Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

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Isuka
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Post by Isuka »

Segaholic2 wrote:Last I checked (granted this was several years ago), certain DC games commanded quite a premium on the secondary market. Power Stone 2 was worth $70 - $80 at the time.
Fucking this. I really want to get my hands on PS2 but people ask for ludicrous amounts of dough for it. Had to make do with a second-hand Oratorio Tangram for the same reason (of course we are talking American ones, Japs are usually much more reasonable). I'll never, ever play burned shit on my DC. EVAR!

And BTW, I'm still infinitely grateful, Frieza. :PY:

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

So here's a new problem.

For reasons I am unable to trace, booting an image in Fusion from Daemon Tools Lite - which is what I was doing before with no problems - now causes the sound and framerate to skip to the point of being unplayable. It runs alright if I load the CUE file directly in Fusion, but then of course the audio sync is completely off.

I'm not exactly sure when this problem began or what I did that caused it. I thought it might've been due to the latest Daemon Tools Lite update, but I tried going back to an older version and had the same problem.


PCE images still work fine. Any ideas?

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Neo
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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Neo »

Did you turn on "Perfect Sync (Slow)" in the options? That might have performance issues since you're using software emulation to fake the CD drive.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

Yeah, but I had that running before with no issues (most games will not play at all without it). And even when I turn it off, I still get the same problems.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

I am completely dumbfounded as to what change I evidently made to something somewhere in my system that has caused this to happen, but I think my best bet is to try some other virtual drive.

Other than Daemon Tools, what's a good one?

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

I noticed the problem is lessened when I set the "ReadAhead" option to 8x, but even then I'm still getting interference.

According to my brother, he's always had this problem. But what would make it happen out of the blue? There must be a way to fix it!

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

Well, I have as yet had absolutely no luck identifying or solving the Mega-CD problem, so let's try something easier.


Google. It used to be beautiful and simple, but their current business model seems to revolve around inventing new ways to be annoying.

When I type things into the search bar, I want to be able to see suggestions from my own search history. Not popular searches. Just what I have put in previously. Allegedly turning web history on is supposed to enable this, but it's not working.

I also want to turn off "related searches" in image search. As soon as you scoot the pointer down over the text (and in the first place I honestly do not want to see what the rest of the universe is searching for) it opens pop-up previews that completely obscure the entire first row of images. Has nobody realized how retarded that is?

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Crisis
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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Crisis »

Google is notoriously awful at user interfaces. They've screwed up Youtube, the new Gmail (not GMail or GoogleMail as it has previously been known) web interface, and their core search engine. Chrome is only marginally better.

My favourite part of the unified Google interface is the "More" tab, which contains an item called "Even More".

I know you can turn off Google Instant (scroll to the bottom), which I believe turns off all suggestions from your search history and everybody else's. It will still use autocomplete, though, which you can't switch off.

I don't think it's possible to switch off the related searches under images but I can't confirm it.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Locit »

I recently started using Duckduckgo.com. It's basically what Google used to be, minus all the creepy privacy stuff and search bubbles.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Crisis »

I was in the lab yesterday and using a computer running Windows XP when I noticed that Google image search wasn't offering previews in IE 6. It looks like that feature is dependent on the browser you're using. For instance it also doesn't show up on Apple's iOS browser that's used on iPhones and iPads (which I guess makes sense since there's no mouse to mouse over anything). I'd like to briefly plug the iPad as the web-browsing device I've ever laid hands on.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Frieza2000 »

Locit wrote:I recently started using Duckduckgo.com. It's basically what Google used to be, minus all the creepy privacy stuff and search bubbles.
startpage.com literally is Google (the results, anyway), but without IP logging and the option to view sites through a proxy.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Locit »

Frieza2000 wrote:startpage.com literally is Google (the results, anyway), but without IP logging and the option to view sites through a proxy.
Cheers! It also hasn't been blocked here yet, so you can use its proxy option to access other blocked websites.

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Cuckooguy »

I've been dabbling into Sega Genesis/32X/CD emulation myself lately and booted up Snatcher. I have 2 downloaded copies, one I downloaded many years ago when I first played and one I downloaded recently that came in a huge every-Sega CD-game set. So I boot up Fusion and tested Snatcher (from the set I recently downloaded) and couldn't help but notice that the prologue movie is out of sync. I played with many settings but to no avail.

Remembering that my previous play many years ago was in sync, I dig through my folders to find my previous downloaded Snatcher. I booted that up and it turned out it was in sync. I think the reason for the sync problems could do with the cue file and/or filenames.

Image

The left one was unsynced from the rom batch I downloaded, the right one I got from long ago.

I suspect it has to do with the .cue file. or possibly just the mp3 filenames. Hope this helps you become one step closer to audio sync issues!

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Green Gibbon! »

I never use MP3 dumps because it's a lossy format, which to my understanding makes it impossible to get accurate timing (especially on PCE which is even more finicky than Mega-CD). You can find lossless BIN/WAV dumps anywhere now, though, and there are still minor sync issues even when playing directly from a CD.

That isn't the problem I'm having, though.

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Neo
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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Neo »

MP3 files shouldn't affect timing because timing is all done based on an internal clock, regardless of what's actually playing.

Whether or not you have a lossless dump (BIN or ISO+WAV) you still need a cue sheet, which stores the data about the number, type and length of the various tracks, information which is normally stored outside the main data region of a CD and therefore doesn't show up on the binary dump. Bad cue sheets are the most common cause of timing issues (missing pregaps, etc.)

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Re: Incredibly mundane technical question, ver.2

Post by Neo »

Also, emulators like Gens like to cheat and allow you to play games without even having a cue sheet. It looks for MP3 files with a similar filename to the ROM you loaded and "guesses" what the cue sheet should look like (track 1 is data, all others are audio with a 2 sec pregap, album has as many tracks as it can find). This in turn has led to very bad practices in which a lot of game rips online only have an ISO and a set of MP3 files but no cue sheet.

Lastly, cue sheets are just plain text files, so if something's not working properly you can always just open them up in a text editor and tinker about. You might be able to find something that's obviously wrong and fix the issue yourself.

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