final fantasy 9 black screen

[Ficus]

hello evereyone :)

its been all morning ive been trying to play FF9 (PAL - italian on original discs) on ANY psx emulator. at last, i managed to make it work only with epsxe through sbi files.
the problem is that my old savegame is a pSX savestate (yes, time ago i played ff9 on pSX, but now i cant any more - i dont know why), but i cant run FF9 on pSX with any method. i simply want to load the savestate, go to a save point and then copy the memory card file to epsxe to play it there.
the pSX problem (i think its the protection issue): the game doesnt load, it freezes at the beginning, black screen. i tried to load from original disc, to make a .img file, to patch it with a .ppf. nothing.

2 possibile solutions:
- how can i make ff9 run with pSX? can i use the sbi file somehow?
- can someone kindly take my savestate (its in the same room of a save point - CD 3), load it, save and then pass me the .mcr file?

here's the savestate:
http://hostfile.org/quicksaveSLES229682.rar

thanks in advance.

[Mr. Killjoy]

1/ Always use memcards as main way to save your pgrogress. Savestates should only be used as an extra features for skipping boring/already seen cutscenes, manual checkpoints, etc

2/ FF9 is indeed copyprotected, if you want to play it on an emu that doesn't support any kind of subchannel reading (SBI is one of them), you must patch your game image files with a PPF patch. You'll have to find one that match your version of the game (since FF are localized in many languages, your must be for PAL Italian version), apply it to each CD and you'll be able to run it.

PPF often offers to select between PAL and NTSC, if your PC is good enough to fun it at full speed, I recommend the latter as it will be running at 60fps (European version run at 50fps so even on a real psx, it's slower because they didn't resync the game speed for PAL countries).

The bad news is that I can't link you to the only site I know with PPFs for download (PPF aren't illegal, but some other things on it are). The good one is that they're not hard to find on google.

Update: Sorry I didn't see you tried PPFing the 1st time I read, but you should really check if you did it correctly, with the right version and all...

[Ficus]

i used savstates because i couldnt save with memcard (i discovered today because they were read-only files..)

probably i used the wrong ppf: it was the english one (and it said image size mismatch). btw, i searched with google but i couldnt find any italian ppf. i found only sbi files (which i can make myself) that cant be used with pSX (i think).

edit: i looked again and now im pretty sure theres no ff9 italian patch. so i think i managed to play last time with an image file..i tried to make a .iso and .img from the original discs with imgburn, but they both dont work. is there a way an image file can be loaded without the italian patch?
otherswise, can anyone load the savestate i posted above and pass me the .mcr file please? its a 1 minute matter: the savestate is in the same room of a save point.

[patrickp]

pSX can read copy protected games (i.e. subcode) directly, Ficus. You'll need an optical drive that supports subcode reading (or an image that includes the subcode) and it will need a driver that supports subcode reading. Windows' IOControl driver, unfortunately, appears not to. However, you can use ASPI instead - download a copy of wnaspi32.dll from the Nero site (ftp://ftp6.nero.com/wnaspi32.dll), put it in your pSX folder, and select ASPI reading in your pSX configuration. If the drive supports subcode reading, pSX can then play copy protected games directly. As a rule, -RW drives are usually better at subcode reads than -ROM ones.

As an example, in Linux (Ubuntu, where the IOControl driver supports subcode reading very well), I can play my English PAL version of Final Fantasy IX without problems with my DVR-RW drive, but not with my DVD-ROM one. In Windows, neither drive will read the game using the IOControl driver, but using ASPI, again, the DVD-RW drive will read the game successfully, but the DVD-ROM one won't.

Final Fantasy IX is actually one of the tougher copy protections to crack and, even after you've managed to find a correct crack for your game version, it still may not work. If you do have a version that works, you don't need to patch the game permanently (which you'll have to do with an image, BTW), pSX can use the patch 'on-the-fly.' The easiest way of doing this is with Ultima's pSX Frontend (http://psxemulator.proboards54.com/index.cgi?board=news&action=display&thread=1156715263) - a very useful utility for pSX.

Save states are not portable between emulators, and it would be difficult to recode one to do so: the person doing it would probably have to know, in detail, how each emulator works - unlikely. Memory card saves are very portable; most Playstation emulator memory cards can be loaded directly into most other Playstation emulators. However, the game region has to be the same for a memory card to be used; it's not difficult to convert them, though.

It's not a good idea to play games entirely with save states; random errors tend to occur as you play a game, and these will accumulate until the game becomes buggy, then can't be played any more. Saving to a memory card strips away these errors, though, so when you reload from that save, you have a 'clean' game again. That's why this problem never occurs on an actual Playstation, where memory card saving is the only option. Save states, however, preserve the errors so they're still there when you reload from one. A good rule of thumb is to use save states as much as you like in a playing session, but always to save to a memory card at the end of the session, and start the next session by reloading from it.

You should also find there's no problem using memory cards with pSX.

Edit: if you have problems with your memory cards being read-only, you need to change the permissions for your emulator/configuration folder so the contents are read+write. XP and Vista can, apparently, make it very difficult to set file permissions; this is one of the reasons why so many people run their XP or Vista installations in an adminstrator account all the time - personally, that thought horrifies me...

[Ficus]

yay - i made it!

i wrote an .img file of disc 3 (where i had my last save state). then i loaded it with the command insert cd image. it freezed at the beginning, then i loaded the state and everything worked smooth.

btw, i discovered i had saved with savegames too: the memory card was a file named "slot" (without any extension) in the pSX directory..=/

thanks everyone for your help