How to fix Grandia III random crashing problem(On battle scene)

[yunsabit]

Well, the movie crash is know iirc. Had to skip it too.

But the crashes were gone for me, with disableing the speedhacks. Yes, please go for latest beta and try it again without speedhacks.

[kabooz]

the movie crash should be gone if you use Gabest CDVD plugin or was it gigahertz CDVD... ahhh dunno anymore just try it^^

[PrinceGaz]

At least so far, battle-scene crashes seem to have ended by disabling all the speed-hacks (in an ideal-world I'd never have wanted to use them).

Unfortunately, my CPU is only at 2.5GHz and short of a large tub of liquid-nitrogen, is unlikely to get anywhere near or past 3GHz. It might manage 2.7GHz rock-solid with that XP-90C cooler, or 2.8GHz if I'm lucky, but it's an old chip using DDR400 memory (good DDR400 memory though). I never really tried cranking the voltages up much back then as it was more than fast enough. I guess I could crank things up a bit given that a new build isn't far off. Let's see what the copper heatsink and 90mm fan at full speed can do when things are really turned up.

[PrinceGaz]

Hmm, from browsing around the forum, I'm getting the idea that an easy way to a speed-increase may be to run PCSX2 under 64-bit Vista Ultimate SP1, instead of 32-bit XP Pro SP3. Especially as I have a GeForce 8800GTS gfx-card which means I could also take advantage of any DX10 optimisations in addittion to any gains from 64-bit binaries. Since I have both already installed in a dual-boot arrangement I'll install PCSX2 under 64-bit Vista to see if that helps. It is certainly a lot easier than cranking up CPU speeds and voltages.

If anyone here knows what the expected gains are from
a) 64-bit O/S vs 32-bit O/S (lots more registers for the recompilers to play with in x64 mode)
b) DX10 (Vista) vs DX9 (XP) with a DX10 capable card
then I'd love to hear from you. I looked around the forum but most people are either using one or the other, and haven't compared them against each other. Even I can't compare each of the above individually as I'll be switching from 32-bit XP and DX9, to 64-bit Vista and DX10.

[yunsabit]

There are no real advantages to 64 bit.

DX10 could speed your game up, so I would get it.

[Derex]

I have the exact same problems. I could skip the hangup at the video scene at the beginning, but the game crashes randomly in battles, and only in battles. Sometimes its running 30 Minutes befor a crash occurs and sometimes its only 2 minutes till it crashes. And the worst part ist, sometimes it even messes up the savestates I regularly make to work around this.

I tried various versions of the plugins, I tried nearly every possible setting of hacks and advanced settings and nothing seems to influence that problem. It's really annoying, since a lot of other games are running fine, but I like this one the most and can't really play it.

[PrinceGaz]

I have the exact same problems. I could skip the hangup at the video scene at the beginning, but the game crashes randomly in battles, and only in battles. Sometimes its running 30 Minutes befor a crash occurs and sometimes its only 2 minutes till it crashes. And the worst part ist, sometimes it even messes up the savestates I regularly make to work around this.

I tried various versions of the plugins, I tried nearly every possible setting of hacks and advanced settings and nothing seems to influence that problem. It's really annoying, since a lot of other games are running fine, but I like this one the most and can't really play it.

I haven't found a solution to the freezes which occur fairly randomly during battles other than using savestates. I've never had a corrupted savestate though (and I save one to the same slot 0 after every battle, and sometimes during a battle when it looks like being a long one with lots of special moves etc being used). I'm not sure why your savestates aren't working. By the way, I gave up using any speedhacks whatsoever (other than the default settings for VU rounding- I tried setting those to the safest setting, which didn't cure it) and just live with the 80-90% movie playback speed, and anything down to 35-40% when a lot of scenery is in view or it is a big battle with lots happening.

I have noticed that it is much more likely to freeze during a big battle, especially just when you start to execute a special move which has really fancy effects, but saving reguarly (essentially just hitting F1 every few minutes) is a useable workaround for me. I'd be more concerned about why your savestates aren't always working, or as a temporary measure, use F2 before each save with F1, so that you are cycling through all 16(?) saveslots, so if the most recent is corrupted, you can always continue from the previous one (using Shift+F2 to select it); that way you can be sure you'll always have a fairly recent good save to continue from. I find it tends to crash every hour or two on average, but as I've always saved before a battle, little more than two or three minutes is lost each time, so it is playable.

By the way, I found the game froze at the end of another movie- this was the one where you get the plane from Schmidt and fly it (and crash it after it is damaged by some sky-snake thing). I didn't try repeating it to see if this happens everytime though; I just used Select to skip it the second time.

Good luck, it's a great game once you learn to workaround the battle problems.

[Derex]

Hi again,

after writing this I've gone back to experimenting with the game and now I don't have any crashes at all anymore. But frankly I can't say which change did the trick in the end. I use Windows 7 and I installed the new directx 11 drivers, I installed new graphic drivers and I'm using the latest beta of pcsx2 and the gsdx and SPU2-X plugins. Default settings, no speed hacks, no crash in several hours of playtime now.

[PrinceGaz]

It could be the graphics. I'm using Windows XP still, which means DX9.0c whereas you're using DX10 now with Windows 7 (there is no DX11 hardware available yet).

The crashes are very random, I can go for a few hours sometimes, but when things heat up in a battle (and I'm getting very over-excited too, like shouting out loud "Mana Stinger!" when an aerial attack is timed just right) things do occasionally freeze.

I'm glad you have solved the problems with the beta Windows 7. It really is a good game with plenty of tactical planning in the battles. I think I'll continue with XP and saving my position regularly as I haven't had any problems with that so far.