Emulator

This issue is basically an update/replacement for issue 5994

Games Affected

Mario Party 5 - GP5P01: Music Stopping, Permanent Hanging after Events
Mario Party 6 - GP6P01: Music Stopping
Mario Party 7 - GP7E01: Music Stopping, Temporary Hanging after Events, Voices freezing or doubling

AX-HLE has some strange effects on these games. While the effects are definitely related, they have different properties, and can softlock Mario Party 5!

To trigger the glitch, just play 6 - 10 turns on any Mario Party game. Somewhere in that time, music will stop, and then maybe 20ish turns in, voices will start to echo/double play. Along with that, there are various other problems in each game.

Mario Party 5 - When Donkey Kong shows up, Bowser Shows up, Last Five Turns or Chance Time, the game will soft hang. There are likely other scenarios that will trigger it, those are just the ones I noticed.

Mario Party 6 - The game just has the music stop to my knowledge. Throughout 5 hours of testing, never experienced any other problems.

Mario Party 7 - This game has the music stop as well, along with voice echoing problems, or even stopping altogether. Various events, such as Stealing a Star, The Bowser Gauge Filling up, Chain Chomps will cause short hangs, sometimes lasting up to thirty seconds before the game continues normally. Unlike Mario Party 5, the game will continue normally all the way through the end.

This is true in NTSC and PAL versions of the games, and I did try Mario Party 4 as well, but it is completely unaffected by the problems. It plays fine, sounds fine, and does not have any of the hangs complained about in the old HLE.

I did a majority of my testing in 3.5-394 (6645bd6fc685fed5894e4bbb8c323ed4835e1efc), but also checked the 3.5 release and 3.5-78 (ba348c29d7055314957d36d80fd515a5f4bb9a31) and the AX-HLE branch builds. I used my Core i5 760, GTX 470, the games were all full speed and played flawlessly outside of the aforementioned audio issues.

Thanks for [SS] pointing out that Mario Party 7 also had issues, I wasn't planning on testing it because they removed letting all AI play. Longest 4 hours of my life. Also, without the original issue I wouldn't have thought to even test the games at all.