Utterly Bizzare Emulator/Graphical Issues in FF8

[Myriokephalon]

I was playing FF8 on ePSXe 1.7.0 on my laptop with a Mobility Radeon HD 2300, using dna drivers (which have always worked fine), Windows XP, on the latest Pete OpenGL plugin. The game had run fine when I played it months before, and it was working fine now. I was doing a little tweaking, mostly with framebuffer stuff to get some flickering to stop, but on the whole the game was great.

Now all of a sudden (I don't think there was anything in particular that triggered it, I might have been loading a savestate), whenever I start the game, it goes incredibly slowly, and when it finally gets to the New Game/Continue screen most of the letters have been replaced with black. I load a save and access the in-game menu. I get the same issue. Pieces of letters are covered with black and the text itself now has a pink tint instead of white. I mess around with the OpenGL settings, switching every setting I have, no change. I switch from the iso I made from the original FF8 disk back to the disk itself. No change. I restart the computer. No change.

Now for the fun part. I switch from OpenGL to my D3D plugin (which had also worked previously for the record). The speed appears to be more normal now, but on start, instead of the Squaresoft logo fading in and out like normal, it just switched on suddenly and switched off. When I get to the credits of FF8 with those black and white artworks, I instead get this garble of randomly colored pixels (like graphical corruption or a card burnout or something) and the text itself for the credits continues to do the pop in an out instead of fading in and out like normal, like it's skipping most of the frames.

What's really bizarre is that I CAN load a savestate in which these issues all disappear, and that this only happens in FF8. I tried FF7 and it worked perfectly. Thinking that some setting in ePSXe that I couldn't find or access had somehow gotten messed up, I created a second directory of it from the original zip file, put the plugins in, and started up FF8. Exactly the same issue. Why would the issue migrate like that if it's a clean install when even a savestate can wipe it out?

I had read in these forums about one guy who had issues from a program that monitored CPU usage causing similar graphical and emulator problems, so I shut down my firewall and AV. Nope, did nothing. Checked to see if my comp overheating caused the issue- no. I'm going to do a system restore and see if that changes anything, but this is such a bizarrely localized issue that I doubt it will have an effect.

I repeat, the game worked perfectly and then just suddenly gave me these issues, and that I can get it working if I load a particular savestate. It's just messed up when I start it normally and then load a proper memcard save. What the hell is going on?

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Last edited by Myriokephalon; June 25th, 2012 at 14:52..

[balthuuu]

I have the black block thing happening when I downgrade the Framebuffer effects other than full. So I keep it full. That fixes it for me at least. Here's a screenshot of my settings for that game:

[Myriokephalon]

Doesn't do anything for me. I still can't fathom how a savestate could fix it yet it propagates across different installs. Did the new install somehow get the old settings from somewhere else?

[Myriokephalon]

I matched all of your settings exactly and it worked. Wow. Gonna check to see if D3D is still buggy too. How did that happen?

Getting a feeling I'm never going to know what happened. Oh well. It works!

Also, THANK YOU.

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Last edited by Myriokephalon; June 25th, 2012 at 16:50..

[Myriokephalon]

Not a total victory yet. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And startup is still very slow. Haven't isolated any particular setting that will do it yet.

[jaren]

lol..... have u try set the default setting to fast? it will demand less graphical issue

[Myriokephalon]

It went from working perfectly for the first few hour of the game to this without any change in settings (that I know of). And I don't think there's a graphical setting I haven't tried.

[Myriokephalon]

Still not working. Is there anyone who has any insight?

[Myriokephalon]

Ok, just figured out that my different ePSXe installations use the same configuration file for settings. If I change the setting in one ePSXe directory, that change is registered in all other directories. Which explains why the problem has propagated across installations. So I deleted all of my ePSXe installations and redownloaded ePSXe and started from stratch. Except it preserved the old settings again (and the problem is unchanged). There's some global setting file for ePSXe that isn't put in the main ePSXe directories. I bet if I deleted it it would fix the problem. So where is it?!!!

Seriously, where is it? I delete all traces of ePSXe on my computer's HD and registry, redownload and unzip, put in newly downloaded plugins, and the program still knows what my old settings were. Where the hell is that information stored?

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Last edited by Myriokephalon; July 13th, 2012 at 06:15..

[KrossX]

The emulator stores its settings in the registry, most plugins too ... and elsewhere.

Look for Vision Thing in HKCU\Software.

__________________

[Myriokephalon]

Thanks, finally got the settings wiped clean. Still doesn't work. Trying to run entirely off my good savestates.

Just a question, does ePSXe automatically use settings from the first memcard entry or something? Next step would be to wipe those saves I guess.