Voice clips cut off early in Soviet Strike

[Crowley]

Odd, I remember playing this game emulated before without this problem. I noticed this when I play the STRIKE files in the main menu. The files consist only of speech played, and they end too early by just a few seconds. The video segments which include speech play properly. I have went through all the usual experiments: I tried several different plugins for all three categories (video, sound and cd), I've tried playing the game both from a cd image and the original cd, I tried different BIOS files and different versions of ePSXe. No luck. At least I do know that this is not a defective disc since I tried running the game with pSX and there the voice clips played all the way through.

Computer specs:
AMD Athlon 3,3 GHz
1024 MB RAM
MSI GeForce 7600GS
Sound card integrated to the ASUS S-AM2 motherboard
WinXP SP2

Maybe the sound card is the problem? I think when I played the game last time it was on my previous computer.

[hushypushy]

Have you tried any other emulators like PSXeven or SSSPSX? If it's working in pSX that would lean toward it being an emulator problem...

[jonc2006]

try using eternal spu 1.41 on either 1.5.2 or 1.6.0 and use my setup-

audio device- directsound
buffer size- 64
audio-out method- thread
all 3 special game fixes enabled
"wait for XA buffer is free" enabled under the "misc" section
neill's reverb

and in the spu selection menu have the top 3 boxes ticked and the 4th unticked.

btw can you post you video plugin config? in 1.7.0 you dont really need to use the video plugin frame limiter, but it might be possible that you are setting the limit to more than what it should be (using 60 as the limit when you should actually be using 50 since its a PAL version for example) which is making the sound act weird or out of sync with itself.

[Crowley]

I suppose I should've mentioned before that the ePSXe versions I've tried were 1.70 and 1.60. The video plugin settings don't seem to matter much. I tried the default 'fast' and 'nice' settings amongst other things, and the same thing still happens. I have the PAL version of the game. Out of curiosity I tried what would happen if I ran it in NTSC mode. The entire game along with sound plays at slightly different speed, but these sound clips still cut off at the exact same point.

Now I've also tried 1.52, and that has the same problem with a slight variation. The Strike files consist of several voice clips played after one another. With higher emulator versions when one cuts off, it goes for the next one. With 1.52 when the first clip is cut off, playing the entire file ends and puts me back to the main menu.

I did also try PSXeven, and the clip plays properly all the way through there as well. I guess this is an emulator problem. Weird.

Here's the precise spot in the first clip of Strike file 2 where the sound cuts off: "If this thing works half as well as the hy-" There is really just a few seconds that get cut off: "If this thing works half as well as the hype, I'll talk to Security Czar about getting you sprung."

edit: I jumped the gun a little. Using the same plugins with PSXeven, the second Strike file plays properly, but the third still is cut off near the middle, though a bit later than with ePSXe. pSX plays that properly too. As for SSSPSX, I'm trying to get it to work in general. It tends to crash on me while trying to play a Playstation CD.

[jonc2006]

try making an image of the disc in .bin/.cue format or patch the game with a .ppf patch do get around the copy protection.

[Crowley]

The .bin format fixed my problem. Thanks. I also found an odd workaround for the problem myself. If I mount the CD image I used earlier (.ccd by the way) on Daemon Tools and then play it by running the CD-ROM from the virtual drive, the clips play properly. It's a wonderful life.

[jonc2006]

yeah daemon tools was actaully the next thing i was going to suggest trying. good to hear you got it working.

[galtor]

Originally Posted by Crowley

The .bin format fixed my problem. Thanks. I also found an odd workaround for the problem myself. If I mount the CD image I used earlier (.ccd by the way) on Daemon Tools and then play it by running the CD-ROM from the virtual drive, the clips play properly. It's a wonderful life.

Can you post the "cue" file please? I suspect that the problem come from cdda files.

Regards.

-- Galtor

[Crowley]

Sure.

FILE "soviet strike.bin" BINARY

TRACK 01 MODE2/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00
REM MSF: 00:00:00 = LBA: 0
TRACK 02 AUDIO
INDEX 01 58:52:09
REM MSF: 58:52:09 = LBA: 264909

I did notice there is now a different problem with playing the voice clips. When those are played during a mission in the map screen in regards to some event, they do not stop by themselves but the game goes on to play what I would guess is the next voice clip on the CD, and the next one and so on... This happens both when playing directly from the .bin and the mounted disc image. It's less of a problem than the clips cutting off too early since the press of a button ends the playback. It's actually rather interesting to hear some messages I've never come across during regular play. Who knows, maybe there's some stuff in there that isn't actually accessible through normal gameplay.

[jonc2006]

if i remember correctly i believe someone else was having something very similar happen with a game, i think it was one of the resident evil games, where the voice clips from different parts of it would play in areas where they normally were not supposed to. ill look around later and see if i can find the thread im thinking of.

[Crowley]

I think this problem in turn is fixed by using the Mooby2 CD-ROM plugin and setting it to "play one CDDA track and stop". Thanks to Galtor for mentioning CDDA files in the first place.

[myloch]

I had a similar problem with Pang Collection, a game with many audio tracks. When I mount the disc image with daemon and I run it, no problems. When I directly run image, I have audio tracks cut off too early or the game that goes on playing the next track or again audio tracks repeated more times.
This made me think CDDA function emulation is not 100% perfect