So I dug up my old Loom CD, then used this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=536748 that was on ubuntu.com to convert the audio track to mp3 then I tried to play it on the Wii and found the loading times to be HORRENDOUS. It was virtually impossible to play it. It took a couple minutes for the title screen to come up, and about a minute to examine each item.

HELP! What did I do wrong?

   

ScummVM has to determine where in the rather large audio file to play from. Apparently that's slow for MP3 files on some platforms. I'm told it's faster with Ogg Vorbis (and FLAC?), but I don't know if that is any help with the Wii version of ScummVM.

   

Are you playing it off an SD card?

   

@mr_nick666: Yes, I am.

@ekitorbjorn: Do you know which out of ogg or flac is faster for loading? Thanks.

   

I use ogg for all audio compression, works better than mp3 in most cases.

   

@bossk: Thanks, I'll try ripping the CDDA tracks to ogg and see if it works better.

   

quote:

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Originally posted by TheBigCW

@ekitorbjorn: Do you know which out of ogg or flac is faster for loading? Thanks.

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I've been pained by this too actually, as loom is basicially THE scumm game i care about.

I've tried with ogg, but it's still too much, it gets desynched with conversations which is really annoying.

EDIT: And i found it somewhat more annoying now that i've tried broken sword, and i know that they uee differing methods of playing the voices, but it's mildly annoying that the newer game which is more technically demading runs better then the older one. Rant end

   

quote:

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Originally posted by link6616
but it's mildly annoying that the newer game which is more technically demading runs better then the older one

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I just tried my loom cd version with flac encoded audio tracks. the game comes up instantly, there are no noticable lags on the voice-overs, and dialogs and playing notes look fine too.

what scummvm version did you use?
where do you load scummvm from?
on which media is the loom game located?

   

quote:

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Originally posted by dhewg
I just tried my loom cd version with flac encoded audio tracks. the game comes up instantly, there are no noticable lags on the voice-overs, and dialogs and playing notes look fine too.

what scummvm version did you use?
where do you load scummvm from?
on which media is the loom game located?

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Overall, all audio formats should be fine (apart from a known issue with ogg files converted by some older encoders).
The bottleneck we have on the Wii is the I/O throughput, meaning ScummVM can't read the data it wants off SD fast enough. So a rule of thumb is: the smaller the files, the less the Wii has to read - thus performing better

In your case, I'd try:
1) grab a current snapshot (SD I/O got better) and just try that without modifying any loom files: http://buildbot.scummvm.org/snapshots/1.0.0/wii-1.0.0-latest.tar.bz2
2) try another SD card
3) scan/defrag your current SD card

if nothing helps, you really might try reencoding the files, but I really hope 1) is all you have to do to enjoy loom on Wii

   

The reason CMI and other games with speech play more smoothly is because they don't use CD audio for speech. Every sound in Loom is read from CD audio. It only makes sense that things would go out of sync when ths Wii has problems decoding so much data (the audio track for Loom is huge!).

That said, I've experienced slowdowns with MP3 frequently on the Wii with various games on various releases. Never had a problem with OGGs yet (except with running games from USB on the latest SVNs, has that been fixed yet incidentally?). I avoid MP3s like plague whenever possible anyway because they're not near as efficient as OGGs. For everything not just ScummVM.

   

I thought I'd give this a try but I had no problems.
I even copied and pasted the syntax from one of the posts who had problems.
It started instantly. Everything was in sync.
I actually tried this as I played Lost In Time on my Wii recently which is similar in that it has one huge CD audio track. I thought it might cause problems on Wii but it didn't.
The version of ScummVM I used I'd just downloaded from the Buildbot (bottom of Downloads page for those that can't find it). r43242

   

Same experience here, never experienced the problem. I can only recommend to try a snapshot. If the problem still exists, report back and we can look into it.

And no, I couldn't yet pinpoint the USB performance problem :\