Mednafen PSX Issues

General
#1

Mednafen PSX is known for being more accurate than other emulators, I recently encountered some issues with it, both in its normal and hardware iterations, the symptoms are the same for the games below:

In Mednafen, Championship Motocross 2001 - Ricky Carmichael (USA) won’t render the pilot, there’s no setting I changed from the defaults and none would fix it, PCSX ReARMed has absolutely no issues with this:

Mednafen PSX, pilot not rendered:

retroarch%202019-10-23%2016-30-59-643
retroarch 2019-10-23 16-30-59-643.jpg1920×1080 1.2 MB

PCSX ReARMed, no issues:

retroarch%202019-10-23%2016-32-23-557
retroarch 2019-10-23 16-32-23-557.jpg1920×1080 1.26 MB

Colony Wars - Vengeance (USA) starts in Mednafen but won’t get past the first mission loading, Bin+cue from redump, works fine in other emulators such as PCSX ReARMed.

Can anyone try and see what’s causing it?

#2

I just tried Colony Wars - Vengeance (USA) and it works perfectly. Are you using Beetle-PSX HW or software?

#3

I’ve tried both cores, the loading where the ship takes off gets stuck, it will never get pass that, while in PCSX ReARMed it will load as fast as it should. Have you tried getting in game or just booted it up?

#4

I played through the whole mission and did not run into any problems. I am not sure what could be the cause of your issue besides maybe a bad dump. Medafen/Beetle is rather picky.

Have you tried the game on standalone medafen? If it doesn’t work with that either then it must be the game itself.

#5

Can you confirm we have the same checksum for Colony Wars - Vengeance (USA) (Track 1).bin?

CRC32 - 3C4742B9 SHA1 - FED68F345D055312B5D4C07DCD9C0C3045916027

Edit, it’s an unmodified Redump file.

#6

Sadly I can’t confirm that since I converted all my PSX games to CHD to save space and remove the need for having a billion cue/bin files. So mine reads as follows:

CRC2: 00A6CBC8
MD5: 933A2EB506F61F23385C851E412C332E
SHA-1: 1085AD519712C486C747470FF1623002C58A5E31

I am using a redump set if you are curious about the source.

#7

It’s not a big deal, but it’s weird this game is getting stuck, maybe I’ll convert it to CHD and see what happens. Thanks for checking it!

#8

Turns out the PAL version of Colony Wars Vengeance had a bug that caused it to hang while loading. It was fixed on the latest version of Medafen, though i am unsure if the beetle core is fully updated. If you are using the PAL version this could be the cause of the issue you are having.

From latest changelog:

PSX: Added a pseudorandom component to Pause command timing to address loading-related hangs in “Colony Wars - Vengeance (Europe)” and "Army Men - Air Attack (Europe)

#9

It’s the USA version, thanks for letting me know though.