PPSSPP Vulkan issues + unrelated crashes

Libretro Cores
#1

In ‘Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?’ the background of the first level is completely gone. It’s all black. This didn’t happen with the OGL renderer. However, the sound was and is distorted/crackling in both modes.

These are my current core options for PPSSPP:

ppsspp_cheats = "disabled"
ppsspp_cpu_core = "jit"
ppsspp_locked_cpu_speed = "off"
ppsspp_language = "automatic"
ppsspp_rendering_mode = "buffered"
ppsspp_auto_frameskip = "disabled"
ppsspp_frameskip = "0"
ppsspp_framerate_limit = "0"
ppsspp_force_max_fps = "disabled"
ppsspp_audio_latency = "low"
ppsspp_internal_resolution = "480x272"
ppsspp_output_resolution = "480x272"
ppsspp_button_preference = "cross"
ppsspp_fast_memory = "disabled"
ppsspp_set_rounding_mode = "enabled"
ppsspp_block_transfer_gpu = "enabled"
ppsspp_texture_scaling_level = "0"
ppsspp_texture_scaling_type = "bicubic"
ppsspp_texture_anisotropic_filtering = "16x"
ppsspp_texture_deposterize = "disabled"
ppsspp_internal_shader = "off"
ppsspp_gpu_hardware_transform = "enabled"
ppsspp_vertex_cache = "enabled"
ppsspp_prescale_uv = "disabled"
ppsspp_separate_io_thread = "disabled"
ppsspp_unsafe_func_replacements = "enabled"
ppsspp_sound_speedhack = "disabled"
ppsspp_threaded_input = "disabled"
ppsspp_true_color = "enabled"

Also, Metal Slug XX shows me half a second of the loading screen before crashing. MH Freedom Unite and MH Portable 3rd HD both crash immediately. All of these crashes occurred before and after Vulkan was implemented/used. None of the games crash in standalone PPSSPP.

Please let me know if I need to provide any more info.

#2

Nothing?

Some updates: Running Prinny in standalone I got rid of the audio crackling, but the backgrounds were still all black. So I ran the game in standalone using the OGL backend and voila! Backgrounds were all there. I did try to change the sample rate to 44100hz in RA, but alas, it didn’t do anything.

#3

Okay, so, back again. Turns out the libretro docs for PPSSPP don’t reflect reality and that’s what caused all of that game crashing. I looked at the folder structure for standalone PPSSPP and moved the ‘assets’ files into their own folder. No more crashing, however I don’t get any japanese text at all (Running the JP ver. of both MH games). This does not seem so easily solved by just looking in the PPSSPP folder.

Status: No more crashing. Missing japanese fonts. Audio crackling persists (only in ‘Prinny’ that I know of). Backgrounds in ‘Prinny’ still missing (most likely on hrydgard’s end).

Edit: The issue with the missing fonts is exclusive to the MH games. All other JP games work perfectly in this regard. I assume the fonts in MH are loaded externally?

#5

Precisely what I wrote immediately after. The docs state that files from the downloadable ‘assets’ folder ought to be placed directly in the ‘system/PPSSPP’ folder, which is not the case. They need to be in ‘system/PPSSPP/assets’.

#7

Alright. I am fast approaching maximum confusion levels.

System/PPSSPP/assets gives me the exact same results as yours. System/PPSSPP makes MHFU crash instantly.

#9

This is the log I gathered when trying to run MH3rdHD with all the assets files in the correct location.

https://pastebin.com/C5FC7sQF

#10

Can anyone else try running a JP game that relies on external font loading, like MH 2nd?

I’d at least like to know if the problem is reproducible. :frowning_face:

#12

Where is your assets folder pulled from, if I may ask?

#14

I SOLVED IT!

And boy do I feel stupid. Through some rigorous troubleshooting I found out that I had to delete the font file named “zh_gb.pgf”. I haven’t the slightest idea how I got a hold of that file to begin with… but there you go!

Only problems left are the black backgrounds (not a libretro issue) and the fact that 9 times outta 10 the core will crash upon exit. But that’s for another day. :sunglasses:

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