(08-26-2013, 10:32 PM)xemnas Wrote: [ -> ]The quality of music in the Dreamcast version is better.
The easiest solution is to just emulate SoA on a DC emulator
Personally, the music in SoA (DC and GC) was nothing too fantastic to begin with, even in comparison to other games made at the same time, so I can deal with the compression they used in the GC version. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, but having CD quality level sound didn't mean the game had quality music. That's just my opinion though.
There was a thread in Support a while ago discussing replacing certain GC audio files. It's probably entirely possible, but you'd need to know how to edit GC disc dumps.
Thanks for the information.
Quote:The easiest solution is to just emulate SoA on a DC emulator
SoAL is a fairly large improvement over SoA though. Graphics are better, random encounter rate is lower, etc. I also really like the SoA music, but that's personal opinion
Replacing the audio files would be difficult though. First of all, there's a reason why they made the audio more compressed and overall worse: not enough space on a GC DVD. If you try to use the DC music files, it would be too large. This might be solvable in Dolphin - not sure if we actually even check for a max size for GC discs, but the game might not be happy about it.
Then you'd need to change the whole audio playback code, and seeing how complex these are you probably don't want to RE them and patch them to add your own music format in there.
Overall that would most likely be 3-4 months of work for someone like me who knows his GC and his RE fairly well. Not worth it.
Thanks for the information. If it requires code modification, I won't be able to do it. It would be nice if Dolphin had Load Custom Audios option like Load Custom Textures.
Can't I just extract DC music files and convert them to GC music files then replace the files in the GC disc dump? I guess it's not simple like that. They should have used multiple discs instead of compressing the music.
I just grabbed the 3.5-2343 version of the emulator in my ever going quest to get SoAL to run smoothly on my system. Unfortunately there are still spots it will lag horribly(curse you Valua!).
For giggles, though, I tried the D3D11 setting and to my surprise I am not getting any of the notorious black textures! I'm using, for the most part, basic recommended settings and the Projection Hack is the standard 1.99998. Has anyone else noticed this or are you getting different results?
I'll test out D3D11 for a few hours and see if the textures continue behaving.
(09-13-2013, 08:59 AM)Gibson8088 Wrote: [ -> ]I just grabbed the 3.5-2343 version of the emulator in my ever going quest to get SoAL to run smoothly on my system. Unfortunately there are still spots it will lag horribly(curse you Valua!).
For giggles, though, I tried the D3D11 setting and to my surprise I am not getting any of the notorious black textures! I'm using, for the most part, basic recommended settings and the Projection Hack is the standard 1.99998. Has anyone else noticed this or are you getting different results?
I'll test out D3D11 for a few hours and see if the textures continue behaving.
The spots in the intro cutscene that used to cause black textures seems to be fixed in this version (and the most recent version too) :3 wonder when that got fixed, and what caused it...
Edit: THE HORRENDOUS RED/CYAN SHADOWS ARE GONE TOO?!?! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS
Xana Wrote:Edit: THE HORRENDOUS RED/CYAN SHADOWS ARE GONE TOO?!?! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS
Whoa. News to me. Will check it out on OpenGL and update the wiki.
I've been playing the game at 2x native resolution and with 2 Samples Anti-Aliasing in 3.5-2442, and now 4.0, with barely any problems at 25 fps.
[color=#ff0000]Issues I get:[/color]
- Most cutscenes cause a big slow down (often dropping to below 20 fps), even if they don't have lots of things to render.
- Every now and then, for some reason, it looks like the camera points to the wrong place (also in cutscenes), usually causing a close-up view of a wall.
- Sometimes, when the game is alt-tabbed for too long, it freezes, with a loud droning sound playing constantly. Save-stating during such a freeze will make you load it frozen. Loading another state that wasn't frozen runs fine. [color=#ff0000](Kinda bad one, has made me lose game progress some times)[/color]
Settings:
- General Configs: Enable Dual Core, Enable Idle Skipping, Framelimit by Audio, JIT Recompiler,
- Graphics: Direct3D 11, Scaled EFB Copy, EFB Copies to RAM (Enable Cache), Fast Texture Cache, Disabled External Frame Buffer, Cache Display Lists, OpenMP Texture Decoder, Fast Depth Calculation.
- Audio: DSP HLE Emulation, XAudio 2
Specs:
- Intel i5-2500 (3.60 GHz)
- Geforce GTX 660 Ti
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
@Kiloku - The speed and graphical issues might be related to D3D11. Try using D3D9 and OpenGL (use both to see if there are any differences). With OpenGL, you can use the Vertex Streaming Hack; OpenGL on Nvidia hardware with this hack (and without it in some cases) is faster than either D3D backend.
About save states, they're working pretty good now, but if you create/load save states while experiencing any sort of issue, that's begging to recreate the issue (or crash Dolphin) every time you load/save that save state. Save states are a "snapshot" of Dolphin's emulation at any given moment, thus they're sensitive to the situation you described (though fine under normal conditions).
I know Alt+Tab is enticing for this game (the battles are slow imo) but perhaps being a bit more conservative would help? Otherwise, try manually setting the Framelimit to something higher (30, 35, 40, etc). Alt-Tab may be going too fast or something when you let go and return to 25 (assuming you're using the PAL version). Other than that, it's very much recommended that you save normally in-game to Dolphin's emulated memory card. You can still use save states, but don't rely on them to save your overall game progress. Think of save states as "quick saves". This will help since later versions of Dolphin may not be compatible with your current save states, but the emulated memory card file will be.
EDIT: Tried this game on 4.0 yesterday. Cyan shadows are still and issue for OpenGL. Perhaps it's only D3D11 that works? Can anyone else confirm?