PCSX2 .FMV playback issue (Wallace And Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit))

[AntiPestoGromit]

I've just realised something, I only have Project Zoo, not Curse of the Were Rabbit lol.

No converting the videos won't help, it might break it though.  Many games use PSS format and they're fine.

I don't think this is a GPU issue, it's more likely a core bug.  I thought that the EE Timing Fix Gamefix might have done something though.

OMG!! That's why it works on your end. Because all of the videos work on project zoo with my PCSX2. PCSX2 just has problems playing .fmvs not .pss. .pss videos don't give me the problem. Try to get a copy of Curse of the were rabbit to see if it gives you the same glitch. I will try the EE timing hack with all the versions.

[refraction]

I think my friend has a copy of Curse of the Were Rabbit, I'll see if I can borrow it, providing I get to see him, Christmas n all that!

[AntiPestoGromit]

I think my friend has a copy of Curse of the Were Rabbit, I'll see if I can borrow it, providing I get to see him, Christmas n all that!

Cool! In the meantime I will still be researching on this rather strange issue. Maybe I can find a solution before then. Also to anyone that has a copy of Curse of the Were Rabbit, can you play it on the latest revision of PCSX2 and see if you have the same fmv glitch.

Thanks for all of the support, really great forum.

EDIT: I found something interesting. It looks like this isn't the only game that does this. Thrillville has this issue as well. Gregory38 has solved FMV issues for other games and his description of the problem follows:

"I just found that GS local memory can wrap around. It explains a bug on Silent Hill 3 FMV. I think it can potentially explain issue on Thrillville. Potentially the end of the FMV is the start of the memory. My guess is that HW will happily overflow the frame buffer whereas SW will hit a wall."

"I gave a look at Thrillville the issue is very close but my option doesn't fix it. The game does some rendering at 0x3C00 which means only 32 pages remain. The rendering is 320x224 so 5*7 pages. It overflows 3 pages (which are the bottom black area). The framebuffer is good now but it is need to be translated as an input texture which is bad. There are various code that stop at the end of the memory. I removed a couple of them and the FMV start to appear (but color is wrong, so there is likely various bugs)."

So it looks like this issue isn't easily fixable. Also in Curse of the Were Rabbit, the FMV glitch happens in Hardware mode as well as Software mode. Hmmm . . .

So the solution calls for GS memory mapping?

EDIT#2: Don't know if this matters but it seems like this FMV problem is linked with the games not being able to be played with the MTVU speed hack. As the Wallace and Gromit Curse of the Were Rabbit crashes when the MTVU hack is enabled. It will work in the menus until the game actually loads the game environment, then it crashes the whole emulator. Thrillville also cannot be run with the MTVU speed hack.

EDIT #3: Progressive scan could be the culprit as in God Of War FMVs are ruined when progressive scan is on. I couldn't find the setting in PCSX2 though. That's all I got for today, tomorrow I will research about using different graphics plugins and which Gsdx plugin is the best for my CPU and GPU. (Difference between SSE2, SSSE3, SSE4.1, AVX and AVX2). Maybe using a different graphics plugin will produce different results.

Githhub Bug Thread:
https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/1562


Thrillville Bug Report:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Bug-Repor...lle-NTSC-U

Githhub MTVU Compatibility:
https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/1669

List of games incompatible with MTVU:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-LIST-Game...-with-MTVU

[refraction]

Well I managed to swing by my friends house tonight and grab the game and it does indeed happen here!

The bad news? Well the bug was introduced somewhere between the 0.9.6 release and SVN revision r1873 (this was a very early 0.9.7 beta). However I can confirm that GSDX is at fault here!

I have provided a GSDump (for our benefit) and informed some of our GSDX guru's to see if they can resolve it. In the mean time I'm seeing if I can narrow it down with the help of one of our testers to get a rough idea of what change caused it.

[AntiPestoGromit]

Well I managed to swing by my friends house tonight and grab the game and it does indeed happen here!

The bad news? Well the bug was introduced somewhere between the 0.9.6 release and SVN revision r1873 (this was a very early 0.9.7 beta). However I can confirm that GSDX is at fault here!

I have provided a GSDump (for our benefit) and informed some of our GSDX guru's to see if they can resolve it. In the mean time I'm seeing if I can narrow it down with the help of one of our testers to get a rough idea of what change caused it.

Exactly what I was going to post today, great job! I found the bug to be between the 0.9.6 release and the 0.9.7-r3113 beta. But I couldn't get any closer because the archive downloads and the archive revisions don't go back far enough to 2010. What is really strange is that in the 0.9.6 version hardware works on Both DX9 and DX10 (as in the videos play properly) but if you switch to software mode the videos have the same messed up black boxes. So it looks like the problem was before 0.9.6 for software mode.

I tested this with all of the previous plugins of Gsdx and I have found that in the GSDX9-10 Plugin Pack these are the versions that work:

Gsdx 0.1.0 - Gsdx,dll = Works on both hardware and software DX9/DX10
Gsdx 0.1.1 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above

Gsdx 0.1.2 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above
Gsdx 0.1.3 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above
Gsdx 0.1.4 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above
Gsdx 0.1.5 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above
Gsdx 0.1.6 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above , Gsdx-sse3.dll = works
Gsdx 0.1.7 - Gsdx.dll = Same as above , Gsdx-sse3.dll = works
Gsdx 0.1.8 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = Same as above , Gsdx-sse3.dll = works , Gsdx-sse4.dll = works

Now this is where things start getting weird. In the next set of plugins Hardware mode works but software mode doesn't. Both software modes for DX9 and DX10 have the screwed up boxes on the FMV video. Also once you change to software mode if you try to change any of the emulator's settings, try to exit, or pause the emulator it immediately crashes!
Here is a list of these plugins:

Gsdx 0.1.9 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse3.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse4.dll = broken
Gsdx 0.1.11 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse3.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse4.dll = broken
Gsdx 0.1.12 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse3.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse4.dll = broken
Gsdx 0.1.13 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse3.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse4.dll = broken
Gsdx 0.1.14 - Gsdx-sse2.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse3.dll = broken , Gsdx-sse4.dll = broken

The weird thing is that all of the individual plugin packs work. So the Gsdx DX10 plugin pack works on both hardware and software on all versions. As well as the DX9 plugin pack works on both hardware and software on all versions. Maybe the glitch started happening when the devs combined the two DX9/DX10 versions, very strange.

Like I said before in PCSX2 0.9.6 the videos on hardware mode work. But if you switch to software mode they have the same glitch on the videos. Anything before 0.9.6 uses the individual DX9 plugin version 0.11.4 which works on both hardware and software. So the glitch might have come about when the devs combined and added DX10. Everything after 0.9.6 doesn't work and has the glitch all the way through 1.0.0 and beyond. Tell me if you want a GS dump of the broken plugins and I would be happy to oblige. Thanks for all of your help refraction, hopefully we will squish this bug once and for all.

This is like me trying to figure out this problem, a lot of researching involved:



This is me when the FMVs don't work after I tried everything:

[refraction]

Haha that's exactly how we're feeling We've found lots of revisions in between, it's frustrating the software mode was broken way before 0.9.6 (i should have tested that), so we're just trying to trace the hardware bug.

[AntiPestoGromit]

Haha that's exactly how we're feeling We've found lots of revisions in between, it's frustrating the software mode was broken way before 0.9.6 (i should have  tested that), so we're just trying to trace the hardware bug.

Exactly, its better to focus on Hardware mode. I hardly ever use software mode anyways unless there are major graphical glitches in a game (Which is rare). Just wanted to let you know about the software issue, no rush.

[AntiPestoGromit]

I read this on the official Git PCSX2 Automated builds and it got me exited:

"PCSX2-Counters: Fix RTC counting at certain cases Previously, the seconds variable of the RTC was updated on progressive modes after every 50 Vsyncs, which was obviously wrong. The code has been adjusted to update the RTC with respect to the vertical frequencies of various other video modes.

Merge: af3c1fc c92830b Merge pull request #1720 from ssakash/rtc PCSX2-Counters: Fix RTC counting in Progressive modes

Merge: c88cd1b 9b6c3bd refractionpcsx2 GSdx Merge Circuit: Fix regression and issue"

So does this mean that you guys fixed the FMV video glitch for Wallace and Gromit : Curse Of The Were Rabbit already? If so then that is awesome!

[refraction]

No that's completely unrelated.

Nobody has even looked at this yet as far as I know. All the GS guru's are on holiday. Although I did find another game suffering from the same problem!

[FlatOut]

No. Those have nothing to do with the W&G FMV's. You probably need to be on the look out for a future PR that contains words like Texture Cache or GS wrap.