Emulator

I actually found a fix to the problem, dolphin 5.0 works properly, so Ill just use that for this game for now.Sorry to bother you guys.

Well, if Dolphin 5.0 works properly and the latest dev builds don't, can you please find out which development build broke it through bisecting. If there's something corrupting saves, that'd be incredibly important to find out since the development builds are newer than 5.0.

I absolutely can do some digging. It may take a while to do, Its been broken for at least a month or so

This took a while: so far I know that somewhere in between builds 581 and 215 there was a change that caused this issue. I still have yet to find the specific build, but will continue to dig.

Last working build was 530. First broken build was 540. So either 532 (not a windows build) that broke the game, or build 540 broke the game.
Conjecture/side note: I noticed a difference in invalid reads when testing the older builds and newer builds, they both produce invalid reads in the room with the gold fuzzy when entering the room from one of the side rooms (but not the pipe). The older builds 530 and older give 0x******* where the stars are a seemingly random number, and the newer builds (540 and newer) give a 0x0000000. I am wondering if this change in invalid reads also affected save files.

JMC: If I haven't misunderstood it, writing into 0x00000000 will overwrite the game ID in RAM, meaning that any save data written after may be identified as the wrong game. So it seems like there's some problem that makes the game write to somewhere it shouldn't write to, and the dynamic BAT change just changed which memory location it writes to. I wonder if this is related to what many people have reported happening in Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles...

Now that's interesting as hell.

Now you got my attention, too! I always had the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles saving problem and
never could play it well on Dolphin. The saving worked just one time but this was years ago.

Concerning TTYD, I experienced that Dophin crashed after collecting the Sun and Moon Stones
and going into the room with the Golden Fuzzy. But the memory card wasn't corrupted after this.

Sorry guys, I just got back from work and read your stuff. I can post some screenshots of the panic handlers from both the non working and working builds in a little bit. But yes, it is saving the file in a new location on the memory card, the memory card I posted has 2 paper mario saves blocks on it, which should be impossible.

I can play FFCC! When I get the saving problem again, I'll upload the saves for you.

@JMC4789: I tried turning off panic alerts like you suggested, it didn't help. the game still doesn't save if I go into the room that causes the invalid read. If I don't go into the room and trigger the invalid read, the game saves fine. its just this particular location that causes this bug.

Just an update, The game works when using cached interpreter (it took a while but I tested it) it only doesn't work in JIT. I dont know if this information helps or not. But I tried changing alot of my settings to see if anything would make it work. The only thing that made the game work was cacheInterpreter.

OK this is weird, saving works if I don't have graphics set to auto fractional (the invalid read disapears too). I guess that the issue is caused by auto fractional in the graphics tab. Sorry to spam so much, I had no Idea that fractional window size could cause issues like this.

What is auto fractional? How can I change this? I tried the Cached Interpreter but I still have the same problem.
What else did you change?

Auto fractional is a setting in the graphics tab, located in the Internal Resolution tab. I still think its weird that the game works with this setting enabled on builds older than 540, but doesn't work on the new ones. but oh well. I will just have to remember not to use that setting with this game. Sorry it took so long to get back to you btw.

I think I found the auto fractional setting now. It's "EFBScale = x", isn't it? I tried to use several numbers but I still can't get past
the Invalid Read. I guess you must've done something else besides setting the graphics.

Ummm... I just switched around some settings and now the Invalid Read was gone and Dolphin didn't crash! But now I don't know what I did.

I'm sorry! I had the panic handlers off and thought it's gone. Well, that was stupid.

I'm still talking about paper mario ttyd, I fixed it by switching auto fractional to something else. I havent gotten around to testing FFCC yet, (been busy with an OS assignment for class, making a screen saver for Linux Debian, still don't understand dolphins code at all though, or id try to fix the problem myself).

Right click the game in the gamelist, click game properties, check - "Enable MMU" so that it is a checkmark.

Already did that and tested paper mario ttyd (I have yet to test FFCC).
When using auto fractional + MMU, the game crashes with no panic alerts.
When not using auto fractional (mmu still enabled), no panic alerts, and no save corruption.
Without MMU enabled, as long as I don't use auto fractional, I can save fine, and don't receive any panic alerts. Auto fractional is not a issue with older builds such as build 530.

Okay, well, I think it's time we remove fractional IR then.

I think that's a good idea, auto fractional sometimes has unintended side effects with games, like pokemon XD for instance, I've never seen it break games like this though.

It's a consequence of more accurate emulation in other areas, namely, the memory map.

It's unfortunate this happens, but, I've been looking for a good reason to kill it.