Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

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Iainuki
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Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by Iainuki »

I have a bizarre problem I've encountered running Zsnes on an Ubuntu Linux system. For the past few weeks, I've been playing a translated FF5 ROM and it's been working fine, but last week I encountered a place where the game froze after I save-stated: when I would load the state, it would freeze at the scene with Syldra after the Karlabos fight. I started again and everything seemed to work fine, until I encountered a far worse bug: any time I created a new save state, when I tried to load that state, Zsnes would segfault, with no other error message. However, I could still load old save states, save state again, and I would be able to load those states without causing a segfault. I can provide one of the broken and one of the working save states if that's helpful. There's no error message in the terminal besides the segfault.

I found this thread, http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14062 , but I'm running a different version of Ubuntu, 10.04, and I don't have any ALSA errors, so I don't know if this is the same problem. This is Zsnes 1.51.
Iainuki
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Re: Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by Iainuki »

This bug occurs because of a change in one of Ubuntu's Pulseaudio libraries, libpulse0, with the update to the latest version, 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu14. I have no idea what's going wrong and I don't have the technical skills to discover it, but I filed a bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/786588 . I wanted to report the bug here as well, since I suspect the Ubuntu people are going to say, "The problem is in Zsnes, not Pulseaudio."
Nach
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Re: Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by Nach »

ZSNES doesn't use PulseAudio directly.

It outputs via SDL or libao which can in turn be configured to output to a dozen different sound systems. If you're sure the problem is with PulseAudio, then simply stop using PulseAudio.

Install one of these packages to make SDL route sound through it instead of whatever you're currently using:
libsdl1.2debian-alsa - Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and ALSA options)
libsdl1.2debian-arts - Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and aRts options)
libsdl1.2debian-esd - Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and esound options)
libsdl1.2debian-nas - Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and NAS options)
libsdl1.2debian-oss - Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and OSS options)

For libao, run ZSNES from the terminal with --help to see what sound devices you can pass to -ad. Once you pass something to -ad, it'll save that setting to the config for future use for however you normally load ZSNES.

I highly recommend to never use PulseAudio, unless someone paid you several large suitcases of cash for the inconvenience involved.
May 9 2007 - NSRT 3.4, now with lots of hashing and even more accurate information! Go download it.
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kode54
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Re: Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by kode54 »

Yes, it's better to buy a modern Creative sound card, so you can have multiple applications generating sound without the need for a software mixer. (Live! or Audigy will do, if you can't afford an X-Fi, preferrably the Audigy since the Live! series had horrible DACs that generated worse noise than most onboard sound devices.)
paulguy
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Re: Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by paulguy »

I had an EMU10K1 sb live without the breakout box and it wasn't too bad, but I was comparing to some rather bad via soundmax onboard crap that sounded muffled.
Maybe these people were born without that part of their brain that lets you try different things to see if they work better. --Retsupurae
kode54
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Re: Segfault on New Save States, Older Ones Load

Post by kode54 »

The external boxes had acceptable DACs. They only screwed you if you wanted to use the front speaker jack on the back panel of the card.
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