Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi, I'm new to these forums and this program in general, so please forgive me if I make any noobie mistakes. I'll gladly follow up on any questions people who want to help have if my initial post does not adequately inform you.

My issue is that, while playing a game (I don't know if I can say which one so I'll refrain from doing so, but it might be the strategy game for the GameCube with the blue haired protagonist) I had absolutely 0 issues for many, many chapters in the game. Then, suddenly, I got to one mission and had repeated GPU crashes within the first few minutes of trying to play that particular mission.

My attempted fixes so far have been:
1. Updating Dolphin (I am currently using the most recent version)
2. Retrying the mission after crashes/after restarting my computer
3. Playing other games to see if it is an issue with my computer (every other game I have played has had 0 issues as well)
4. Playing other parts of this same game. I got through the tutorial and first mission without issue.

My next solution would be to try doing this mission on my laptop, but I would like to know if anyone here has any solutions/ideas about what the issue is. All of my spec data is on my profile, but I'll put the relevant bits on this post for ease of reference.

DxDiag
Dolphin 5.0-9958 (Issue was also present in previous version, which I think was 5.0-9888)

Could you name the game? I'm guessing it's Fire Emblem or something, but this is the kind of issue where it really can matter to know the exact game you're running.

(04-14-2019, 06:56 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]Could you name the game? I'm guessing it's Fire Emblem or something, but this is the kind of issue where it really can matter to know the exact game you're running.

Of course, it is Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. The one mission I was having troubles with was Chapter 18: Crimea Marches. However, I did as I said I would and played through the mission on my laptop, and it went just fine and with no issues. I ported the save back to my computer and played through the next mission or two, again with no issues. I feel a bit foolish to say that I didn't think to keep a copy of the save file that was on Chapter 18, however. Sorry if this impedes anything, but at the very least my issue is fixed.

Quick update, I've recently run into the same issue again. I was seemingly doing fine, but have started crashing again on a particular mission, chapter 20. This time I do have the save file, if that's important. I'll make a copy of it, and in the mean time I suppose I'll finish the rest of my run on my laptop. I've had issues with this GPU since day one, and I can't tell if it's just AMD being shoddy or the GPU being crappy, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is an issue related to that.

Are you running the latest drivers?

I just checked and there is a small update for my GPU driver, but it's the kind of update that just optimizes things for new games (Anno 1880 was specified). Other than that, yes, all of my drivers are up to date. I don't honestly think this update will fix the issue.

Yeah that probably won't fix the issue magically.

Right-click the game in Dolphin, go to Properties, go to the Filesystem tab, right-click on the different partitions, and then choose check partition integrity. If any of the partition checks fail, you might have a bad or damaged game iso, and could require you to redump it

I had no idea I could just set up the games in a library on the front! Well that'll save me from having to navigate to the game each time, so I thank you for that. However, I didn't see any options to check partition integrity under Filesystem. My only options when I right clicked on anything was to extract it. I did go to the Verify tab and running that test gave no errors, but it did say that game cube games have little verification data, so there may be something that is wrong with it. I kinda doubt that's the issue though, since I've had no issues playing the very same game on my laptop (I did crash once but that was because my laptop didn't like me alt-tabbing so fast).

What graphics backend are you using? AMD tends to do better on vulkan (or DX12 now I guess?) than OpenGL, for example. Does resetting all setting back to default (e.g. create a "portable.txt" next to the dolphin.exe to use the "local" settings and not use your global ones) help?

(04-17-2019, 06:24 AM)JonnyH Wrote: [ -> ]What graphics backend are you using? AMD tends to do better on vulkan (or DX12 now I guess?) than OpenGL, for example. Does resetting all setting back to default (e.g. create a "portable.txt" next to the dolphin.exe to use the "local" settings and not use your global ones) help?

I'm not sure how to check or change my graphics backend. Also, which settings do you mean? My dolphin settings? I don't know how to make a portable.txt settings file or whatnot, but I'd appreciate some advice/instruction on how to test that.