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Little Princess - Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime 2 (JP) #188

Open UltraSunDK opened 2 years ago

UltraSunDK commented 2 years ago

Issue: The game may lock up when moving between areas or events. When the game locks up the game still plays the music in the background, but the game is just showing a black screen. I am not sure how useful it is, but here is a savestate from the game in it's locked up state: Little Princess - Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime 2 (Japan)_2.zip

I have checked the latest version of Duckstation which has the same issue. The game is mentioned on it's wiki: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/wiki/Difficult-to-Emulate-Games#little-princess---marl-oukoku-no-ningyou-hime-2

I have checked and have reproduced the issue with both the full game "Little Princess - Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime 2 (Japan)" and the demo included with "Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime - The Adventure of Puppet Princess (Japan) (Omake Disc)"

Reproduce:

  1. Start the game and load this savestate: Little Princess - Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime 2 (Japan)_1.zip
  2. After loading walk to the right the moment you can.
  3. The game may lock up here already. If not you can either reload the save state or let the event play out.
  4. After the event has played out, you may try to move between areas a couple times. It should sooner rather than later.

Can also be reproduced without the savestate in this way:

  1. Start the game.
  2. On the title screen select the first option.
  3. Hold down X to skip through the events fast (This can also result in a early lockup)
  4. When getting control of your character move along the level as normal and get to the first battle on a bridge.
  5. After completing the fight you are now free to go between maps to trigger the lockup if it hasn't occurred thus far.

Workaround: None known

BIOS: 7000

CD Image: Redump bin/cue

Core Version: PSX_DualSDRAM20220828

UltraSunDK commented 2 years ago

It appears that this might be an original game bug that affected some PS2 systems. A later revision of the game called "Little Princess - Marl Oukoku no Ningyou-hime 2 (Japan) (+1 Tasu Ichi)" in Redump addressed this and in my testing doesn't suffer from the same issue on the core.

Here is a excerpt from the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game describing the changes in this version. "In addition to partially renewing the content (difficulty setting, adding events before the ending, etc.), analog controller support, and a frequent freeze on the early PlayStation 2, the bug has been fixed."

This means that a workaround for this issue would be to use the later revision of the game which also included new functions and apparently other stuff.