Emulator

Oh, and I tried both the US and EU version to see if there were differences, but nope.

And I tried running at 1x res, since I read in another bug report that it could fix FIFO problems, but here it doesn't fix the freezing.

The freezing is related to the Dual Core option, and happens on all video setting, DX9,11, and OGL.

Skidau are you sure it is fixed? This is an old issue as stated, not a latest regression. The game would become unstable especially if it didn't run at it's full normal speed, which is easy to reproduce if you play the game pressing tab, sooner rather than later it will freeze.

To the op: try the sync gpu setting, it gives much better performance in this game than what disabling dual core would give and perhaps it fixes the freezing.

I'll test this new version but nope, synch gpu in the game settings did nothing to fix the freezing.

Nope, not fixed.

For some reason the performance seems better, so the freezing happens slightly less frequently, but still happens.

Saving the game using the quickstate a few times produces the freeze consistently.

That makes performance far more stuttery, and I got a freeze like 20 seconds into the game, so earlier than usual (likely because performance is worse).

As I said, the only thing that consistently seems to fix it is the Dual Core option being disabled. I think I was able to get the freezing even with the sound disabled.

Bad dump maybe? Check against redump.org.

Nope.

CRC-32: a8e18c76
MD4: 681c106517b78d5992ec9c3b0bcd6493
MD5: bd814992f1e39d4147c775ff8b32d022
SHA-1: 30ee1d7777fe51bcd7c4deeb867651d5b6e96e41

Try a new game without using save states. Save states are unreliable btw in general. Here sync gpu fixes it using the latest rev to be frank.

I always test without save states, saving states are just a way to trigger the freezing quickly.

Something happened here? I tested the 4.0-330 and it looks like framerate is MUCH better.

The game would be absolutely playable if it didn't freeze like 5-10 seconds. I was only able to test the introduction (that previously ran much slower) by juggling save states.

So nothing can be done to synch those damn cores?

It seems this has changed something: http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/source/detail?r=b863e40677710f2d53cae8aedfe450b4215562d3

The emulator is a bit more resilient, but it still freezes. If before it was every 10 seconds, now it's every 50. Especially easy to trigger by simply trying to save state, it almost always causes a freeze.

Playing it in dc-netplay branch (https://de.dolphin-emu.org/download/list/dc-netplay/1/?cr=de) fixed this for me.
Played for a few hours without any freeze so far.

Dualcore Netplay Branch seems to affect a lot of games that sync GPU affects. Interesting?

Yes, this is true. That build solves the freezes even for me.

But it's also a fair bit slower. Is it due to different code or just because it's compiled differently, or not optimized, or just a few commits behind?

If this bug was solved it would be a good idea to integrate it on the main build...

Can a dev look into this?

The build has a fairly low compatibility rate and a ton of other problems that will prevent it from being merged at this time.

From time to time I check if new versions improve the situation.

Nope. It freezes as usual, and the performance seems considerably worse than the version I pointed out in my Nov 8 message.

The same happens for the two Zeldas I sometime test: Twilight and Windwaker.

abalienostats, would you please test if turning on Dolphin movie recording prevents the game from freezing?

From the Dolphin, start Skies of Arcadia. Once the game has started, stop the game, and then from the Dolphin menu, select Emulation > Start Recording. Now you can start playing, checking if the game freezes.

Same problem here, only happens on Direct3D and in my case it will usually recover from the freeze in a few seconds on its own, but still kind of annoying. Sometimes can take as much as 30 seconds or more but exiting fullscreen tends to make it recover if needed. Disabling dual core seemed to fix it as mentioned.