Audio skipping in Katamari Forever among other things (BLES00658) in 0.0.12-10923

[jakismar]

Love this game to death and it runs flawlessly on my machine for the most part. However the audio of the game keeps repeating at a certain point and it's driving me crazy. I'm pretty much on default settings and messing with the audio settings yields no result. The audio doesn't skip during FMV's notably (like the intro for example) but title screen and in game music always skip. In the attached log, you'll also notice this line

E {PPU[0x1000000] Thread (main_thread) [0x00439100]} SYS: 'sys_ppu_thread_set_priority' failed with 0x80010005 : CELL_ESRCH [1]

On the title screen, this first appeared when the music begins playing. Then the same error appears each time it skipped which was a grand total of 3 times before I shut down the emulator. I noticed someone was having the same issue about 2 years ago but apparently it got fixed in an update sometime after that. I'm just wondering if this is a bug with the emulator or if this is something I can actually fix through the settings if some wizard is able to do that. Here are my specs.

On a side note I also wanted to add that movement in the main hub is a little glitchy too. Cousins walk in place and are not able to be interacted with at all which is not how they functioned on the real console. Movement is stuttery but still works enough to be playable. Not the most important issue ever but I feel like it would help to mention it.

Windows 10 64 bit
AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS with Radeon Graphics 3.00 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with Max-Q Design
16 gigs of RAM

RPCS3.log

[bevanweiss]

Bot says: Please change SPU Block Size to Safe, currently Mega is unstable.
Does changing this setting provide any change in the behaviour you're hearing/seeing?

[jakismar]

It has always been on safe, and I still have this issue. It seems to have been kinda fixed as of the latest update as the ingame music no longer skips and repeats as much as it did before. Music in other areas of the game still repeat sometimes.

[philj56]

@jakismar I played through this recently myself and noticed the same issues. I seem to remember enabling "accurate xfloat" in the cpu tab fixed the audio skipping, but I may be misremembering. It's hard to reproduce reliably for testing. In any case, I've attached the custom config I used while playing through. Hopefully you have some luck sorting it out.
config_BLES00658.txt

[nitroos-ai]

is it fixed now? Someone posted a video on youtube of the game working without issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce_sCp6i0z8

[robotoboy30]

A setting I changed for this was

SPU Block Size: Mega
Shader Mode: Async with Shader Interpreter
Multithreaded RSX: Disabled

Also keep the the Vbank Frequency at 60hz otherwise the game speeds up too much.

Other than that I used that guys exact settings (Fixed the audio skipping).

Seems to work flawlessly minus some odd bugs.

Listed bugs I can find are:

• Characters move slowly on select screen (lag)
• Cannot change characters by tagging as you should be able to.
• The katamari is invisible on the file select screen.
• The katamari is invisible during the the results screen.

[robotoboy30]

The recent update seems to have broken the game and it now no longer moves past the loading screen after the Bandai logo.

[MSuih]

It's most likely same issue as #12085, so keep the discussion in that ticket

[robotoboy30]

It's most likely same issue as #12085, so keep the discussion in that ticket

Will do ('-'*ゞ

[Bioness-zz]

I was able to fix the invisible Katamari on the results screen and the music looping during levels. The following is the configuration I used:
CPU:
SPU XFloat Accuracy set to Accurate Xfloat
SPU Block Size set to Mega
GPU:
Shade Mode set to Async with Shader Interpreter
Checked Wite Color Buffers
Checked Multithreaded RSX

[finzu0]

this worked for me! there are still some times where the audio repeats, but it worked for the most part! I have spent hours trying to fix this, thank you so much!

[Flannels]

I’ve tried every solution above, yet the music still skips. Am I doing something wrong? (For reference, I’m using RPCS3 on Steam Deck via EmuDeck)

[Volkaru]

Not having any music skipping during gameplay with the above settings. However, every video file, including the intro, is having massive stuttering and tearing. Tried tweaking some settings related to video files, nothing seems to help.

[lovelylaika]

Had the music restart issue playing on the most recent build (0.0.26-14723) and a slightly older build (0.0.22-13761) no matter what settings I used.

I noticed in the YouTube video posted above, they used version 0.0.20-13288 without issue. I tested that build, and there's no repeating music problem at all, even with the default config.

My PC, for the record:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
NVIDIA Geforece RTX 2070 Super
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Home

[0ctopain]

Just beat the game in RPCS3 (0.0.27-15030), and I noticed a few quirks about the audio loop bug.

• Playing a song for the very first time has a 90% chance of not looping, but any time a track gets played again, it has a high chance of looping.
• After a while, the track will begin to play normally again. The amount of time it takes to fix itself seems inconsistent, and I noticed that sometimes a track will stop looping after rolling up a present or cousin, but it could just be a coincidence.
• Pausing for 4-5 seconds seems to fix the issue with what feels like a 75% success rate.

The main hub and the katamari results screens are the worst looping offenders, but thankfully the full versions of those songs already tend to repeat themselves, so it's not as noticeable during casual play. If the game doesn't seem like it wants to stop looping no matter what you do, it's best to just quit out and restart to refresh all the tracks.

[theknewgreg]

The one thing that triggers it in-game the most for me is doing the charge and roll in the first 5 or so seconds. I think when you do that it overwrites the data for when the music should loop to be the same as the charge and roll (Which is about 5 or so seconds), but if you wait for the music to get past that point, it goes back to working normally

[FlexBy420]

Is this still an issue?

[0ctopain]

i just replayed katamari last week and it still had the audio bug, yeah