Release DraStic Nintendo DS emulator

[Bachstelze]

I have tried Wario - Master of Disguise and its somehow crashing Drastic repeatly. It happens from my savepoint randomly from 20seconds to 2 minutes. I thought it could be due to the overclock of 1200 Mhz but it happens also on 1100 Mhz which is stable and the default.

If it crashes the screen turns black and if i then tap x i am back to the rom select screen. If i exit drastic from there the screen is not properly reset. Only ~1/5 gets drawn with a bunch of pink or grey pixel. The only way to get a propper reset is a forced reboot.

Are there any log/debug info which i could provide?

 

[KickAss]

Nobody understands you if you use language like this here.  This is a professional forum so please consider your words before it comes out of your mouth.

professional (lol) right, and i thought it was fun, too.

dude, seriously? get your board cop badge out of my face.

as you obviously didnt understand my "language" there, let me fix you up with a quick translation:

"great job, exophase! i would like to donate some money."

im sorry if i caused any trouble.

did not mean any harm

 

[moxie]

I think (hope) he was joking. I understand all of your versions well

 

[KickAss]

@bachstelze: ive encountered various freezes as well. at first i thought it was zaxxon 1.52 specific, but things didnt change much after the 1.54 update.

what seemed to help so far (and i know it sounds ridiculous) was deleting and reinstalling it (in my case using pndmanager).

other than that, the game you mentioned should run fairly well (if the compatibility list is to be trusted - didnt test it myself).

 

[Exophase]

It could be the microphone problem, don't really know yet. Next version will hopefully alleviate it for games that don't use microphone, and I'd like to try some things to mitigate it for games that do. What I really need is someone with a direct serial connection that can monitor kernel messages after it freezes but that applies to very few people..

As for donations, thanks but I'd prefer you donate to other things.. I'm going to be selling an Android port so I'll be making income from that.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Nobody understands you if you use language like this here.  This is a professional forum so please consider your words before it comes out of your mouth.

professional (lol) right, and i thought it was fun, too.

dude, seriously? get your board cop badge out of my face.

as you obviously didnt understand my "language" there, let me fix you up with a quick translation:

"great job, exophase! i would like to donate some money."

im sorry if i caused any trouble.

did not mean any harm

I guess you and I grew up in two different societies.  Sorry.

 

[leathco]

Pretty cool. I tries new smb on my cc unit. It runa but When the 3d stuff starts too much slowdown. If I had a 1 GHz unit Its prolly run Fine tho.

 

[ShleeDragon]

Nobody understands you if you use language like this here.  This is a professional forum so please consider your words before it comes out of your mouth.

professional (lol) right, and i thought it was fun, too.

dude, seriously? get your board cop badge out of my face.

as you obviously didnt understand my "language" there, let me fix you up with a quick translation:

"great job, exophase! i would like to donate some money."

im sorry if i caused any trouble.

did not mean any harm

I guess you and I grew up in two different societies.  Sorry.

yo exodawg, da code be straight up gangster.

I'mma be dropping hamilton's all over your paypal.

 

[Bachstelze]

At least i could get a terminal this time. After crash of drastic from xfce and a bit fiddeling with lowpower mode and starting some apps blindly i got a picture, it breaks down again if i go to desktop. Strange thing.

Anyway this is what dmesg has to say:

aufs test_add:261:mount[7034]: uid/gid/perm /mnt/pnd/Drastic 1000/1000/0775, 0/0/0777

detected fb_set_par error, error code: -22

omapdss MANAGER error: dispc_ovl_setup failed for ovl 0

omapdss MANAGER error: configure_overlay 0 failed

Ok, now that i have a console i have fired up klogd and syslogd, both from busybox. The klogd says nothing but syslogd writes a few lines more than dmesg. And i found the pnd_run log of Drastic, see attachments.



pndrun_DraStic.out.txt

 

[KickAss]

if i fire up the drastic binary via terminal it starts and runs the given game image in NON-fullscreen mode. if i quit the running drastic binary in the terminal, issuing CTRL+C , the output that was drawn by drastic will stay on top of my screen (even tho the binary was killed). the system is up and stable, but 2/3 of the screen are overlayed by drastic's former output and i can see the mouse pointer disappear behind it. i have yet to find a solution to get rid of that overlay.

so here's my theory:

running the .pnd as usual will start drastic in fullscreen-mode. at some point an error occurs and the program will quit, halt, or get killed...

since the output will stay on top of your screen (and will not get updated any more, seeing that the program is no longer running) it will look like your pandora just froze to death. no matter what you do, you cant get rid of that screen overlay and thus are forced to force-reboot.

as i practically do know nothing about the inner mechanisms of drastic and as i am lacking serious knowledge about device drivers and frame buffers in particular, i can only guess that this might be frame buffer related

 

[Exophase]

You're not supposed to do that. If you have to run it via command line use op_runfbapp <drastic> and quit it normally.

If you have to get rid of the overlay do it with the following command:

ofbset -fb /dev/fb1 -pos 0 0 -size 0 0 -mem 0 -en 0

But this doesn't happen if you run the PND and it crashes because the PND will close it (and AFAIK op_runfbapp does that anyway). So that isn't making it look frozen. If it froze it really froze.

 

[Exophase]

At least i could get a terminal this time. After crash of drastic from xfce and a bit fiddeling with lowpower mode and starting some apps blindly i got a picture, it breaks down again if i go to desktop. Strange thing.

Anyway this is what dmesg has to say:

aufs test_add:261:mount[7034]: uid/gid/perm /mnt/pnd/Drastic 1000/1000/0775, 0/0/0777

detected fb_set_par error, error code: -22

omapdss MANAGER error: dispc_ovl_setup failed for ovl 0

omapdss MANAGER error: configure_overlay 0 failed

Ok, now that i have a console i have fired up klogd and syslogd, both from busybox. The klogd says nothing but syslogd writes a few lines more than dmesg. And i found the pnd_run log of Drastic, see attachments.

Could have something to do with you switching focus from the app to change the clock speed then trying to switch back.

 

[levi]

When I've had DraStic crash, I've not been able to enter low power mode, which I think means the thing's not still running just with a frozen display.  I can however reset it using pandora button+switch right, which presumably happens via some interrupt handler of some sort, so presumably the CPU and RAM is still running at least.

 

[KickAss]

@exophase:

right, so much for my theory.

in the drastic readme you wrote about capturing a freeze with the --input-record method.

i just did that.

yo will find that file here:

http://www.speedshare.org/download.php?id=BD686BBE1
 

 

[Neelix]

What ROM does that input record go with?  

Does the recorded session involve loading a saved game or savestate?  If so,  Exophase will need those too.

- Neelix

 

[KickAss]

great  <_<

im pretty sure i used the quicksave feature after loading that savestate... so it was overwritten.

yeah, ill start all over again.

what does --input-record actually do?

record all of my input? which buttons are pressed and touchscreen coordinates?

 

[Neelix]

Exactly that.  It seems most games base their random number seeding on user input.  Replicate it exactly and the playback is exactly the same.  (The exception being with games which use the clock for random number seeding)

You can see this in action by playing back the recording,  it's quite remarkable to watch, especially with a game like Mariokart where you might expect the AI to do different things each time. (or at least I did)  

There are also other things worth checking though.  What game are you experiencing crashes in?

Sometimes a crash will be due to a bad ROM dump (or a badly patched ROM)  There have been at least a couple of occasions. where I've captured a crash,  only to discover that with a good (or unpatched)  dump of the rom the crash goes away.

- Neelix

 

[KickAss]

thanks neelix!

i had crashes with almost all the games i tried so far:



Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney


running without crashes so far:

Advance Wars : Dual Strike

crashes can not be triggered or reproduced from my side. they seem to happen randomly (2 min up to 45 min in the same game).

 

here is my most recent --input-record from Professor Layton and the Curious Village:

[Link removed] - Please don't post links to illegal roms! (_wb_)

i just started a new game and after like 7 min it froze. no savestate used here.

the .zip holds the rom, the log and a checksum file (just to be sure...)

hopefully this will shed some light on whats going on

 

[moxie]

Hm. I've played "the Curious Village" to the end, and gotten quite some distance in "Diabolical box" and "Ace Attorney".  No crashes.

 

[KickAss]

@moxie:

would you mind trying the rom from my archive?

maybe neelix is right and its just a bad dump in the end...