Saga Frontier

[munkibowl]

Hi, I'm having a problem with the game Saga Frontier, on T260G's quest. In the beginning of the game you have to go to a battle arena on the world Junk, when I try to go to that location, the music stops and the screen becomes black, and the emulator drops from 99% cpu usage down to fluctuating between 5 and 25. I've tried using an earlier version of epsxe as well as psx emu, and tried running from an image instead of cd, as well as trying a variety of different plugins. Every other part of the game seems to play just fine, I even downloaded a save that had t260g at the end of his quest, and was able to play that just fine. Has anyone else experienced this problem or know a way to get around it?

[jonc2006]

what plugins are using now and what settings do you have them at? does it come out of this black screen at any point or does it just freeze up?

[munkibowl]

Right now I'm using Pete's OpenGL 1.76, P.E.Op.S. Dsound audio 1.9, P.E.Op.S. CDR 1.4 and the basic epsxe controller, but I tried all of Pete's visuals, and the internal epsxe sound and cdr as well in various combinations. the screen freezes, if I bring another window in front of it, the image of that window remains, but I can hit esc to return to the gui and reset the game

[jonc2006]

what type of video card and cpu are you using? if you are using any sort of multi-core processor, make it so that epsxe is assigned to only one of the cores, this can be done in the task manager. not having that done has been known to cause issues, although what they are specifically varies from case to case.

edit- assuming you have decent hardware that meets the requirements for certain features, try my settings or something similar to them:


i use the d3d dx6 1.76 video plugin with these settings:

Plugin: Pete's DX6 D3D Driver 1.1.76
Author: Pete Bernert
GFX card: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS

Resolution/Color:
- 1920x1200 Fullscreen - [32 Bit]

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 4
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- VRam size: 256 MBytes (either set it to auto or the total amount of vram your card has)

Framerate:
- FPS limit: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: 60.0

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 3
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Framebuffer access: 4
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: on
- Advanced blending: hardware

Misc:
- Scanlines: off [0]
- Unfiltered FB: off
- Dithering: off
- Screen smoothing: on
- Full vram: on
- Game fixes: on [00000001] (ignore)

and for sound i use eternal spu 1.41 (non-lite) with these settings:

have the top 3 boxes ticked

in the actual config mine is set up like this:

audio device- directsound
buffer size- 80 (doesnt have to be this, so set it to your preferance)
audio-out method- thread

all 3 special game fixes enabled

"wait for XA buffer is free" enabled under the "misc" section

neill's reverb

my cd rom plugin is the epsxe cdr wnt/w2k core 1.5.2, although most of my stuff is in ISO format so i dont really need it. but in case you want a cd rom plugin example, thats the one i usually go with.

[munkibowl]

My system is a p4 2G, 768M ram, with a nvidia geforce4 ti 4200. I tried using the settings you suggested(I'm running it windowed, I don't get anything when it's fullscreen), still ran into the same problem. also, a small correction, this problem seems to cause epsxe to freeze completely, when it esc the program closes - I was able to reset without problem when I was using psx emu. thanks for your help.

[jonc2006]

hmmm. you say other games run fine though, right, including frontier (with the exception of this part of course)? if i had to guess at this point i would say its due to some sort of unreadable sector from your disc, which was also either skipped or undetected during the making of the iso, which explains why the iso inherits the same problem as the actual cd. and just so you know, a game cd or iso can have an unreadable sector at some location, which would cause problems in a specific part and most likely, only in that specific part. the rest of the game could run fine, which can be misleading to some. so just because an unreadable sector exists, doesnt mean the whole game wont work. that is why these issues are sort of tricky to figure out at first, and they require alot of trial/error testing before they can be exposed. ive played the game before on epsxe, and although it was quite some time ago, i dont remember having any issues like this at all, so its not a compatibility issue with the emulator, at least i dont think it is because it sure doesnt sound like one now.

think of it this way: if this same thing happens in another emulator like psx, i highly doubt the problem is related (technical-wise) to the emulator itself, that goes for both epsxe and psx. if other games run fine, and if frontier itself runs fine, for the most part at least, then it doesnt seem to be something related to your hardware not meeting the needed requirements for the emulator, or a compatibility issue between the game and the emulator. so with that all said, i would have to say it has something to do with the condition of the disk. in this case the best way to test what the source of the problem is, is to test the game on a real ps. if it doesnt work on that either, that would either rule everything i just listed before out. or if it does, well that would set us back to step one.

so the last thing i can ask is, have tried using different iso software programs? some work better than others, off the top of my head there is alcohol, isobuster, magiciso, clonecd, isoproducer, etc. some have better reading abilities than others, personally i use isobuster and i get perfect images every time. it may or may not work for you, im not sure, but i would try it at this point because i cant seem to think of anything else that could cause something like this.

[munkibowl]

unfortunately, my ps is currently in pieces, as I thought I'd try a little DIY repair to fix an annoying problem it has as a result of being dropped a few too many times, and once I discovered that the problem couldn't be fixed, I gave up and left it disassembled. Chances are that the problem is with the disc, I'm not known to take very good care of them, though most of my games still seem to work fine despite numerous scratches. once again, thanks for the help.

[jonc2006]

well like i said, try different iso making softwares. i have a few discs that are pretty roughed up as well but i often use different programs if i run into one that is giving me real trouble and it works most of the time. so sometimes, even though parts may be damaged, you might get lucky with one and get a perfect image of the damaged disc. it usually comes down to what program you use. read this thread for links and how-to guides for some of the programs i mentioned earlier.

[munkibowl]

Hey, just wanted to let you know, I tried what you said, and wouldn't you know, it worked! Thank you so much! I'm really glad, because as I played some of the other quests I ran into some other places that caused crashes, but all that is resolved now.

[jonc2006]

no problem. what kind of crashes though?

[munkibowl]

Same sort of thing as before only in different places in a few different quests like the cave under baccarat. Like I said, the disc was pretty scratched up, but the new image works fine, I'll have to try this with a few of my other games that I had given up as too damaged.