First off i'm running windows 7 professional 64 bit, RAM is 12GB, CPU is an Intel i7-3770. Dolphin version is 3.0-864 dirty. My emulation settings are dual core and idle skipping enabled. Graphics is set to D3D9 with v-sync enabled. Anti-aliasing is turned off, anisotropic filtering is set to x1. EFB copies is set to RAM no cache enabled. External frame buffer is set to virtual, all other boxes in that tab are unchecked. I have audio set to DSP LLE recompiler.
The problem i've been running into is sometimes when entering a battle the game simply freezes up the and audio goes into a short loop forcing me to reset the emulator. The problem occurs about 5% of the time normally, but seems especially common at the Pit of 100 trials though there isn't a specific floor it always freezes at.
In the future, please direct all questions about specific games to the proper thread in the Game Discussion forum. You can find the thread for this game here:
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-gc-...-year-door
Some things to try:
1) Use the latest revisions or the latest stable release (3.5)
here
2) Disable Dual Core
3) Save often with save states
(use the emulated memory card for recording overall game progress though).
Be sure to have a look at the thread/wiki to see if there are any settings you might have missed (primarily the Bounding Box Calculations). Another thing to note, XFB isn't necessary for this game, you can disable it if you want to.
oops, forgot to mention graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 4GB of memory on it. So far i have tried disabling dual core, still running into pit of 100 trials issue and I have tried save states, still seems to freeze. I guess the next step is to try Dolphin 3.5.
EDIT
Okay i setup 3.5 and got a freeze on floor 7 trying to go through again. Using the same settings as before. I'll try disabling idle skipping next, and D3D11
While disabling idle skipping is technically more accurate emulation, I wouldn't imagine that it'd help much in reducing crashes. Not sure how much changing the backend would help (usually not much) but you might as well try OpenGL while you're at it.
You could try 3.5-336 (the latest revision as of this writing) or earlier (though unsupported) revisions before 3.0-864 to see if those avoid the crash issue. This may be a bug that has gone unnoticed, in which case you could do regression testing (checking revision by revision to see when the bug was introduced) and the developers can look into it after you file an issue on Google Code.
Disabling idle skipping and v-sync seems to have solved the problem, even on D3D9. I wound up returning to D3D9 because D3D11 ends up lagging ever so slightly(frequent random fps drops of 1-4 fps) I managed to make it to floor 20 for the first time and back out(wouldn't have survived much further and merchant wasn't there) allowing me to solve the trouble i was working on.