Slow downs during battles (castlevania)

[Jonacrab]

Ill start by saying that I'm assuming my computer just isn't fast enough to run this at full speed, but I thought it was worth asking.

So I'm trying to play 2 games, Castlevania lament of innocence, and Castlevania curse of darkness. In any case, with both games, when there are no enemies on screen the game runs fine, full speed. As soon as enemies appear on the screen, it goes into slowdown, probably about 40 fps. According to the readout at the top, the Fps is about 40, the EE(during battles) jumps up to 100%(60% when game is running fine) the gs sticks around 50-60% and the UI at 1-4%. Initially there was a general slowdown in the game, and adjusting some of the settings(speed hacks I believe is what got it running faster) I was able to get the game outside of battles running at close to full speed.

So, I guess my question comes down to the EE(and im not emulation savvy so dumb it down for me) Is this indicative of something? are there settings I can change to help this? i have fiddled around with alot of settings, and I did read the guides here, but still I can't really get anything to change during battles.

Anyhow, I assume the problem is just that my system can't run everything at full speed... but if you guys know something I don't, clue me in

System specs:

Processor: Intel Core 2 6420
Ram: 4gb
Video: Geforce 8800 gts
OS: windows 7 64 bit

On a different topic, how come save states aren't saved per game, only per slot. I only ask cuz i apparently lost my save data for 1 game assuming that the emulator, like most other emulators, would have 10 slots available per game, isnt that better? (maybe im wrong about this, but, what happened was i was playing lament of innocence, and saved on the first save slot, but then started playing curse of darkness, and saved over the first save slot again, assuming it was game specific, but when i went back to play LOI again, i tried to load the first slot and the game reverted to curse of darkness again(LOI was loaded at the time, which is the weird thing, i have no idea how it jumped to curse of darkness except that they are both ISOs on my hd and had both been previously loaded), but with the music all buggy, and it would let me play, until i tried to go into a different room, then the game crashed and the readout was just spewing errors) Is that a bug, or is the save slot system not based per game?

Sorry to go off topic, I really just meant to ask the first question

[GamerGeek]

As you thought your pc is the problem. When the EE hits 100% it means your cpu isnt keeping up. You can speed it up with speedhacks(which you already have) and frameskip. You could try using SuperVU if you are on 9.7, its generally a bit faster but less compatible. Or you can overclock if you want to give that a try.

Save States are actually game specific. I dont know what happened with your state reverting to another game. The only reason the state would do this that I can think of is that the emulator reads the game CRC incorrectly(it uses crc to identify the game). Did you close the emulator between the games?

[Jonacrab]

hm... superVU didnt help... one note tho: for lament of innocence i had to set the bios to Pal, for some reason the game would lock up before it ever got into the main menus, and that was the only way i could get it to work, could that affect it in any way? regardless... its really only a minor issue... since i can play it... just annoying when it slows down...

As far as the save states go, I retested it, and it works vice versa for both games, i was using state 0 for curse of darkness, and state 1 for lament of innocence. I initially saw the problem when i was trying to load a LOI state and it would load COD, but i tried it opposite, and it still works that way as well(meaning this time i loaded COD, tried to load the slot i was using for LOI, and it loaded the LOI save, playable until i went through a door, at which point all hell broke loose and the console was spewing out errors, and the game had effectively crashed)

It was possible i didnt close PCSX2 the first time around, but in my last test it was restarted. I looked in the sstates folder and there are only 2 files, should there be more?

[GamerGeek]

The bios doesnt affect fps in any way. What it can do sometimes is that when using full boot it doesnt load games that are of a diffrent region. Although in my experience this is always solved by using fast boot(or skip bios hack in earlier versions).

Im not sure whats going on with your save states at all. All mine save on a specific game. Maybe a developer could shed some light on what could be the bad guy. If I understand what youe written correctly 2 files is right. There should be 1 files for every state you have saved. You saved once on COD and once on LOI so 2 files is correct.

Are they named diffrently?(apart from the file ending 000/001)

[Jonacrab]

00000000.000 and 00000000.001 is how they are named. Assuming that each game is "supposed" to have its own files.... i guess maybe they are being named the same and overwriting each other? im under the assumption that if i had saved slot 1 and slot 2 for each game i should have 4 files correct?

[GamerGeek]

Ok Im guessing the crc is being read incorrectly since they should be named after each games individual crc. In your case they are not. What plugin are you using? If using from a disc try ripping it with imgburn and use the internal iso loader.

Also if you save twice for each game then there should be 4 files yes, but since the crc seems to be read incorretly they both save over eachother.