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Wii Zelda Skyward Sword game crash bug: A guide to prevent and fix the Song of the Hero glitch



I had a crash at the exact time too, (in the video) but retrying right after that I had no issues. I guess it was just some random crash. This whole issue seems invalid to me as most people are playing through the game just fine.


You'll find yourself in the Title Screen and you can play as Link. You'll be Link with the starting clothes, no items and you can only press A and B or else it'll crash the game. Beware to not use the Bird Statues on Skyloft to prevent glitches or deletion of your saved game. Also if you pickup something like a heart, you get back all the rupees that you've in the save file you used for the BIT.




How to avoid the Wii Zelda Skyward Sword game crash bug



December 6, 2011 perivision Leave a comment I normally do not write about games I have not played, but this one is on my list of games to check out. And before I even have a chance to play it, a (major?) bug has been discovered that if you hit it, will not only crash the Zelda game but will corrupt your saved game file as well. Ouch. However, there is a way around it as reported via VentureBeat. So if you have Zelda Skyward Sword, and you are the tl:dr type, here is the take away..


No, seems justified to me. If it didn't work without an expansion pack then why not include it. Even it didn't actually need it at least the game wouldn't crash... Which would've cause more problems later on.


It's funny when I look at this article. I don't really recall the N64 Expansion Pak being advertised when they released Donkey Kong 64 back in late 1999. Although, I can imagine the part about the game glitching up or crashing without the N64 Expansion Pak inserted into the Nintendo 64 was true back then because if I recall right, I think Nintendo or RARE said the Expansion Pak was needed to enjoy most of the whole game.


@ULTRA-64 my friend I think Nintendo games scare other gaming consoles.this year a new 3d Mario,mario kart wii u,smash bros. 2 zeldas,pikmin 3 .plus the new games we don't know about yet that we will find out on june11th


Interesting info. I'm not surprised they chose to handle it the way they did, and I'm not particularly upset because A) they bundled the expansion pack with the game, and B) based on his description, the game did make use of the extra RAM, it's just that a mode where it wasn't required would have been included if they could have ironed out the crash bug.


It'd be interesting to get one's hands on the original source code and see if the bug could be identified. Not very likely, I know, but the game is plenty old now and the Internet is a magical place full of wonderfully talented people with nothing better to do, so Nintendo/Rare should really think about giving it a shot. My best guess is one or more of the scaled-down resources causing the crash, but that's obviously a shot in the dark.


Upon looking at the actual changelog, however, something became readily apparent: this wasn't going to be just a Progress Report; this was going to be a MEGA Progress Report. The long rumored time era of developers merging everything at once had finally come to pass. We have graphical fixes for Super Mario Galaxy and Luigi's Mansion, crash fixes for Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (AArch64), and new features that make playing games more pleasant! And about AArch64, there are a litany of optimizations and fixes that will change things across most of the library.


Our current way of handling the rare cases where icache/dcache matter is by either patching the game, or massaging things into working well enough to avoid user-facing bugs. To help with the cause, Pokechu22 added support to disable Dolphin's icache emulation on a per-game basis. This isn't really a performance measure as it doesn't affect performance, but it does affect the behavior of several games. Turning off the JIT version of Dolphin's icache emulation fixes hangs in several games.


This particular change has been frozen in carbonite for two years. Way back then, Stenzek found a way to fix up Dolphin enough to run Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike without crashing. Now you may remember that the game was working for the Dolphin 5.0 release, but shortly afterwards Dolphin's GPU timings got slightly better and the game stopped working. Stenzek's solution to fix the regression was simple and made sense. Only problem? It required more GPU syncing. He wasn't comfortable merging it because of the potential for performance regressions and sought to find another solution.


This change can also be called 5.0-14257 - Developers Learn Not to F!#* with Bounding Box Part 1 with the other parts coming up next. It started out so innocently, with a simple issue report claiming that Ultimate Spider-Man was crashing randomly during a certain stage. Usually reports like this in less common games are simply a setting issue or Dual Core being Dual Core. So, JMC47 leapt into action assuming this would be a fairly conventional bug. While he had Ultimate Spider-Man, he hadn't really played it outside of making sure it ran in Dolphin. With his patented setting to fix 99% of the crashes in Dolphin (Dual Core disabled) he ran the game using the savefile the user provided expecting nothing bad to happen.


A game crashing on Single Core is like the Bat Signal to developers that something is actually wrong. But JMC47 wasn't convinced that this was a legitimate bug yet. He tried using interpreter, software renderer, and even wondered if the savefile itself had put the game into an illegal state. The only way to confirm that was to transfer the savefile to his console and test it from there. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened: Tales of Symphonia has a game crashing bug with the Pink Pearl Ring Quest if you do things in an order the game doesn't expect.


The results on console weren't quite as interesting. The game didn't crash on repeated playthroughs, even as he tried to replicate the crash conditions perfectly. In fact, without having to deal with the rampant crashing, JMC47 started playing deeper into the level, learning the game mechanics, and got up to the mission boss! After confirming the game definitely doesn't crash on console, he returned to Dolphin and tried again there. The game didn't crash. He was able to play through the entire level multiple times and die on the boss. He guessed that some setting he had changed must have fixed it and he didn't notice before moving over to test on console. However, even returning everything to their original settings didn't affect the situation.


With no crash, it became harder to figure out what was going on. So, he kept playing the game until he got to the mission boss in Dolphin and even defeated the boss this time around. Thinking that maybe he would never be able to solve this bug, he set down the controller to let the cutscene play out... and the game crashed. Relief and anger hit all at once, but at least there was a guaranteed crash that could be investigated. But what had caused the earlier crashes to disappear?


It turns out it wasn't a setting or anything in Dolphin, it was the player. By getting better at the game, JMC47 spent less time in each zone of the city. He had inadverently been playing well enough that the crash didn't have a chance to manifest. By pure happenstance, he left the game running at the start of the mission and it eventually crashed on its own when he turned the camera. Considering that was much easier than playing through the level each time, that became the new test case for the crash. A bisect was in order.


It turns out that the game was using Bounding Box to do some kind of occlusion effect! It paints a 3D decals onto floors or walls, and then uses Bounding Box to remove the original geometry that would be covering it up. With this, they are able to dynamically punch craters into the ground or walls wherever they want! Seeing this cleared up literally all the mysteries about why the game was crashing and lined up with all of the listed test cases on the Dolphin Wiki.


The problem is accessibility. This feature does not work in Nintendont, Freeloader, or any other method of making your Wii region free. However, it did work in Dolphin ever since GBA GCN support was added with VBA-M. This comes with a caveat - it only worked for the NTSC version of the game. The PAL and JP versions of the game would crash... if you had Full MMU enabled. More curiously, if you had Full MMU disabled, it would load the GBA emulator with no game. This was notable because it's the same failure state as the backup loaders. While this issue has been known for some time, copies of Pokemon Box routinely go for over $1,500 on eBay, so we couldn't look into it due to the extreme cost of getting multiple versions of this exceedingly rare game. But thankfully, an enthusiast with both the PAL and JP versions of the game showed up to provide testing and debug data.


In practice, when we changed Dolphin to mask HTABORG, Pokemon Box instantly crashed because some important file structures had been overwritten. Since the game works on console, we know that real hardware cannot possibly be masking the HTABORG value.


Repeatedly getting this error message will ultimately result in the corruption of the PS3 system start up files and other important software, basically killing your PS3. Once the crashes start happening, it's probably a good idea to uninstall the patch and start a new, patch-free game. Sure, you've probably wasted dozens of hours game time, but how bad can it be? You have to play more Skyrim. Boo-hoo.


If you complete the desert section of the quest first and talk to the Goron twice, the game locks out completion of the other two portions, halting all progress of the game. How do you avoid this? Just talk to the Goron guy once. Alternatively, don't do the desert section of the quest first. 2ff7e9595c


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