Inherit the Earth sound freeze

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:04 am

I have currently a problem with Inherit the Earth. When I play the game on the PSP with the latest subversion build, there is after a short time a sound Freeze (only with the voices, music plays fine). In the 1.1.1 Release it worked great.

The Voices are compressed in MP3.
For the music I am using the Files of James Woodcock (ogg).

While the Sound Freeze the Memory Stick LED is blinking like crazy and sometimes the PSP crashes during the Sound Freeze.

I am not sure if it is a Bug or my Memory Stick is corrupted. But all other Games (also other Homebrews) are working fine. So I do not think the Memory Stick is corrupted. The Gamefiles are working flawlessly with the PC Version of ScummVM. But I didn´t test it with the uncompressed Voice files on the PSP.

Did someone else notice this Problem?

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 1:27 pm

Is there a particular point where this happens? If so, please post a save file.

Also, please specify the exact revision you're using. You should see the number on the launcher screen.

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 3:21 pm

There is no particular Place where it happens. Sadly I do not know how to Post a Savegame. I´ve got some savegames, where it happens very fast. Normally it takes a little Time to Occur. Within 5 Minutes moving around and talking it happens. But it happened the first time, when I talked to the Glasmacher to repair the Lens. But: I played till there with an older Version of ScummVM. I did not play the game any further for a time. Then I upgraded ScummVM and it Occured.

I am using ScummVM PSP 1.3.0svn52835 (Sep 21 2010 08:00:51)

I do not know how to post a Savegame. So I uploaded it to Rapidshare. Give the Glass shards to the Glassmker. And listen to the conversation. Ask every question. There it happens everytime to me. And not only there. It happens now everywhere sporadically. Especially in Conversations.

http://rapidshare.com/files/420370436/ite-de.s01

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Wed Sep 22, 2010 8:20 am

I'm having a really hard time reproducing your issue.

Your savefile is unfortunately for the German version of ITE and doesn't seem to work on my version.

Using James Woodcock's ogg files, I walked around the first area of the game talking to everybody I could find and exhausting every conversation option. I didn't get your issue.

Which firmware are you running?

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Wed Sep 22, 2010 11:41 am

As i mentioned it happened the first time, when I talked to the Glasmaker to repair the Lens.

I am running 5.00 m33-6. Yesterday I tested the game with the savegames and the 1.1.1 Release PSP Version of ScummVM and it was running fine. The Bug did not happen. Maybe the Game does not like the Media Engine

. But I still have to test if the Bug is still there, when using the uncompressed original Voice File.

Did you try to rename the Savegame from ite-de.s01 to ite.s01 or ite-en.s01? I do not know what the savefile names for the English Version are.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:47 pm

OK I managed to recreate it. My bad, I didn't realize the game was loading your savegame after all.

I'm checking out the problem.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Thu Sep 23, 2010 9:04 pm

I wrote a fix for the problem. Please test tomorrow's version and let me know how it goes.

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Fri Sep 24, 2010 7:42 pm

I did not test it intensive (but I will the next days). So far it works flawlessly. Good work.

But I encountered another Problem with this Game. I realised it Months ago. When I use the MP3 converted MUSIC.CMP or convert James Woodcocks OGG Soundtrack to MP3, the Music will be played in Slow Motion.

If it is a Bug it is not as critical, as the Speech freeze was.
But since the Media Engine is integrated, I would like to use MP3 for as much Soundfiles as possible.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sat Sep 25, 2010 5:55 pm

Yeah I came across this 2nd bug while investigating your report for the 1st bug.

Unfortunately this particular bug is a very hard one to solve. It seems like 11khz MP3 files aren't decoded properly by the ME. The ME decodes them as if they were 22khz files - hence the slow motion effect - but it doesn't produce enough data for them to sound ok, so when played at 22KHz they still sound terrible. Since 11KHz mp3 files are rare in our games (I think ITE is the only one that uses them, and only for the music) it's not such a big deal.

The problem with the ME is that it's a black box. Few people know how to use it properly. It was a real struggle to get MP3 playback working in the first place, and I couldn't find anyone addressing the 11KHz problem. I'll have to study the problem some more but I can't guarantee a solution.

For now, I think I'll put in a hack that switches to using the CPU instead of the ME for 11khz files.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sat Sep 25, 2010 5:57 pm

I just noticed that you mentioned converting Woodcock's ogg to mp3. What rate is that?

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Sat Sep 25, 2010 6:36 pm

James Woodcocks OGG Files are 44100 Khz 16Bit Stereo as an CD. Also when converted to MP3. The Voice Files of The Dig are also 11025 Khz (when I am remembereing correctly). And they are playing fine with ScummVM ME as MP3.

And by the Way: I played the Game more than an Hour and now I can say with absolute certainty: The fix is working 100%. Great Job (as always)!

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sun Sep 26, 2010 6:00 am

OK I also converted the enhanced music to mp3 and it seems to be working. I think what you encountered when you tried to do that was a separate bug that I previously found and fixed via the 7th Guest, so that should be fine now.

I'm pretty sure (but not 100% certain) that we don't have 11khz mp3 files anywhere else. 11khz is an extension of the mp3 standard, and provides an inferior sound quality (sampled sounds can only go up to 5.5khz). It still annoys me that it doesn't work well with the ME but like I said, it's going to be a tough bug to crack.

BTW thanks very much for finding and reporting these bugs. You're doing a great job yourself, since it's the only way the port can get better.

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Tue Sep 28, 2010 8:27 pm

Found another MP3 Bug. But not in Inherit the Earth. This Time it is in the Game Lost in Time. When converting the Audio Track from the Original CD to MP3 (track1.mp3) the Game is loading very long. It does not happen when using the Track converted to OGG.

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Tue Sep 28, 2010 8:33 pm

McKnallski wrote:Found another MP3 Bug. But not in Inherit the Earth. This Time it is in the Game Lost in Time. When converting the Audio Track from the Original CD to MP3 (track1.mp3) the Game is loading very long. It does not happen when using the Track converted to OGG.

That might not be a bug in our code really, it might be related that libmad (which is *basically* used for MP3 support, even for the PSP) does not feature any good way to determine the length of an MP3 stream, thus we need to seek through the whole stream to find out. Combined with slow disk I/O, this might cause some delay on start-up for really long/big MP3 files.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Tue Sep 28, 2010 8:53 pm

Yes I agree with LordHoto. It's really a limitation of variable bitrate mp3s, for which there's no easy solution of getting the length of the file. I've got a possible solution for this in mind, but it probably won't be ready before 1.2.0 is released.

Also BTW, I re-checked the 11khz ITE file and it's suddenly working again, which would explain why I didn't notice it before. I think I had an issue that was caused by the ME getting into a bad state (perhaps after encountering a certain error). Fully resetting the PSP fixed this weird issue. It seems like all mp3 files play properly now.