Emulator

And I wanted to add that compared to last year the emulator now runs really well on the 4.0-864. The whole intro sequence could be quite stuttery and with some lag on my hardware, but now that I tested it again it ran basically flawless.

So performance is really good. The problem are those constant crashes.

I used to have a different issue with this game:
http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=5928

The difference is now that Skies of Arcadia has freezes like the one described in that old bug for Xenoblade: only the game freezes, but you can close it since the emulator doesn't crash.

Whereas now Xenoblade crashes the whole emulator. But I still suspect these crashes are related

Believe me, this hardware is old but rock solid. I have no temperature problems, I play all the time with equally intensive emulators for hours. I played just before Guild Wars 2 WvW with hundreds of players onscreen for about two hours. I've recently played DmC, Tomb Raider and Borderlands 2. I never have issues.

The problem here happens in just a couple of minutes, most of the times.

Dolphin has always given me these crashes and freezes, one way or another. It has happened for years now. So believe me if I say it's something in the code (or maybe some configuration, or driver, or whatever, but not stability or hardware).

By the way, is there a way to test this game with the netplay build? Trying wouldn't harm, but I have that issue with the controls not working.

Dualcore Netplay branch does not have support for Wiimotes at all.

And this is a single player game.

Dualcore Netplay branch fixes quite a few games with dualcore problems even on single player.

I guess there are some old builds in the branch before Wiimote support was broken if you want to dig around and see if it helps you.

Anyway, testing more.

I can somewhat make the crash reproducible if there's some program in the background lagging the game, or saving state repeatedly.

Before, I ran around with the limiter off for about half an hour without being able to make it crash, so it's not my hardware.

Instead I can reproduce the crash right away, for example spinning the camera and saving states one after another. This produces that weird polygon warp and stuttering that I was seeing just a couple of seconds before a crash happened. It usually takes 10 seconds or so to fix itself and go back to normal, but sometimes it can't seem to figure out a way, so it lags and stutters till it crashes.

So IT IS a kind of desynch thing. In normal conditions and with only the game running, it can happen after 30 minutes as it can happen after 5. It's just random. If instead there's a program in the background or if the game is running slowly, then this crash is more likely to happen.

It's a problem I had with Dolphin for years, basically. I remember that on Zelda Windwaker you only needed just a small lag and the sound would die. That bug was apparently fixed, but it seems I still get freezes (like in Skies of Arcadia, fixed with the netplay build), or random crashes like in Xenoblade. They always happen when there's a framerate drop. Sometimes the emulator figures it out and goes back to normal, but some other time it can't seem to recover and just crashes.

I've tested Twilight Princess too. On the 4.0-864 sometimes some sound effects turn off and I get rather bad performance overall (whereas these last version instead run much faster with Xenoblade). I also get freezes (FPS 0 VPS 50 100%) like I used to get in Xenoblade:
http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=5928

Even in this case the Netplay build fixes completely these problems. No sound cut off, no freezes or crashes, and even much better performance.

Is there a reason why the multicore code of that branch can't be ported on the main? Because I'm suspecting it will fix ALL my issues. Especially if I can keep the same performance of the latest commit in Xenoblade.