Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Full Version: Hard system lockups (Win7 + Core i7 + 4870)
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siberx

I have recently been playing around with dolphin some and have been quite impressed with the improvements made since the last time I took a look at it a few years ago. Many games have support and run at fully playable speeds, and the featureset is improving constantly.

I am having an issue however that I'm unable to solve and is impeding any serious use of the emulator. I have been running into periodic hard lockups when running dolphin across many (pretty much all) games, including those that are listed to have fairly good compatibility. Dolphin will be running fine, and then will suddenly hard lock (frozen image, looping sound) and background apps will appear to continue to run for at least a short while. Any attempt to break out of it (alt-tab, alt-f4, ctrl+alt+delete) results in a complete system lockup, necessitating a full reboot.

I've had the problem occur with various versions of Dolphin (32-bit, 64-bit, normal, IL, latest official, latest nightly, etc...) and with all sorts of different settings (I've tried many combinations with no change). The problem has occurred for both Wii and Gamecube games, and I'm out of ideas as to how to resolve it.

I am running the emulator on a very modern system whose specs are detailed below; are there any known compatibility issues with any of these parts/software, and if so - are there any workarounds? I would really love to be running my Wii games in 1080p (SSBB looks fantastic) but if the games are periodically locking up my entire system that's not really possible.

Core i7 920 @ 4GHz (stock makes no difference)
6GB DDR3 Triple-channel memory
EVGA X58 3xSLI Motherboard
ATi Radeon 4870X2 (Catalyst 9.3)
Asus Xonar DX
Windows 7 Build 7000 64-bit

As another side-note, I've been having some difficulty getting many games running at all that are otherwise listed as having excellent compatibility (Twilight Princess, Mario Kart Wii, Super Paper Mario, Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones... Boom Blox and Okami for example load at least some way into the game from DVD). These are mostly Wii games that I'm having the issue with, and I will load the disc and get stuck at a black screen before just about anything has happened, and the emu will hang loading from the disc (I have most of these already burned to DVD for my Wii, so I'm trying to run straight from those). Are there any known issues with loading from DVDs instead of ISOs, or are there any common issues that would cause many Wii games that are listed as working to hang at a black screen before anything happens? Most of the discs I have are NTSC (as that's the kind of Wii I have) and I see more talk of PAL on the forums here - is there better compatibility with PAL discs in general, and is most compatibility testing done with those? Any hints as to why I'd be having difficulties getting many titles to even start at all? Any help is appreciated!
It may be the fact you're using Windows 7 although i did dual boot x32 build 7022 and it ran fine (probably because it basically is vista). The two other things i can think of which may be the problem is driver issues or a hardware issues if the whole system is locking up, either a problem with your CPU or GPU, i say the GPU because a few month ago on my parents computer the whole operating system kept locking up when a program crashed, once i removed the GPU, and set the system to run off the onboard GPU everything worked fine. I'm not sure if this will be relevant but i hope it helps.

siberx

(04-11-2009, 06:13 AM)Glurion Wrote: [ -> ]It may be the fact you're using Windows 7 although i did dual boot x32 build 7022 and it ran fine (probably because it basically is vista). The two other things i can think of which may be the problem is driver issues or a hardware issues if the whole system is locking up, either a problem with your CPU or GPU, i say the GPU because a few month ago on my parents computer the whole operating system kept locking up when a program crashed, once i removed the GPU, and set the system to run off the onboard GPU everything worked fine. I'm not sure if this will be relevant but i hope it helps.

Thanks for the suggestions - I do, in fact, have both an XP and Vista boot available on this system as well (yes, triple boot :3) but haven't booted into them in a month or two as Win7 has been great overall. I'll give it a shot in my Vista 64 and if the problem is still there I'll try my XP install.

Despite the fact that the application is causing overall system lockups I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem - I run a lot of other games and apps on the system and everything else has been very stable with no major issues or lockups that I can recall. Drivers are potentially a problem, but I'm running the latest for just about everything so if that's the case I'm not sure what I could do about it to resolve it...

Thanks for the ideas, I'll give the other OSes a shot - anybody else have any other suggestions?
(04-11-2009, 10:04 AM)siberx Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the suggestions - I do, in fact, have both an XP and Vista boot available on this system as well (yes, triple boot :3) but haven't booted into them in a month or two as Win7 has been great overall. I'll give it a shot in my Vista 64 and if the problem is still there I'll try my XP install.

Despite the fact that the application is causing overall system lockups I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem - I run a lot of other games and apps on the system and everything else has been very stable with no major issues or lockups that I can recall. Drivers are potentially a problem, but I'm running the latest for just about everything so if that's the case I'm not sure what I could do about it to resolve it...

Thanks for the ideas, I'll give the other OSes a shot - anybody else have any other suggestions?

Well i'll agree with you there Windows 7 is a brilliant operating system, but judging by your system i'm going to say its probably the drivers, i'd like to know if it does run on your other OS's, you got me interested in this xD

siberx

(04-11-2009, 10:49 AM)Glurion Wrote: [ -> ]Well i'll agree with you there Windows 7 is a brilliant operating system, but judging by your system i'm going to say its probably the drivers, i'd like to know if it does run on your other OS's, you got me interested in this xD

Well, I tested out dolphin on my Vista 64-bit install by simply booting it and running the existing emulator in place - no settings changes at all. I went through an entire classic mode in SSBB without a single hard lockup - it would appear there's either something to do with Windows 7 or some of the drivers I'm using. Considering the fact that 90% of the drivers I have installed are identical to my Vista ones, the only ones I can think of that are different are the graphics drivers (which are new WDDM1.1 Win7 ones) so if it *is* a driver problem then it's got to have something to do with the graphics drivers. I'll try reverting to some old Vista-style drivers for graphics and see if that makes any difference. Has anybody else experienced an issue like this, or general problems with Win7 64-bit in general? The impression I got from the forums was that it ran quite well on this operating system...
(04-14-2009, 07:35 AM)siberx Wrote: [ -> ]
(04-11-2009, 10:49 AM)Glurion Wrote: [ -> ]Well i'll agree with you there Windows 7 is a brilliant operating system, but judging by your system i'm going to say its probably the drivers, i'd like to know if it does run on your other OS's, you got me interested in this xD

Well, I tested out dolphin on my Vista 64-bit install by simply booting it and running the existing emulator in place - no settings changes at all. I went through an entire classic mode in SSBB without a single hard lockup - it would appear there's either something to do with Windows 7 or some of the drivers I'm using. Considering the fact that 90% of the drivers I have installed are identical to my Vista ones, the only ones I can think of that are different are the graphics drivers (which are new WDDM1.1 Win7 ones) so if it *is* a driver problem then it's got to have something to do with the graphics drivers. I'll try reverting to some old Vista-style drivers for graphics and see if that makes any difference. Has anybody else experienced an issue like this, or general problems with Win7 64-bit in general? The impression I got from the forums was that it ran quite well on this operating system...

i installed windows 7 build 7077 64 bit for a bit a few days ago and it worked fine but i have been using vista drivers rather than windows 7 drivers