Picodrive takes ages to load 32X games

Libretro Cores
#1

At first i thought RA crached but after about a minute the game loaded. Then another game took 10 seconds to load. Another took 2 whole minutes, etc. It’s completely random. While it’s loading, RetroArch completely freezes, you can’t even close it’s process through the task bar.

Also, is there any point in updating the core? Any emulation improvements? I saw a new version in the buildbot today.

Edit: The same goes for other cores like mGBA. Dunno what’s going on i don’t remember this issue a while ago.

#2

Which OS/platform? We haven’t done anything that would affect loading times lately, so I would suspect something on your end. Are you loading from network shares?

And yeah, there was actually a huge update in the core a few hours ago, which notaz said included some nice accuracy improvements. I haven’t tried it myself, yet, but it’s worth checking out. If you depend on the core, maybe make a backup of your current one, though, just in case.

#3

Ok i figured it out. The problem was on my end but it’s an interesting behavior. You can probably reprpduce it too.

The reason for the very long loading was that i was copying some files from the HDD to an external drive. During the this procedure it seems like some cores do this. I wasn’t copying anything from the drive where RA or the roms are. The drives were completely unrelated/separate.

That’s on Windows 7 64bit. Seems like the version of the cores don’t matter since i tested the older backup i had and the same thing happens. So it’s not a problem, all you have to do is not loading games while copying-pasting big files or backing up in the background. But it’s an interesting issue nonetheless.

As for the update in Picodrive, i only use it for 32X and i usually test NBA JAM and see if the speed problem is fixed (it’s still slow). I don’t remember any other issues i came across.

1 Like
#4

there is no problem loading 32x here(at least for NBA JAM) confirm you are not loading from a slow storaga and have not set “Cache” directory in a similar manner.

#5

If you are telling your PC to transfer from one drive to another, even if you are loading off a 3rd drive it’s going to cause slow-downs in read/write functions.

I ran into this a while back too 'cause I was doing major backups but wanted to play while waiting lol