Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones - intermittent freezing in gameplay/battles

[andymcca]

This is an issue on previous compatibility lists for TempGBA and it still persists on my fork.

I suspect it's due to this game running code frequently from its ROM - if we can't allocate the full 16MB or 32MB in PSP memory to store the whole ROM then it has to page in/out from storage and I think this is what causes the freezing glitches. I only have a PSP1000 which can only allocate 8MB as the gamepak buffer. Need someone who has a 2000 or 3000 which should be able to allocate more to verify if this is still an issue on their devices.

[andymcca]

Got to the bottom of this! It's not a PSP1000 issue - it's the 'Update Backup' setting which defaults to 'Auto' in TempGBA (defaults to 'Exit Only' in gpsp-kai)

In Auto mode it will check for and write any changes to the Memory Stick every 10 frames. For most games this is ok but for 'busy' games like FE Sacred Stones this causes glitches as the PSP blocks on writes to the memory stick. So I need to implement a halfway house here - maybe I'll add an extra option for 'Menu and Exit' so that it saves on accessing the menu and on exiting the emulator/loading a new rom.

[JxPv2]

@andymcca solved?