Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm trying to play Pikmin but every time a day ends there's a chance that the screen will go black and the cutscene never plays. Savestating beforehand and reloading doesn't prevent it, even though it seems like it's random since it doesn't happen every day.

Yes, I know this isn't the first thread asking about this problem, and I've looked through plenty of them, but none of the solutions have worked for me. The only one I haven't technically tried is using LLE audio rather than HLE, but my computer apparently isn't fast enough and I really don't want to play with that kind of slowdown. I've also tried setting the framelimit to audio rather than auto, clicking on RAM under "EFB Copies" in hacks (or at least I think that's what the suggestion said to do), and playing the game from startup to the end of the day without savestating (since I read that savestates could cause it). I also had the idea to savestate before each day ends and then temporarily switch over to LLE just for the cutscene, but I guess that's not possible so I can't do that.

So basically I have a choice between playing with HLE and risk having to replay entire days (I got up to day 9 once, and I thought I had been saving to the memory card after each day, but I had to restart from day 5, and I've replayed day 7 three times now with it blackscreening every time), or playing with LLE and experiencing unplayable slowdown. Admittedly, I had been using the most recent stable release (which was apparently outdated by over half a year), and I just downloaded 3.5-1734, and I've been allowing days to finish and haven't been seeing any problems so far, but my performance is terrible in this version. Whenever there's a lot of stuff onscreen (such as having a bunch of pikmin), it runs as bad with HLE as the stable release was running with LLE. Plus, I don't technically know if the problem is gone with this version; it only happens sometimes, but it's very persistent when it does happen.

So is there anything I can do to get around this? The only thing I can think of doing is playing the game and every time it fails to load the end of day cutscene, replaying the entire day again with LLE-induced slow motion. Not exactly ideal.

As a side note, I just tried loading the save with the day I was stuck on (with the stable release of dolphin) and selecting "go to sunset", and the cutscene played just fine, even though it failed to do so three times in a row after I had gone through the trouble of actually playing through the day. I also turned off the FPS limit and allowed the day to naturally complete in hyperspeed, and it also worked. It's like it only happens when it knows it will result in nullifying all the time I just spent.

You could always try 3.5 for more speed

(08-12-2013, 12:11 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: [ -> ]You could always try 3.5 for more speed

Isn't that the stable release that I've been using (aside from when I tried 3.5-1734)? Like I said, it's way too slow to be playable using LLE. If you're talking about something else, well, I'm extremely new to this so I wouldn't know what you're talking about.

Your CPU is too slow
Overclock it @ 3.4GHz or higher and try again with LLE

(08-12-2013, 12:39 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Your CPU is too slow
Overclock it @ 3.4GHz or higher and try again with LLE

I was thinking about trying that, but I have absolutely no idea how to overclock. Is there some sort of program I should download or something?

No
Go to your Bios and tweak base clock , multiplier/CPU Ratio , CPU voltage , buy aftermarket cooler if you don't have one (CM Hyper 212 Evo + Arctic MX-4) but you must do some research . Too much voltage (>1.35 Vcore) will blow up your PC

(08-12-2013, 12:54 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Too much voltage (>1.35 Vcore) will blow up your PC

Yeah, see, that's another reason I was hoping for another solution. I might try it out but right now I have no knowledge of what I'd be doing and I kind of don't want to blow up my PC. Is there really no way to avoid the black screen issue using HLE, and no way to load savestates from different DPSs?
EDIT: I also don't want to have to buy an aftermarket cooler or anything like that. I'm not looking to mess with my hardware, I just want to avoid my game suddenly stopping at the end of certain days.

Well , if you do it properly , your PC will last as much as you hope it to
For Example :
Q8400 multiplier/ratio = 8

I want to overclock it to 3.2GHz first
Set Base Clock = 400 MHz
CPU frequency = CPU Ratio x Base Clock = 8 x 400MHz = 3200MHz ~ 3.2GHz
CPU Voltage = as low as possible (increase little by little until your PC can boot and run Prime95 torture test without crashing) . For Example , I feed it 1.30Vcore first then 1.31 , 1.32 ...(Remember the 1.35Vcore rule if you still want a stable system)
To keep everything stable , you have to lower Ram/memory frequency (If you default memory frequency = 800MHz , lower it to 667MHz) . Since Core 2 Quad does not have unlocked multiplier , overclocking base clock will result in overclocking a whole system

Btw , if your PC is OEM product from Dell , Acer , HP , Lenovo.... No way you can overclock it unless you replace the mobo

(08-12-2013, 01:20 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Well , if you do it properly , your PC will last as much as you hope it to
For Example :
Q8400 multiplier/ratio = 8

I want to overclock it to 3.2GHz first
Set Base Clock = 400 MHz
CPU frequency = CPU Ratio x Base Clock = 8 x 400MHz = 3200MHz ~ 3.2GHz
CPU Voltage = as low as possible (increase little by little until your PC can boot and run Prime95 torture test without crashing) . For Example , I feed it 1.30Vcore first then 1.31 , 1.32 ...(Remember the 1.35Vcore rule if you still want a stable system)
To keep everything stable , you have to lower Ram/memory frequency (If you default memory frequency = 800MHz , lower it to 667MHz) . Since Core 2 Quad does not have unlocked multiplier , overclocking base clock will result in overclocking a whole system

Btw , if your PC is OEM product from Dell , Acer , HP , Lenovo.... No way you can overclock it unless you replace the mobo

I've actually gotten to day 9 without issue now, but if the screen goes black again, I guess I'll try that. It isn't OEM, I put it together myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean I know what I'm doing.

Sorry for the double post, but now I have a new problem. I figured out why I had to restart from day 5 that one time; I just noticed that when I save the game, there's no text at the top of the screen saying it's written to the memory card. I know it did it before, but for some reason it's not doing it now. I clicked the "..." next to slot A's memory card in device settings and made sure it has the right file in the correct path selected, but it just won't write to it. This wouldn't be much of a problem with savestates, but if the screen ends up going black at the end of the day, I won't be able to use any savestates (since reloading them doesn't stop the blackscreen thing), I'd have no choice but to manually load a save.

EDIT: Actually, I have two problems. The audio keeps getting progressively worse the more I play, with music and sound effects getting cut out constantly. Restarting the emulator didn't help.

EDIT2: Ok, apparently it was firefox causing the sound issues, because after I closed it the sound started working properly again. So nevermind that, but still, the memory card thing.