Wii/GameCube port - News & Nightly snapshots

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:47 pm

Just wanted to post a few findings. Might be of interset to Dhewg. Forgive me if it's something you're aware of and has already been mentioned.
I've been trying a couple of games. I Have No Mouth and Bud Tucker with the stable 0.12 and this new 0.13 with a Kingston 2GB SD card.
IHNM (Compressed and Normal) is OK with 0.12. But 0.13 doesn't recognize either version using the SD card and a SanDisk U3 Cruzer 2GB USB stick.
Bud Tucker (Compressed and Normal) is recognized by 0.13 but doesn't load. That's with both SD and USB. I've left it for up to 15 minutes (a black screen) to load as I've seen you have to wait for at least half a minute for IHNM in 0.12 to load.
Could this have something to do with Bud Tucker having over 4000 wavs? Compressing, copying and even deleting a Tucker folder takes ages! Could this game be too much for the Wii? My complete uncompressed tucker folder is only just over 600MB.
I've also been toying with CoMI. Not too worried personally as I played it through, first time in ages, a few months back but I read about the optimizations you used in 0.12 which don't exist in 0.13. I tried Compressed and Normal in 0.13 and it seems to crash at the Part 1 loading screen. I'll read some of the other posts and try stuff like subtitle speed.

md5 · Post by **md5** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:40 am

If the Wii port is using a custom makefile, the fact that IHNM is no longer working or recognizing the game might be because the ENABLE_IHNM flag hasn't been set in the makefile

Bossk · Post by **Bossk** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 10:46 am

Thanks md5.
Ok. I enabled ENABLE_IHNM and ENABLE_SAGA2 in the custom makefile and the result was 45k larger. Without being able to test I guess that means that the SAGA engine has support for IHNM now.

md5 · Post by **md5** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:02 am

Bossk wrote:Thanks md5.
Ok. I enabled ENABLE_IHNM and ENABLE_SAGA2 in the custom makefile and the result was 45k larger. Without being able to test I guess that means that the SAGA engine has support for IHNM now.

Seems like it, thanks

You can try the IHNM demo from our downloads page to see if IHNM support is there (though it should be, as you mentioned)

ENABLE_SAGA2 is for the work in progress support for the game game Faery Tales 2: Halls of the Dead. Currently, it only shows the intro of the game. But it shouldn't matter for the Wii anyway - these flags were placed for devices where RAM is too small and every kb counts (e.g. the Nintendo DS)

Bossk · Post by **Bossk** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:06 am

Well, I'm all for including support for every available engine/game. That means that testing regularly for improvement is there for people who want it.

I will test IHNM this weekend if noone else gets around to it. I'll build a new svn checkout today.

RogerWilco · Post by **RogerWilco** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 1:45 am

Red_Breast wrote: I've also been toying with CoMI. Not too worried personally as I played it through, first time in ages, a few months back but I read about the optimizations you used in 0.12 which don't exist in 0.13. I tried Compressed and Normal in 0.13 and it seems to crash at the Part 1 loading screen.

I was having issues getting it to load past the initial game mode screen, but I took off some extraneous directories from the root of the SD card and moved the game to the root of the SD card (/COMI) and it got past that point. Now I am seeing the same thing as Red_Breast where the game hangs at the Part I loading screen. I tried turning off autosaves, thinking it may be having trouble there, but it didn't help. Any ideas?

dhewg · Post by **dhewg** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 1:44 am

I moved all the Changelog entries as well as the links to post #1.

I also believe that i fixed the lockup that happened on various games, please test SVN rev 35811 i just added to the first post in this thread. This (hopefully) fixes:
* the Full Throttle intro
* the COMI intro
* The 7th guest (lockup only happened when CD audio tracks were ripped)
* Possibly more, please recheck if you had hangs/crashes before

If this indeed fixes these problems, i'll try to get my changes upstream, they have not yet been commited (the problem resides in newlib, the C library of devkitPPC)

And don't forget to provide feedback, thanks

Oh, and IHNM and SAGA2 were enabled too, cheers md5

RogerWilco · Post by **RogerWilco** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 6:54 pm

Excellent work my friend! That, indeed, fixed the problem. My Wii is playing COMI beautifully now!

Let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to test to help out. I've got a boat load of Lucas Arts games from back when I had time to play games...

Mr_Nick666 · Post by **Mr_Nick666** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 9:23 am

Thanks! All seems fine so far with the new build

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:37 pm

Indeed CoMI's working well with r35811. Much better than dhewg's last build. ScummVM on SD card and the game on USB stick.
But Bud Tucker. ScummVM recognizes the game. The normal version still gives me a black screen though which eventually I just have to power off at the mains. Glad I'm in the UK and have a switch. I don't like just pulling power plugs from sockets like I imagine you'd need to do in Europe etc.
Anyway I tried an OGG compressed version. After about 10 seconds I got a "Exception (DSI) occured" with the obligatory collection of numbers (addresses?) I have no idea what DSI is but I'll have a Google.
If there's some sort of app. for catching screendumps from the Wii I'd give it a go. Is there such a thing? It's far too much to write down. Maybe it would help dhewg/Wii ScummVM team.
I'm encoding/compressing Flac and MP3 versions of Tucker to see if they help at the moment.

dhewg · Post by **dhewg** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 10:25 pm

If that happens every time, i should be able to reproduce it. I'll look into it

Mr_Nick666 · Post by **Mr_Nick666** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:11 am

Red_Breast wrote:Indeed CoMI's working well with r35811. If there's some sort of app. for catching screendumps from the Wii I'd give it a go. Is there such a thing? It's far too much to write down. Maybe it would help dhewg/Wii ScummVM team.

Take a digital photo and post that

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:41 pm

That's a point Nick. I only realised after posting how stupid my post sounded. How would I start something for taking screensnaps once the Wii has crashed? Doh!

I've encoded a Flac version but haven't tried it yet. I'm having problems with MP3 though. I even tried compressing Touche with all 3 codecs and again only had a problem with MP3.
I can't work out where I'm going wrong. I've been playing with all the parameters and to begin with no parameters which seems to work for Ogg and Flac. I think it uses a default set in that case. The time before I get an error seems to vary a bit I think. Usually after about 30-40 minutes. I'm using the Lame codec from Rarewares. Does anybody know if it's possible to use another MP3 codec?
http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundl ... me-current

Here's the Tucker error:
Can't init outfile 'tempfile.mp3'
Got error from encoder. <check your parameters>
Encoder Commandline: lame -t --vbr-new -b 24 -q 2 -V 4 -B 64 "tempfile.wav" "tempfile.mp3"

And the Touche error:
Can't init outfile 'tempfile.mp3'
Goterror from encoder. <check your parameters>
Encoder Commandline: lame -t -r --bitwidth 8 --big-endian -m m -s 22050 --vbr-new -b 24 --resample 22050 -q 2 -V 4 -B 64 "tempfile.raw" "tempfile.mp3"

I've never been much of a photographer. I have an old Olympus given to me by my mum when she got a new Kodak.
1.3 megapixel only. It uses SmartMedia cards of which the one I have is 2MB. Not much more than a Floppy but you get about 30-35 pictures out of it.
Worse of all was getting the pictures from the card. Mum had lost the original. My card reader takes 5v Smart cards and the card I have is 3.3v. Rather than spend any money after some research I made one as I had the parts. At the PC end a 9 pin serial and into the camera on the other end a 2.5mm jack. Crazy combination. It works though. At least it did last time I used it.
I'll give it a go soon. The Wii runs at 480p but I think the camera will be the problem.

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Fri Jan 16, 2009 5:11 am

Red_Breast wrote:The time before I get an error seems to vary a bit I think. Usually after about 30-40 minutes.

...

Can't init outfile 'tempfile.mp3'

That's odd. As far as I can see, the error message happens if Lame fails to create a new file called 'tempfile.mp3', and after 30-40 minutes it should have done that successfully several times.

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Fri Jan 16, 2009 7:09 am

Yes it's running. It's creating loads of tempfiles. One at a time obviously. Also I can see the .SO3 file in Explorer slowly getting bigger. It just gets to a point where I get the errors. Followed finally with 'Press any key to continue'
Seems very srange.
Before Xmas I compressed some Scumm .buns OK to mp3. I've no idea why I get this. Lame just seems to stop and say I've had enough of this boring task.
With Tucker the original files are wav so it's straight to mp3.
Touche has it's own strange format so I take it that first the files are converted to raw and then to mp3.
It can't be anything to do with ScummVM compress tools either as for Touche I tried with 0.12 and a new svn version.