Hacking Castlevania Portrait of Ruin Problems

[john310]

Here are some problems I have encountered with Portrait of Ruin:

1. When I go into the selection map in the portal room, the game will freeze(BGM still plays) when I do not make a selection around 4 seconds.

2. When talking to Wind (the quest guy), sometimes the bottom screen will turn black and game freezes(again, BGM still plays).

Note, this problem will happen even when I use the Download Play option in M3 Real Menu.

Those are all the problems I have encountered so far, and I am kind of surprised that this game does not emulate with perfection because the game has been out for a while now. If there is something I can do to fix this problem, please post it away.

P.S.: I am using the latest firmware.

 

[aerowalk]

it's a well known problem for many flashcarts
whether it's gonna freeze or not depends on your sd card i believe
faster sd cards (eg. kingston japan) are less likely to have this problem

 

[FAST6191]

The problem lies in flash carts being slower than normal carts (usually in the getting from the call by the DS to pulling it off the ?SD stage but anything method of crashing (as in the project management term crashing) the process helps) and the game not liking the delay.

There was a big thread the other day (I have not got the time to go searching but I posted in it if you fancy going back through my post history) but if you are willing to butcher the sound file and/or lose some of the sound you can get it to run (sound is not very important). You can either hack off the end of the sound file (all the big streaming audio stuff is at the end as I recall) or you can use a bit more finesse and alter the pointers to make the game unable to read the large files (Kenghot made a patch for the US rom which should not be too hard to find as it was spread fairly widely).
Sound file hacking (also in the rom hacking docs in my signature), the technique will be similar to the tetris sound hacking: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=90917

You can also defrag your card and format with 64k clusters (or bigger if you are using FAT32).

 

[Tir]

You can also defrag your card and format with 64k clusters (or bigger if you are using FAT32).

Don't defrag it, it's very bad for them. Simply moving everything off (and formatting if you want) and moving them back has the same effect.

 

[Toni Plutonij]

There is a patch made that will remove some of the sound effects from the game, but it will reduce freezing possibility drastically!! I completed the game with that patch, and it works fine (just don't push too many start button)..

I found the patch and uploaded it for you, try it....
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=2681

Cheers..

 

[themuddaload]

must be a card problem or something. i have an a-data class 6 and i only ever had PoR freeze once.

 

[john310]

Thank you Toni Plutonij. Your patch did fix the following problems I had and again, thank you very much.

 

[Toni Plutonij]

You're welcome!!! Anything you need....someone from GBAtemp will probably be able to provide help!!