White screen of death :(

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

My guess is major memory leakage....

I got 1 crash on the first level (trying to enter the big block map area) and then just about my entire PC locked up after I deated that first seal boss (vampire thing with two giant swords)...it was starting to come to life again after 5 minutes but I could take no more...I played the game for just about a whole hour. My commit charge (RAM + pagefile in other words total memory) just kept on climbing the whole time. I have it set to 3485MB max and cuz I have a lot of background stuff idle is like 700-800MB, well it climed all the way from there to 2384MB or so which my PC did not like much and not even playing my latest and greatest PC game does it go beyond that. The process itself got bigger than any game I have at 550MB...the largest being Oblivion at around 460MB. The only time that size can decreases is during convos/cinematics otherwise it just keeps on growing and growing.

So yeah my overall guess is majorly bad memory management on iDeaS part....or my PC just aint good enough for propper NDS emulation, although I experience no such major hike on resource use with no$gba.
Also frameskipping hardly helped me...it ran just as bad on 6 as it did on none....continous stutter and sporadic movement and sound. Apparently it was running at 30FPS, but I don't believe that...more like 10.

[LightningLockey]

Interesting. Very interesting indeed...

What I normally have going on in the background is the folder open for ideas, firefox (4-5 tabs) task manager and winamp (just minimized, not playing anything). I've got avast! which hardly uses any resources. Though once during a virus update it made a good slowdown for a few seconds. I've also had some large downloads going while playing Castlevania.

I'm really shocked on how poorly it ran on your computer. Also very surprised it does so well on mine compared to yours.

Were you able to get castlevania to run on no$gba? It gave me and error and ask me to reinsert the cartridge or something like that.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Yes I did a while back...also never went further than the golem on the training level...it also runs very badly but a little better than iDeaS as far as I remember. I tested it about two months ago with a ton of other games so I don't quite remember exactly, but if you have it you may aswell try it. You just need to use the correct savetype which should be in the compatibility thread.

I have AVG, AntiVir, Ashampoo Firewall, ATI Tray Tools, Skype, Spybot, Avant (my main browser currently) and other stuff running, well not active, but they are there. I should have probably turned most of them off, but I have never, not once noticed an improvement of doing this in a PC game or emulator. I also had my task manager open to watch what it was doing which may have further added to the lag.
I may be exagerating how bad it ran (although the FPS counter went everywhere from 2 (with occasional freezes) all the way up to 30, but it was usually in the high teens. Honestly since I got this PC, I actually experienced what speed is (60+ FPS maxed on my older games) and since then I detect just about any dip in FPS which which may make it seem worse to me than to you. Before this on my old PC I thought 11FPS was fairly smooth and good..now it just hurts my eyes.

That bossfight took me a good 20 minutes, with me throwing bones and avoiding his attacks.

The main thing which probably leads to the difference in performance between our PC's is the RAM, your's is DDR2 and mine is regular DDR400...so your RAM blows the socks off mine. Which may be why your PC can cope a little better with the bad memory management as it's better at moving memory around.

I did also notice white blocks, but they were like a rain drop or something...they flashed here and there but never stayed and it was like max 2 onscreen at a time and seemed more like a transparency thing than what you experienced.

[Tony Luey]

I prefer playing Castlevania: Portraits Of Ruin, but no sound is best Castlevania games I ever played on iDeaS & NDS.

[LightningLockey]

The white blocks are stuff like snow and rain most likely. They are only present in a few levels.

Since this thread went so off topic, I think I'm going to make a post about it in the main release thread to try and get lino's attention again.

Thanks, I really appreciate you looking at it. Harmony is a good Castlevania game (best one on GBA). Though if you want a real good one, best to get Symphony of the Night for Playstation. Dawn of Sorrow is close, but still not as good as Symphony.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Ok im gonna have a look at those GBA Castlevanias to try and get more into the story, for when these games are playable by my standards.

By the way I just said it as I see it and understand it....I don't have anywhere near the level of Lino's programming knowledge though so I may be very wrong.

[LightningLockey]

I decided to try that Zelda Phantom Hourglass a bit. It didn't pound my system nearly as bad as the Castlevanias do. If the game was in English, I didn't probably play it until the 'click and swing' sword attack would give me carple tunnel (might have to avoid that Zelda ).

Also, when I get a white screen, I'd exit ideas, but my system would remain at the super low resolution. I'd have to use task manager to end ideas.exe and get back to how things were. Didn't have to do that after spending 20 minutes with the zelda game.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

You would probably find much lower resource use with Zelda...possibly coupled with more effiecient memory management.
Eventhough Castlevania looks mainly 2D it's apparently almost entirely rendered using 3D which probably accounts for the performance issues.