Drmd - Corrupted Folder?


Prophet

God I'm old.
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Yesterday my DrMD folder kept becoming corrupt and I had to reformat my SMC. Not complaining, just want to figure out if it's a DrMD bug or if it's my SMC going bad. It's a very new SMC though, only had it maybe a month.

At first I had lots of other stuff on the SMC, including GPengine, LJGP, several homebrew games etc. I put DrMD and a bunch of Genesis games on there. For the first day or so it seemed all was fine.

But at one point I noticed the ROM list in DrMD was corrupt at the bottom, for example instead of listing "Ys 3" it said something like "GPSYS(O)" and some lines in the list were either invisible or corrupt.

So I had DrMD remake the ROM list. Then I found it wasn't saving it, when I restarted it was the same corrupt list.

Another symptom I found, was that when you go to save state, you get a message like "Not a zip file" and DrMD just freezes. So you have to reset the GP32.

After checking things out in my SMC reader, I found that the card was all messed up, as if the FAT itself had become screwed.

I lost many files on the SMC at that point, but no big deal.

I'm not sure yet, but I think MAYBE there's a DrMD bug related to remaking the ROM list and/or remaking the DrMD menu options file. For example, changing controls, CPU speed etc. and resaving options.

Right now I took everything off the SMC, and only have DrMD and some games it it. I want to see if it happens again, and try to see what action occurs just before. If it doesn't happen again, then maybe it was some other app I was using that corrupted the SMC. I think I used GPFM to delete some ROMs for example.

Sorry for the long post, just trying to sort it out.

Anyone else have a similar experience with the DrMD folder becoming corrupted? I'm suspecting DrMD because this SMC had no problems lik ethis before, and DrMD is mostly what I'm using because it's so amazing. :)
 
I also had to format my new Apacer 128MB SMC today. After paying gpquake I was unable to run anything ... white screen or reboot. Strange ... I had Genesis emu there aswell ...
 
Not had anything like that with DrMD, but I have had similar problems before and I now put it down to attempting to Save when the batteries start to go (flu starts flickering)

I think that saving to the SMC on low batteries can corrupt stuff in different ways - I've had to reformat on occasion but often it would just wipe out a whole directory. This has mainly happened when using CaSTaway, but I think it's a general issue.

Now, I don't ever try to save when the batteries run out, I just turn it off and start again :(
 
frolik,

You may be right. I don't think my batteries were low when it happened though, but I may be wrong. They're rechargeables, so perhaps they aren't always 100% reliable. I regularly backup my saves to the PC now just to be safe.
 
Many emus and homebrew throttle down the clock speed while saving to help with power issues. When you save you use more juice than when reading so if the power is marginal the extra power that is required to write to the SMC PLUS the overclocking might cause problems.

I am not sure if this emu does this throttle down while save, if not it would not hurt if it was added.
 
DrMD automatically goes to 133Mhz at the moment when you enter the menu, is that too fast?. I wasn't sure, if it is causing problems I'll make it slower.
 
Interesting DaveC, I didn't know about that before.

Reesy, maybe it would be a nice idea to throttle down to 40Mhz for the menus? Especially since I only had issues after using DrMD on this SMC. Couldn't hurt.

Do you think the 40Mhz would slow down the saving routines much? Well, whatever speed you think makes sense is fine. 66Mhz maybe? I dunno.

Thanks again for the magnificent work Reesy. :)
 
I think DOOMII goes down to 40 when saving because the same corruption thing was going on when saving with partially depleted batteries. You can see how writing to the card does use more power as many times your screen will flicker a bit while saving.

While you are waiting for the update, a trick to use is when you are going to save turn the volume all of the way down and then save the state. Those two speakers suck alot of power too, I think that would help. I know when the batteries were getting low and I would turn up the volume the GP32 would reset or crash instantly.
 
DaveC posted on Dec 18 2004 at 12:26 AM said:
While you are waiting for the update, a trick to use is when you are going to save turn the volume all of the way down and then save the state. Those two speakers suck alot of power too, I think that would help. I know when the batteries were getting low and I would turn up the volume the GP32 would reset or crash instantly.
good tip, and turn off your front/back light
 
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