VisualBoyAdvance: Final Fantasy V Advance Slowdown & .SA1 Problem
Greetings. Long time member, first time poster.
My Problem's a simple one: I was attempting to play Final Fantasy V Advance on the VisualBoyAdvance v1.6 and experiencing significant slowdown during gameplay. Specifically, right as you enter the pirate hideout at the start of the game. Naturally, I sought a more up to date version of the emulator, as I had been sitting on v1.6 for who knows how long, in hopes of solving my problem.
Unfortunately I've now encountered something entirely different: While attempting to test both v1.7.2 & v1.8.0 with the same Final Fantasy V ROM, downloaded from EmuParadise, every time I attempted to save or load a state my Windows 7 Aero theme would crash and the emulator would bug out, running slower than normal. Curious, as if I manage to play to the pirate hideout in either emulator version I no longer experience slowdown, but the moment I save state, or load the ROM again after the .SA1 file is written, my theme and emulator go bonkers.
VBA v1.6, which writes standard .SAV files, does not incur such problems. After testing the emulators with a variety of other ROMs, including Final Fantasy's 4&6, I've come to the conclusion that the problem lies in some sort of compatibility issue with the .SA1 save files and the .SG1 save state files. No matter the ROM, and on either VBA v1.7.2 or v1.8.0, as soon as either file is written, the crashing starts. Disabling Aero solves the crashing issues and the emulator runs fine, for now, but I still find this all very strange. No emulator I have ever used has behaved in such a manner before.
In summation, a few questions:
1.) Has anyone else experienced a similar problem? Desktop themes crashing when using VBA v1.7.2/v1.8.0?
2.) If so, is there some manner to fix said problem? Disabling Aero is acceptable but if there's something in the emulator I can tweak to fix it, all the better.
3.) Concerning FFVA's slowdown issue: Does anyone know how well, on average, the ROM runs on VBA v1.8.0? It works now, but am I to expect slowdown in the future? Is the ROM just not completely compatible with modern emulators?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Emulator: VisualBoyAdvance version 1.8.0 stable build.
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
CPU: AMD FX 6100 6-core
GFX: ATI Radeon HD 6970
RAM: 8GB Patriot 1600 DDR3
