Liberation crash when entering bar vital to the first mission

[JemyM]

Tried with a vanilla CD32 configuration using WinUAE 2.3.3.

Issue: Trying to enter a bar that seems to be vital to finishing the first mission instantly crashes the game in v2.02-2.00c (1994-04-08) and v2.00c/v2.00c (1994-01-26), but not in v2.00b/v2.00 (1993-12-08) or v2.00-1.92 (1993-11-25).

The bar is called "Huw's Pool Rooms".
It's located at 10 Paneizen Promenade in the Gamma sector.
(Gamma Sector is the eastern sector of the game and Paneizen Promenade is placed in the southwestern part of the Gamma Sector).

A savefile right outside the place can be downloaded here. Also see this thread for maps. The place is marked in red in this map.

[Toni Wilen]

Need real CD32 test. Could be a game bug or possibly it does fully support transferring saves between game versions.

Does it crash if you first start a new game?

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Need real CD32 test. Could be a game bug or possibly it does fully support transferring saves between game versions.

Does it crash if you first start a new game?

Yes, it crashes if I start a new game and go directly to that location.
Since it's a bar you first have to rest 1 hour for the front door to open by removing a droid's head then click the lightswitch beneath it.

I tried a couple of tweaks like running the "more compatible" setting but no change. It could be a bad dump floating around.

I was able to finish the first mission by swapping from v2.02-2.00c to v2.00b/v2.00 just when entering that location, then when I got back outside I swapped back to v2.02-2.00c for the reminder of the game.

[JemyM]

Another peculiar issue. I will try to research this futher; for some reason Liberation keeps rejecting the nvrom. A certain way to get the following error seem to be to saving the game the first thing you do (to CD32 Bat-Ram: ) then enter the City Records Office right in front of you, exit and save again, you get an error message that your Save game is too large to fit. At this point you can no longer save your game at all and you cannot load the game either (no savegames found). Restart the emulator and suddenly you can load your older saves just fine. The tip to leave to another city zone or use Ram-Reset do not help. But even after passing this stage the game seem to reject the nvrom by itself after playing awhile.

If you do this without Cycle-Exact the game crashes instead.

Update: After much testing I have reached the conclusion that if you simply save twice in a single game, your save will be corrupted. One way to avoid it to get corrupted is to save your game and then load the game you just saved. You can now save again, but you much reload again after you do.

Update 2: After even more testing I have found that this happens only in v2.02-2.00c (1994-04-08), not in v2.00c/v2.00c (1994-01-26), v2.00b/v2.00 (1993-12-08) or v2.00-1.92 (1993-11-25).

[JemyM]

I analysed the content of v2.02-2.00c and v2.00b/v2.00 and found something interesting, the dates and filesizes suggest that v2.02-2.00c have an older date.

File: "captiveII", v2.02-2.00c = Date: 1992-02-05 15:50, Size: 245*628 bytes
File: "captiveII", v2.00c-2.00c = Date: 1994-01-26 16:52, Size: 249*856 bytes
File: "PlotGen", v2.02-2.00c = Date: 1992-02-05 15:50, Size: 16*384 bytes
File: "PlotGen", v2.00c-2.00c = Date: 1994-01-04 00:33, Size: 16*384 bytes

2.00b-2.00 and v2.00-1.92 have older files.

But opening CaptiveII in notepad gives the following:
$VER: Liberation : Ratt V2.02 : Wyvern V2.00c : © 1993 ( The Byte Engineers. The rights of Antony Crowther and Ross Goodley to be identified as the authors of this program are hereby asserted. : Friday 08-Apr-94 09:35:08 )
$VER: Liberation : Ratt V2.00c : Wyvern V2.00c : © 1993 ( The Byte Engineers. The rights of Antony Crowther and Ross Goodley to be identified as the authors of this program are hereby asserted. : Wednesday 26-Jan-94 12:34:35 )