Green garbage during FF9 mdecs

[John_Dory]

Hi everybody

I have a problem with an otherwise perfect FF9. During the movies (mdecs?) there are intermittent flashes of garbage over a portion of the screen, usually many boxes of different colours, a bit like a graphics self test from an arcade game, plus some dark and light green stripes.

This only happens during the movies, and the suspiscious thing is everything worked perfectly the very first time I ran FF9, but now this problem. It happens on all graphics plugins I have tried, Pete's and Next3d etc, and changing every single setting hasn't made any difference, and I have uninstalled and reinstalled ePsxe from scratch because it seemed to be unusual that it worked perfectly the first time I ran it (which was the first time I have ever run a PSX emu on my machine).

The Cd's are originals, my machine is a p3 800, 320 megs of Ram, Geforce 2, running XP Pro, does anyone have any ideas? Is this a common problem? Apologies if the fix is obvious, I have had a good search. Should I be looking in the registry to get rid of a setting gone bad?

Thx
John_Dory

[Kane]

I can't think of anything off the top of my head which would do that, but here are a few things to try:
Try running the game from an ISO Image.
Reinstall your Graphics card drivers/ update them to the latest version.
Make sure the latest version of DirectX version is installed

Also, does theis MDEC problem happen in any other game (FF8 for example)?

[Betamax]

taken from the readme from the pete's latest V1.63 plugins:

- And some more internal adjustments: I've was able to reduce the
garbage frames which can happen after/before a 24 bit mdec is
displayed. You can see that with FF9, for example.

If your aren't using v1.63 I advise you update them :)

[Pete Bernert]

betamax, the garbage frames I've mentioned are only the ones at the end of a 24 bit movie, so I don't think that this is John_Dory's problem.

John_Dory, somehow it sounds to me that your cd drive is having problems (not correctly decoded mdec frames, producing exactly the descriped glitches, usually point to cd reading problems). So please try Lord Kane's "Try running the game from an ISO Image" tip, and see if it helps.

[John_Dory]

Thx everybody

The problem still remains unfortunately. Everything is up-to-date, drivers, DX etc.

I thought about the CD too, so I made an ISO almost straight after the first occurrence, and the garbage is identical when running from the ISO as the CD, which is why I thought of the corrupt registry possibility - eg the mdec routine wants to do exactly the same thing when it encounters the same file, regardless of ISO or CD.

Garbage is also identical on all Plugins, do they use the same mdec code? I will track down FF8 to see how I go, and try and grab another CDr, and any more thoughts would be great.

Thanks for your help so far.

John_Dory

[alanm26]

Sometimes right when polygons show up in an FMV or disappear from one, I get a garbage-like flash but it lasts for only a split second. I think it's "normal."

[John_Dory]

Well, a bit of effort, the problem is solved. Thanks Pete, you were right, the CD reading was corrupt at anything above 2x, and the ISO was being created at the same speed so it was reproducing the glitches exactly when played back.

So I have made a CD clone by reading the CD at 1x, and now playng the ISO is fast, flawless, 100 per cent. The glitches increase exponentially as the CD read speed is increased. Many thanks.

Hopefully this might help others, thx.

John_Dory

[Decoy_Octopus]

This crap happened to me too. I got garbage with the cd, but when i went to iso it was fine.