Another sound association bug ^-^

[mer-curious]

 Hey Tux! I hope you are doing well besides the pandemic! 🙂

I don't know if you're still uninterested in solving sound associations bugs, but I've just happened to find another one while playing KOF99 in version 0.91.10. I'll report it anyway in case you ever feel motivated.

It's very easy and quick to reproduce it here. I just load the savestate, unpause the game and wait less than a second until the soundtrack immediately stops playing (it will happen when the character Mary, which is controlled by the CPU, finishes her move).

Here's the savestate: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yaW_JHOf7VgruAQTyO2lBJ-Dfr2hFAtJ/view?usp=sharing
And here's my games.cfg file with the necessary associations for KOF99 (all tracks come from the KOF99 NGCD version, except one which is from the Dreamcast port, but I don't think it should matter for this very case): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LpbYDWrc16tmuQMuY2LSLL3H8cekTkNO/view?usp=sharing

I hope you can reproduce it if you ever try!

Thank you in advance for any help and attention with these bugs! 😊

[Tux]

wow, you probably spent some time creating this, a save state stuck in pause, have to press select 1 to get out of pause, not the usual thing.

Well I had a quick look and it's indeed something unknown, a code which should start a song and which does nothing. I might take a closer look later, but don't hold your breath. Been fixing a few things in raine lately, but nothing related to sound associations !

edit : fixed, it also affects kof98 and garou.

The story : until now I was only testing a 1st array in rom which gave the type of command, 2 was for music. Except that after that, it takes an offset to the music itself, and sometimes the offset is 0 like here, in this case the music command is just ignored. So now I am also testing this array of offsets.

Now you could wonder why the main cpu is asking a song which doesn't exist ? Maybe it was something planned at the start and finally they gave up the idea ? Since there are quite a few songs like this and not only one, maybe it was some custom stage music like something faster playing if the hp of one of the players reaches a certain limit, and in the end it didn't sound so good so they just gave up the idea, the call remains but it does nothing. Just a guess, but it could be the reason !

What was your other sound assocation problem ? Might be fixed at the same time by this... !

Edited January 25, 2021 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Thank you so much! Yes, I had to go play-and-pause in this test so I could find a spot right before the bug trigger, because this bug would happen very randomly during a round! 😪

The other sound bug is with Art of Fighting 3. I reported it a while ago in the 0.91.3 thread, but my post there is a little messy, so I'll sum it up here:

It's a very weird bug with the sound associations in this game. I found three different situations where I noticed it but they may be all related to the same cause. So I created three savestate points where you can reproduce it:

aof3.sv0 - in this savestate you just wait the round countdown time reach 35~34 seconds and at this point you should see the soundtrack suddenly changing to another one.

aof3.sv1 - in this save you just wait the "how to play" demo run until you eventually hear a track start playing when it shouldn't, because this demo doesn't have a soundtrack (it is silenced).

aof3.sv2 - in this save point just press the player 1 D button and it should trigger the track to change. You can press the D button as many times as you want to trigger the track change (really weird!)

Grab the saves here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TDv6oGWIgVEBuUqeX5SFij9-HET-OB06

Grab the games.cfg file here (I'm also providing the NGCD tracks since I've renamed them to something shorter, it may be quicker for your testing): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1I5lp5SueypJSk2S8724o_mIjwysLh4vk

I hope you can reproduce it easily.

Thank you so much for taking the time to checking this another one. 🤗

[Tux]

Yeah ok it's your day of luck, I had a look at this one too. Type 2, more complex sound system, there is even a sound command to change the tempo of the music which is not emulated because we can't change the playing speed of an mp3 ! Anyway the common problem here is the interpretation of a command which takes an argument, if the argument is < 0x20 then it's not an argument, it's another command. I am less confident here than for kof99, but it seems to fix to 3 save states, so we'll give it a try...

Ok, I'll try to make a binary then... !

[mer-curious]

Hey Tux! Thank you so much for checking this another one. I've downloaded version 0.91.11 and played a turn in KOF99 and gladly no issues so far with sound associations. As for Art of Fighting 3, I'm still experiencing a weird issue in which a track will play over the other (very weird!). You can check this by selecting the character Kasumi as your fighter and when you start the round, the character select screen track will continue playing together with the stage/character soundtrack!

If you wish, here's a save state in the character select screen. Just select Kasumi as your character and you should see the bug as the round starts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kFxRlUAS-ctE9Y5wg1Eqa1wKAZS0-56n/view?usp=sharing

It happens all the time here, so I guess you should reproduce it easily.

Thank you so much again for investing your time in these bugs. I hope they can benefit other games and other Raine users. 🙏

[Tux]

Ok, obliged me to cleanup most of the commands for type 2, a lot of them are just ignored in fact.

You get your own build (link removed), 64 bits since that's what you use. Normally it works everywhere, retested your 3 save states with it, + kasumi selection.

Also : I have a way to emulate the playing speed change, but do you know of any place in a game where the music changes its speed to test this ? It can be slowed down or accelerated, both are possible...

Edited January 28, 2021 by Tux

[mer-curious]

Hey Tux! Thanks for this test version! I've played a turn in Art of Fighting 3 with it and noticed no issues with the sound associations now, so I guess it's fixed. 🙌

I've also played a turn with the sound commands turned off to see if there are places where the tracks speed up or slow down, but didn't find any. So I guess your speculation is right about these commands being implemented but never used (at least in this game). But it's great to know you could change the tempo in the mp3 files! I'll let you know if I ever find a game that does that.

Finally, I found an easy way to reproduce the graphics corruption in AoF3! I had reported this issue a while back but never really investigated it. So now all you have to do is load the savestate (made with the sound commands off) and try to reload the same state sometimes (press F4 between 3~5 times) in order to eventually trigger the graphics corruption.

Here's the file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WOvDdG7-Jhs8kjFY__0RzPguVqK8Nr6z/view?usp=sharing

I can reproduce it easily here. Hopefully you will too!

Thank you so much again for your fast responses! ☺️

[Tux]

Not something easy to reproduce, it's just luck but I think I found the culprit, some 68k bank, which is extremely rare, and that I forgot to save in the save state... !

To my defense there is an insane number of things to save for this driver, it used already the 16 user slots, + a few extensions, it's the only one to save so many things.
Actually I couldn't trigger the bug 1st and when I was about to give up it suddenly happened, next time was at the 2nd time, but then it became extremely hard to do again.

This bank changes a lot actually in this area so it's not easy for sure. It's only 1 byte to save, assuming I found the real culprit !

If you want to test this again in a next build you'll have to recreate a new save with the next version, this save here doesn't have the bank info.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Tux