Lag counter keeps rising and it's as if I had no controller setup.

[Derpstorm]

I was playing Animal Crossing GC, and had had tried to save, but it did not. This was a memory card glitch I had had before, at least twice. Like normal, I selected all of the memcard files multiple times, until I gave up and made a new one. I think it didn't work, and so I loaded a save state from a minute before I tried to save. I tried to move, but couldn't. None of the buttons had any effect, and yes, the controller is configured. The lag counter was going up rapidly, 50 numbers per second, although the frames per second was still at 60, and the animation was fluent in-game. I thought it was due to the game using the real-life time, so I deleted my save on the memcard, uninstalled Dolphin (including 4.0 which was still installed) and removed the game. Nothing worked, and I later noticed that his happened to all of my games, and it is therefore an emulator problem. I am clueless as to what to do, and I'm not familiar with complicated inner-workings of Dolphin. Any help would be great.(The memory card problem is a bother, too)

[pauldacheez]

"Derpstorm", indeed. I don't know what the hell happened to you, but I think you'll need to start with a fresh memory card. You'll need to go into My Documents, move/delete the Dolphin Emulator folder, start Dolphin again to let it regenerate the default files, and optionally replace everything but the empty memory card files in the GC folder with your old stuff.

The "lag counter" is a TAS-related thing. It doesn't relate to performance in any way, it just counts the time in frames (e.g. 60ths of a second) since the game last polled for input. It's useless information for normal people playing the game, aside from telling you in this case that it's no longer paying attention to your button presses.

Also, the game only syncs with your computer's clock when it first starts; after that, it depends on how long the game has been running for (at full speed). If you pause emulation or make a save state and load it later, it'll pause the in-game clock until you resume or load the state; if you run the game at double-speed, the clock will go twice as fast as real-time, and if you run the game at half-speed, the clock'll go at half-speed.

And don't use save states. They break shit.