Sonic Robo Blast 2 Wii port homebrew wrongly 50hz and not saving progress.

[retroben]

I managed to get SRB2Wii running on Dolphin with SRB2 2.0.6 only to find some oddities like music being slowed down at lower pitch than normal and it running at 50VPS/50FPS.
Enabling PAL60 makes it run at 60fps when no change to the audio conditions.
Runs perfectly fine visually and otherwise fairly stable.

Another issue is that it seems to fail to save my act clearing progress at all. (I made it all the way to the 3rd area,Deep Sea Zone in order to test lag+cpu clock override and it removes the lag awesomely)

Is there an issue with sd.raw not allowing writing to it via Dolphin?

How I got SRB2 running; I added Homebrew Channel (open source edition) by creating a custom sd.raw as instructed by a guide in a wiki page and copied all of the files into it (like the knux.plr file for example) and a parallel set of the files into my game directory as well to prevent issues.

My goal is to get this to run on Android via my Shield TV since there is no proper port released of the Sonic fan-made game as of yet and the PSP emulation method has really unstable frame-rates and is in general very unstable to the point it often crashes on boot or requires save-state loading in order to run properly.
Dolphin runs this game loads better and has a resolution advantage,even at 640x480 compared to the PSP port's pitiful resolution.

I feel this is not something to post into the issue tracker since it takes so much explanation to get the game running in order for anyone to debug why its running oddly in the audio plus at PAL speeds and not saving progress of beaten zones.
Let me know if I should add this on the issue tracker with more direct details.

1. Acquire SRB2Wii 2.0.0rc4.tar.bz2 and extract its folders into your games directory then acquire SRB2 v2.0.6 and extract the following contents and place them into the outer srb2wii folder;

drill.dta
knux.plr
music.dta
rings.wpn
soar.dta
sonic.plr
srb2.srb (or srb2.wad)
zones.dta
tails.plr
base_config.cfg
wminput.conf

3. Use mksdcard batch to Create an sd.raw of 256MB then install ImDisk and right click that sd.raw to mount it and select the removable
storage checkbox so stuff will save when unmounting it.

4. Copy all of the folders (should be Apps,bootmii,srb2wii and files srb2wii.dol and srb2wii.elf into that virtual sd.raw directory then unmount when done.

5. Set your sdcard directory in Dolphin on the Paths tab in Config then check "insert sd card" on the Wii tab.

6. Find and place The Homebrew Channel (open source edition is what I used) into your game folder and install it via Dolphin. (I double clicked it in the list and it installed it for me)

7. Run Homebrew Channel directly and it should list SRB2Wii and be able to launch it successfully.

8. The game should then run fairly well aside from the issues i mentioned at the start.

Afraid to post links at all even though both are freeware and its homebrew,someone can give me clearance and I can link the thread for it and the other freeware stuff if allowed.

[ExtremeDude2]

Did you check it on real hardware?

[retroben]

(07-27-2018, 10:00 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: Did you check it on real hardware?

I ran it on hardware years ago and all was well for the most part,audio was fine and it ran at the proper speeds.

[JMC47]

You should find a spot that saves and make sure all the logging is enabled to see if it fails to do something with the SD card.

[retroben]

  dolphin.zip (Size: 18.81 KB / Downloads: 43)

Turns out I forgot there is another version of it using another method to run it.
The new version has links found on wiibrew but you have to search for it on a search engine because wiki sites are bad about lacking links to many pages.

There is also a custom music data file to fix audio the pitch issue.

Saving still fails so I got a log for this newer version of the game port.
Sorry the log is so large.

Here is something I noticed a handful times...

40:52:184 IOS\IOS.cpp:565 W[IOS]: Previous request to device /dev/sdio/slot0 blocked emulation for 3845 microseconds.

Edit: Forgot to mention I am using Dolphin 5.0-7794 Wx for reasons.
If the saving issues can be fixed,it won't matter for Windows to me because my intention is to run the game on Android which doesn't specifically have the Windows QT interface and lacks hefty debugging so I would have no reason to be irritated about the Dolphin Android.

Edit: Smaller log file around the time it should likely be saving. (beating the Green Flower Zone Act 3 boss and entering zone 2,Techno Hill.

[JMC47]

I see writes to the SD card, there's nothing in there denoting failure.

[retroben]

After running SRB2 v2.0.6 on Windows (with its own issues) I found that it saves the save slot soon after starting a level and has pictures and info on the bottom for lives left and continues.

Normally,that starts out empty before starting a save file slot then that changes to the images and indications.
But with the Wii homebrew port on Dolphin,it always says "empty" due to it failing to save.
It would be painful to run it in the purest accurate settings to see if it succeeds in saving,but maybe that wouldn't be the worst idea.