Ring Out 1.5

The first fight no longer hangs

If a fresh install ever gave you a black screen with the music still playing —
the first time you started an Arcade or VS fight, no input, nothing to do but
kill it — that was a bug, not your hardware, and it is fixed.

The emulator wrote a stale graphics-FIFO read pointer into a buffer the game had
just swapped, leaving the GPU pointing into memory the game had abandoned.
Nothing could be drawn after that, so the game waited forever for a frame that
would never arrive.

It only happened while shaders were compiling for the first time, which is why
it hit new installs almost exclusively — and why it went unnoticed here for
months, since every test machine has warm shader caches. 1.4 has this bug too,
so if it froze on you at the VS screen, that is why.

Mods

Two kinds, and the MODS tab is honest about the difference.

Texture packs drop into userdata/Load/Textures/GRS/ and just load. Packs
authored for another SoulCalibur II release usually work — the game is matched
on the first three characters of the disc ID. Nothing about the emulated machine
changes, so netplay and determinism are untouched.

Character skins are written into the game's own archive, so your copy stops
matching the disc: netplay turns itself off while one is installed, and the tab
tells you that before you install rather than after. Skins apply at the next
launch, because the archive is open the whole time you are playing.

Both work on the Steam Deck.

A second controller just works

Plug in a second pad and player 2 is ready — port 2 attached, mapped, and
calibrated, with no configuration. (#5)

Player 2 gets the stick calibration too, which matters more than it sounds:
bound by hand, a pad's diagonals never reach full deflection, and no screen in
the game lets you fix it. Movement and guard, in a fighting game.

Two pads on a Steam Deck: if one does nothing, turn Steam Input off for the
shortcut. Steam can replace your physical pads with virtual ones the profile does
not recognise. The launcher log now records which devices the emulator can see
and how much of each pad actually bound, so this is a line to read rather than a
thing to guess.

The launcher finds its module on older systems

If your glibc is older than 2.36, the launcher starts the game through the copy
it ships with — and on that path it looked for the recompiled module in the
wrong directory and gave up, with the module sitting in bin/ the whole time.
Fixed, and a module that genuinely cannot be found now names the directories
that were searched. (#4)