Experiencing random crashes? Use MP3!

After some debugging -using the info I mentioned the other day- some game that used to crash "randomly", I've found that all the crashes I could reproduce were related to Tremor (the library used to play OGG files) and in particular to oggpack_readinit. I believe this problem arises more on games with multiple sound sources playing at once, and doesn't seem to appear in simpler games with only one or two sound channels.
This error might well be related to this other bug or even this other one.

I'm not really sure I'll be able to fix this anytime soon, but I've made some simple tests with MP3 playback and they seem to work much better; the interpreter doesn't seem to crash anymore and I believe that both bugs mentioned above might also go away. If this is true, I'll update the transcode_music scripts so that they recode&resample your music to MP3 by default.

Just one note: You will only be able to play what smpeg can: MPEG-1 - Layer III sound files (the simplest/oldest kind of MP3 available), but hopefully the transcoding script will do all the hard work converting your files so that you don't have to.

Hope this solves stability problems, in case you found'em.

Happy coding! :)

Send me photos of your crashes so I can fix them!

I just found this article on the wiibrew site. It explains how to debug that ugly -but useful- crash messages the PPC CPU inside your Wii dumps when bgdi crashes.
I don't own a USB Gekko device (which is the preferred debugging method) but it should help during debugging nonetheless. Thanks, devkitpro guys!

So, if you find your Wii crashes when running BennuGD games, please send me a photo of the screen where I can read the text, and possibly the source code for your game and a little explanation or what your code was doing when it crashed.

This will help create more stable builds and might eventually help BennuGD upstream, too. So thanks for your help!