PCSX2 freezing my whole system with certain games

[Rekrul]

Well, so much for that idea. Games are still freezing.

Anyone else have any ideas of what I can try, or how to diagnose the cause of this problem?

[rama]

Keep searching the net for this game + PCSX2 and hope someone has found out something.
Unless you know how to work the Visual Studio debugger?

[Rekrul]

Keep searching the net for this game + PCSX2 and hope someone has found out something.
Unless you know how to work the Visual Studio debugger?

Except that it's not just one game. To date I've had PCSX2 freeze on me while playing;

Battlestar Galactica - Usually freezes quite near the start.
Godzilla: Save the Earth - Froze once in options, once in game, seems relatively stable.
The Incredibles - Usually freezes during first level, once went through most of second level.
Iron Man - Can freeze anywhere from the first level through the second.

It's quite possible that it will freeze in other games if I play them long enough. It seems to me that it's more likely a problem with the emulator on my system, than with specific games. To date, I've been more experimenting with various games to see how they perform rather than seriously playing any of them. It makes me a little reluctant to really get into a game if I know the emulator can just freeze at any moment. I know I can use save states, but it's easy to forget to save and then lose all my progress.

Is it possible that 1.4.0 and/or some of the plugins aren't 100% Windows XP compatible?

[Rekrul]

I'm reviving this thread because I just realized that I never posted a conclusion to it.

After my last post, I finally discovered the cause of the emulator crashing.

I was getting frustrated and decided to concentrate on ePSXe which always worked great for me, then THAT started to freeze on me as well. After a little head scratching to figure out what had changed, it finally dawned on me that I had enabled rumble support in the Super Joy Box 5 Pro driver. (Super Joy Box 5 Pro is an adapter for connecting real PS1/PS2 controllers to USB)

I disabled it and the crashes in ePSXe stopped, then I went back to PCSX2 and no crashes there either. Looking at the customer reviews on Amazon, I see other people complaining that games freeze when using the adapter and other people telling them to turn off rumble support.

To be honest, I didn't think rumble was that big of a deal. It seemed like most games would just activate it at random, rather than really syncing it to what was happening on the screen.

Anyway, since disabling it, I don't think I've had PCSX2 crash once. So, mystery solved. Maybe this will help someone else out if they have the same issue.

[JobeStroud]

Huh/ There was another thread where I just told a guy to not use those adapters. They are buggy at best and can cause all sorts of issues from input delay just not working randomly during play and this new one of freezing whole programs.
I hope other people read these cause most the time those adapters have drivers that are made for windows 98 and they just say they are for new OS's.

[Rekrul]

Huh/ There was another thread where I just told a guy to not use those adapters. They are buggy at best and can cause all sorts of issues from input delay just not working randomly during play and this new one of freezing whole programs.

Other than the crashing problem, which was fixed by disabling rumble, I haven't noticed any problems with the Super Joy Box 5 Pro adapter. As far as input lag is concerned, there doesn't seem to be any as far as I can tell. When I go to the control panel and pull up the properties box for it, which allows me to test all the functions, all of the buttons and inputs seem to respond exactly when I press them. If I "jitter" my finger on one of the buttons, I can make the display for that button flicker like it has rapid-fire. In fact the driver offers an adjustable auto-fire option for all the buttons and even with it set to the fastest setting, I can make the button flicker faster by doing it manually. I don't know any other way to measure/judge input lag other than pressing the buttons and seeing how quickly they appear to respond.

If I recall correctly, I think it worked without any drivers and appeared to Windows as a generic dual-analog gamepad. The driver just lets you customize a bunch of things, like remapping the buttons. There's an option to make two of the buttons pressure-sensitive and register them as additional axises, but so far I haven't had a use for that. I am kind of disappointed that it doesn't have an option to swap the functions of the left and right analog sticks though, or remap the D-pad buttons. I know that can all be done in the input configuration in the various emulators, it just would have been nice if the driver had included it.

One oddity that I did notice (besides the crashing) is that if you plug in both PS1 and PS2 controllers at the same time, some of the functions on some of the controllers don't work. I forget the details and don't have a PS1 controller handy to test it at the moment, but I know it didn't work correctly. However there doesn't seem to be any problem connecting up to four PS1 or PS2 controllers as long as you don't mix them.