did/said was legit? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afYet7uGT5w

Dunno, watched the video and the audio sounds, weird. Some parts sound like they're supposed to, but others sound completely off. Parts of the intro chase scene don't seem right. I haven't played SoA in a while, but I remember parts of the beginning sounding different, maybe that's because the video is the PAL version. The only way to get perfect audio in this game is LLE. I don't think the audio in that video is perfect, nor did the poster say it was. If he did, then that's nonsense

[xentar]

Don't remember any sound issues but I do remember getting a blackout on Fina's flashback scene in the beginning of the game. And those red/cyan shadows are quite annoying, I wonder if it's reasonable to wait for the fix.

[fagoatse]

perhaps neobrain could elaborate on that since he's well-versed in gc/wii's gpu and dolphin's gfx plugins. I guess it's a matter of debugging the game but I suspect nobody from the dev team has the game in their possesion.

[neobrain]

I wonder if it's reasonable to wait for the fix.

It usually isn't. Issues get fixed when someone decides to specifically work on them (unlikely) or when some random fix happens to solve the issue (more likely, but unlikely to solve this issue specifically).

[Nameless Mofo]

Would like to add:

OpenCL Texture Decoder: OFF

With it on, frame rate for me drops from 30 to ~4 while in menus.

BTW thanks for the tip about EFB->RAM fixing the menu glitches, that drove me crazy for the longest time!

[catabarez]

Is it possible to change the music to the original Dreamcast version?

[linkinworm]

Is it possible to change the music to the original Dreamcast version?

whats changed? and you probs could if you had enough time unpacking files, converting audio, repacking, encrypting etc

[Shonumi]

Is it possible to change the music to the original Dreamcast version?

I never owned a Dreamcast, so I can't verify if any of the music for this game has indeed changed, but like linkinworm said, you'd have to mess around with the files yourself. I think there are a couple of tools that can extract the files in a GC ISO and put them back together, GC Image Rebuilder and GC-Tool might be what you're looking for. Of course, it might not be so simple as extracting and replacing.