DraStic

Hello. As you can probably can guess from glancing at my user info, I am a newcomer to this site. However, I have been lurking around these forums ever since January of this year and I need your help. I have been abstaining from creating an account and posting my problems ever since March the 1st because I thought that I could solve them by myself, or that the devs would find this eventually and patch it. These two things never happened, so I am doing this right now. After 6 months. Let me explain.

(Note: If you want to skip my long explanation of how my problems came to be and want to see what my problems are ASAP, please scroll down to the TL;DR section.)

Ever since I bought this app in the summer of 2014, everything has been working fine. No lag, no bugs, nothing. Every game I emulated worked very well, both on my Galaxy S3 and S4. It wasn’t until March the 1st of this year, during which I was about to beat the E4 the second time in Pokemon White, where problems arose.

You see, I was grinding as usual when all of a sudden, the emulator crashed to the main menu. I was confused on why this happened as it never happened before as well as mad as I lost about 10 minutes of progress. The device I was using was my S4. I shrugged it off angrily as I went to redo my progress. The intro went as normal and so was the menu. But when I entered my in-game save and walked around a bit and fought in a couple of battles, I noticed that the game was lagging. It lagged when transitioning from city to route or entering/exiting a building as well as when using moved in-battle. It didn’t lag much, but it was noticeable.

By this point, I became a little bit more pissed off. My game was working perfectly but now it’s not. Regardless, I continued with my game without trying anything to fix. A day later, I finally beat the E4 for the second time and went to go play White 2 on Drastic. It had the same lagging problems as described above. I tried several things to fix it this time like fiddling with the options, downloading White 2 from a new source and even uninstalling and reinstalling Drastic. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. I decided that this was a thing that I could deal with and played the game through.

Around the second half of March, I was about to reach Humilau City when the emulator updated. I was wondering if it was going to fix my lag issue. I was wrong. Instead, it caused more problems. Audio problems, to be exact. Almost every song that played in-game had static sounds accompanying it. What I mean is that the songs would play as normal, but the audio would be slightly muffled by crackling that mimicked the song’s tune. Not only that, but every once in a while, a barrage of static would play in my ears, annoying me greatly. It would begin around halfway through the game’s intro playing and it would cycle on from there.

I tried more things this time like using the beta version at the time as well as using the official DS BIOS files among reinstalling the app and the ROM, but as last time, nothing worked. I decided to go continue with the game after I gave up trying to fix it and it crashed when I tried to fly somewhere.

I was distraught. The game was now broken. White 1 also had the same problems, but it didn’t crash. The settings didn’t matter as they didn’t change a thing. I didn’t touch the game or the emu since then until about yesterday. During that long hiatus, I had factory reset my S4 and S3 and I felt that Drastic should be fixed by now. I tried my S4 to play White 2. Nothing. Nada. It went and suffered the same problems as usual. Started a new game and went to go meet Hugh. Crashed. Next, I tried my S3, thinking that my S4 has suffered some problems that may have affected the drastic emulator and that it wasn’t the emu’s fault. Nope. Same thing happened to me, minus the crashing. Settings didn’t change a thing for either. I now determined that the drastic emulator was the culprit all along and have now posted my problems here, hoping to get it fixed. Please, can you find what’s wrong? I want to be able to play White 2 again without any problems. Can you be able to find the bugs?

(TL;DR: The emulator hasn’t been working correctly for a while now (six months) on both Pokemon White and White 2. Problems happen on both Galaxy S4 and S3. Both games experience lag after the drastic emulator crashed to the main menu on March 1st (S4 only) and both games experience audio issues such as periodic crackling and static accompanying music after Mid-March update (Both S4 and S3). White 2 also crashed twice. Nothing I have done, from meddling with the settings to downloading the beta to factory resetting my phones, did anything. Please help.)


S4 Debug-Info:
MemOffset: 00000000
MemModifier: 0110
Threads: 3 (Shouldn’t there be four?)
Mode: ARMv7 NEON
Sample Rate: 48000
Buffer Size: 512
Additional settings: Anything I try here doesn’t change a thing, so they are irrelevant.

S3 Debug-Info:
Irrelevant as I prefer(red) to play White 1 and 2 on my S4, not my S3.

Latest version: r2.4.0.1a

(P.S. I don't have any save files for you. However, if you request it, I may supply one for you.)

Are you loading through a savestate or an in-game save? If it's a savestate it sounds like it could just be corrupt. In which case, you should see if you can make an in-game save from it and start fresh using it.

Another thing I'd try is to increase the audio latency setting, and if you're using a bluetooth headset try with it removed.

Finally, your ROM may be corrupt. If you know how to get an md5sum I can check it against online game databases.

Exophase wrote:Are you loading through a savestate or an in-game save? If it's a savestate it sounds like it could just be corrupt. In which case, you should see if you can make an in-game save from it and start fresh using it.

Another thing I'd try is to increase the audio latency setting, and if you're using a bluetooth headset try with it removed.

Finally, your ROM may be corrupt. If you know how to get an md5sum I can check it against online game databases.

1) I admit that when White 2 crashed for the first time (just before my hiatus) I loaded from a savestate. However, when I tested it again 2 days ago after I decided to try it again, I started a new game from a new ROM downloaded from the same source, didn’t load from anything, and it crashed when meeting Hugh for the first time. The source may be the problem. As for White 1, it was fine until March 1st when Drastic mysteriously crashed to the main menu. I have no idea where I downloaded that ROM from, but I believe it to be the same source as White 2, in which case, as stated before, may be the problem. Maybe.

2) I don’t use a Bluetooth headset and the audio latency is as high as it gets. Problem still occurs in both ROMs in both of my phones, so that’s not the issue.

3) Yeah, the ROMs may be corrupt, but what apps should I use for the md5sum? I don’t know any and I'm at school currently so I can't access my phone.

Here's one app you can use to generate md5sums:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .md5&hl=en

You'll want to do it on an uncompressed .nds file, which means you may need other apps to uncompress it (or do it on a PC)

Exophase wrote:Here's one app you can use to generate md5sums:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .md5&hl=en

You'll want to do it on an uncompressed .nds file, which means you may need other apps to uncompress it (or do it on a PC)

For Pokemon White:

8dfef9a099e1269af5c1fcf9d7736a11

Confirmation: For Pokemon White 2:

fa7f9772c2d51866185b3fc3fce3acdc

Conformation: Here you go. Hope this helps.

The Pokemon White 1 isn't a perfect dumps, but it should be close enough to where they won't give you problems. The Pokemon White 2 dump on the other hand doesn't seem to check out (http://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php ... =6150&s=28). Is it a non-USA region? How large is it?

At this point it seems worth seeing if anyone else can try to load from your saves (not savestates) and see if it happens to them too. It's possible something's universally broken, just unlikely since they're such popular games. I have seen people run into problems before because they were using faulty SD cards (problem went away when the ROM was moved to internal storage), but it's hard to believe that would result in something so reproducable.

Exophase wrote:The Pokemon White 1 isn't a perfect dumps, but it should be close enough to where they won't give you problems. The Pokemon White 2 dump on the other hand doesn't seem to check out (http://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php ... =6150&s=28). Is it a non-USA region? How large is it?

At this point it seems worth seeing if anyone else can try to load from your saves (not savestates) and see if it happens to them too. It's possible something's universally broken, just unlikely since they're such popular games. I have seen people run into problems before because they were using faulty SD cards (problem went away when the ROM was moved to internal storage), but it's hard to believe that would result in something so reproducable.

That's strange to know, because from what I experienced, both White and White 2 experienced the same problems in the audio and lag department. White 2 was the only one out of the two to crash proper, sure (If you don't count that one time I was playing Pokemon White on March 1st when it suddenly crashed to Drastic's main menu), but if your findings were correct then shouldn't I never have come across the same problems in White as in White 2?. BTW, the White 2 ROM that I have is the USA region one, so that's not an issue. The file is about 512 megabytes as well.

As for the saves, I should have them up in a while. Wait a moment.

Edit: here they are:

So... isn't anyone going to check the saves that I posted? I want to know if the problems are replicated amongst you. Please.

I was only able to test pokemon white, since that is the only game I physically own and could make a rom out of. I ran around for a few minuets, fought some overkill battles, and changed routes multiple times. Even using a fairly heavy filter (SABR 3.0) there was no noticable lag and my fps stayed at 95-100%/100% the entire time.

Device: Samsung galaxy tab S
Frame skip- 0, hi rez - off, multi threaded - off, filter- SABR 3.0, audio latency- low (lowest setting)

TkSilver wrote:I was only able to test pokemon white, since that is the only game I physically own and could make a rom out of. I ran around for a few minuets, fought some overkill battles, and changed routes multiple times. Even using a fairly heavy filter (SABR 3.0) there was no noticable lag and my fps stayed at 95-100%/100% the entire time.

Device: Samsung galaxy tab S
Frame skip- 0, hi rez - off, multi threaded - off, filter- SABR 3.0, audio latency- low (lowest setting)

Interesting. I've wondered for some time now if the problems that are occurring to me are just something to do with the devices that I use. I'm not sure about that, but it could be a likely reason. However, the fact that the same problems occur in both White and White 2 in both my Galaxy S3 and S4 makes that murky.