[GC] Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike

[Visor]

(07-15-2018, 07:19 AM)Monotremata Wrote: I did make sure Im running the latest build, 5.0-8449. Im trying to run it on a 2010 Mac Pro with a Radeon 5770.

Have you tried the 5.0 stable version (available on Dolphin's download site)?  You shouldn't see any blue/purple blocks covering your screen with that version.  Please note that I have an i5 3570K (overclocked to 4.8 GHz), which is a CPU that's a few years newer than what's in your 2010 Mac Pro.  That said, playing through the first stage (at a mere 1x rendering resolution) still had pretty significant stuttering / slowdown for me.

This game requires a LOT of raw CPU power, but I don't necessarily mean lots of cores like an i7 or Threadripper, as Dolphin can really only take advantage of 2 cores, although they recommend a 4 core CPU to handle other background tasks.  [Edit: It looks like the Core i7 CPUs still have the best single-core performance when compared to i3s and i5s, so it's probably best to stick with the i7s (or the i9s if you can afford them.)] You'd probably need a 7th or 8th gen Intel CPU (albeit the 9th gen is coming very soon) to get things running relatively smoothly.  In my case, I can't really justify spending $1,000+ to upgrade my CPU, RAM, and motherboard just to get these Rogue Squadron games working.

A much cheaper alternative would be to track down a Wii that supports Gamecube games (along with a Gamecube controller) and soft-mod it so that you can play Rebel Strike (among other games) via a USB drive.  I had this setup working back in Canada and the experience was sweet, especially when connected via a CRT television.  However, I've since moved to Australia and of course their power system is different here, so I had all my classic gaming stuff stored back home until I eventually return. 

[Visor]

Well, here we are almost a year later and still no progress on ticket 9845 (https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/9845), with the latest two and a half year-old response being "I don't know then" and an assignment to someone named degasus for further investigation.  Meanwhile we're almost at the 10,000 updates milestone for Dolphin 5.0 (including a pretty significant unification of the video backends) but it appears that not a drop of time has been spent on investigating the Opcode-related crashes to this game.

That being said, I took it upon myself to do some research and trial & error in order to squeeze out as much performance as possible with this game on older versions of Dolphin, and I'm pleased to say that with my aging i5 3570K (overclocked to 4.8 GHz) I can now get framerates in the 50s-60s for the more demanding planet-based stages (e.g. the opening "Revenge of the Empire" stage) and I can get a pretty-much locked 60fps frame rate for the open space stages.  Here's what I've done:

First, you'll need to use an older version of Dolphin for the game to actually work without risk of crashing.  I would recommend a later version of 4.0 (I'm currently using 4.0-8684 due to its popularity on this forum as well as on YouTube videos) but you could also use a very early version of 5.0, like 5.0-9.  I'm aware that ticket 9845 claims that the problem started with version 5.0-686, but I've found the game still crashes with versions much older than that.  Unfortunately, this means you won't be able to take advantage of UberShaders and the luxury of being able to compile all the shaders before the game starts up, so you'll have to play through each stage at least once before you'll start seeing all the stutters disappear.  

Side note: You could also look into older Ishiiruka versions that used other methods to pre-cache shaders, but that opens up a whole other can of worms given that the textures were somewhat buggy (the ground on Hoth immediately comes to mind).

Once you have an older version of Dolphin installed, you'll want to draw up settings for only Rebel Strike, as configuring global settings will break settings for all your other games on your newer version of Dolphin, as all versions of Dolphin 4/5 draw their global settings from the same pool (usually located within your \Documents\Dolphin Emulator folder on Windows).  To apply settings to only the game itself, go to your list of games on the main Dolphin page (remember you're now using your older version of Dolphin), and right-click on Rebel Strike and select Properties. Click on the "Edit Config" button at the bottom-left of the window, which will open the .ini file (in my case it's GLRE64.ini) for editing of the game's settings.  Now copy and paste the following into the text file:

[Core]
DSPHLE = False
[DSP]
EnableJIT = True
[Video_Hacks]
EFBAccessEnable = False

What this does is disable HLE audio and ensure the LLE recompiler is used instead of the slower LLE interpreter.  It also disables the "Skip EFB Access from CPU" hack, which provided a 10 fps gain for me in the game.  

Optional additional setting #1: You can also speed up disc load times by adding the line FastDiscSpeed = True under the [Core] section.  This will load up your game's stages (and sub stages) much faster.  I haven't played the whole game yet with this option enabled so use it at your own risk.

Optional additional setting #2: You can also enable proper widescreen support using Gecko's widescreen code.  Please note that the menus and cinematics will still be improperly stretched/distorted, but the actual gameplay will be in proper 16:9.  To do this, add the following to your game's .ini file:

[Gecko]
$Widescreen
48000000 8005F71C
DE000000 7E007FFF
301AA484 801F0060
141AA480 C00D0000
E0000000 80008000
040A88A0 3FAAAAAB
*
[Gecko_Enabled]
$Widescreen

That's it!  I hope you find a significant jump in performance as I did. (Remember you'll have to play through each stage at least once to fully reap the performance benefits.)  If anyone has found anything else that improves performance, please be sure to post it here.

Cheers,
Visor

[JosJuice]

(04-08-2019, 01:03 PM)Visor Wrote: Well, here we are almost a year later and still no progress on ticket 9845 (https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/9845), with the latest two and a half year-old response being "I don't know then" and an assignment to someone named degasus for further investigation.  Meanwhile we're almost at the 10,000 updates milestone for Dolphin 5.0 (including a pretty significant unification of the video backends) but it appears that not a drop of time has been spent on investigating the Opcode-related crashes to this game.

There has been investigation, it just hasn't been written down on the bug tracker. We know that the fix is to use more accurate GPU timings, but actually getting that done and merged is tricky.

[Visor]

(04-08-2019, 04:27 PM)JosJuice Wrote: There has been investigation, it just hasn't been written down on the bug tracker. We know that the fix is to use more accurate GPU timings, but actually getting that done and merged is tricky.

Ok, fair enough.  At least you've identified the issue and I guess now comes the hard work.   If I knew how to program (not to mention had a better understanding of how emulation worked behind the scenes) then I wouldn't hesitate to offer to help out.  

Thanks,
Visor

[nbohr1more]

Here is my latest config that works pretty well (added the widescreen stuff from Visor):

Code:

[Core]
# Values set here will override the main Dolphin settings.
MMU = 1
SyncGPU = True
OverclockEnable = True
Overclock = 0.68
ProgressiveScan = True

[OnLoad]
# Add memory patches to be loaded once on boot here.

[OnFrame]
# Add memory patches to be applied every frame here.

[ActionReplay]
# Add action replay cheats here.

[Video]

[Video_Settings]
# ShaderCompilationMode = 3
EnableGPUTextureDecoding = False

[Video_Hacks]
EFBToTextureEnable = True
ImmediateXFBEnable = False

[Video_Enhancements]
ArbitraryMipmapDetection = False

[Gecko]
$Widescreen
48000000 8005F71C
DE000000 7E007FFF
301AA484 801F0060
141AA480 C00D0000
E0000000 80008000
040A88A0 3FAAAAAB
*
[Gecko_Enabled]
$Widescreen

It seems I can't make it past the title sequences if I don't have SyncGPU enabled but I did ONCE and when
I got in game the speeder-bike scene went from 40FPS to 60FPS!

I sorta wish there were a hack option that only performs SyncGPU during menus and title sequences. I was hoping
that disabling "Ignore Format Changes" would do the trick but it still locks up.

[eckso]

Also working for me in last version r9984 (DX11), although the widescreen hack (PAL here) only works in cutscenes.
I think the problem is antialiasing, disabling it goes past the intro.

Code:

[Core]
MMU = 1
SyncGPU = True
CPUThread = True
ProgressiveScan = True

[Video_Settings]
EnableGPUTextureDecoding = False

[Video_Hacks]
; enable to fix purple fade outs, disable to make it run above 20fps
;XFBToTextureEnable = False
ImmediateXFBEnable = False

[Video_Enhancements]
ArbitraryMipmapDetection = False

[JosJuice]

(04-19-2019, 01:59 PM)eckso Wrote: Also working for me in last version r9984 (DX11), although the widescreen hack (PAL here) only works in cutscenes.

The cutscenes are in widescreen even when you're not using a widescreen hack.

[eckso]

Then the Gecko code (EU) is not working for me. EDIT: I found out, the PAL Gecko code is for Rogue Squadron II, not III. Tested with the NTSC code and while it boots it doesn't work.

After several tests it looks like if you have precached shaders (played once) it won't hang when going in/out of the level.

[Videogamer555]

Why does it keep crashing with "unknown opcode"? You'd think by now the people who reverse engineer stuff like this would have figured out what opcode gets executed at this point in the game, and how the CPU or GPU of the Gamecube is supposed to respond to that opcode, and that it would have by now been implemented in this emulator.

[JosJuice]

(05-06-2019, 01:56 PM)Videogamer555 Wrote: Why does it keep crashing with "unknown opcode"? You'd think by now the people who reverse engineer stuff like this would have figured out what opcode gets executed at this point in the game, and how the CPU or GPU of the Gamecube is supposed to respond to that opcode, and that it would have by now been implemented in this emulator.

It's not a matter of Dolphin not supporting a certain opcode, it's a matter of the game feeding the GPU invalid data due to some complex timing issues.