The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

[eddanja]

I just beat this game using 1.1.1.

There are sound problems that appear to be the root cause of crashes. I'll try to explain them from my point of view and include workarounds that got me through the game.

Audio appears to stop randomly after most battles. The audio also appears to always stop after a scripted battle (such as with a boss or with a monster treasure chest). It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen. When audio has stopped, you may notice the following:

1) When you fight another battle, the emulator freezes or crashes after that battle (this doesn't happen all the time)
2) The emulator will freeze during a cut scene.
3) The game will be stuck on a loading screen with a character during area transitions.

Workaround
The workaround that I have found to get me through the game is savestates. When the audio stops, perform a savestate and then load that savestate. The emulator plays all the missed sounds between when the audio stopped and when you made your savestate but it will start playing sound again. This does become a pain as in dungeons, you may find yourself doing this quite a few times.

This workaround also works on the loading screens. If you get a loading screen with a character doing an action, save and load a savestate and it instantly fixed the issue for me.

If there are a lot of sounds that you have missed from when the audio stopped, your emulator will freak out with noise - don't panic.

Why does this happen?
I'm no programmer but from what I can tell, the emulator seems to have a problem loading different background music. When this fails, the emulator stops loading sounds (but I'm guessing it still records that it needs to). When you save and load a savestate, the emulator loads its queue of sounds and is able to rectify itself.

Hopefully this post helps someone who is playing the game or even the devs to apply some fixes to the sound.

The same thing appears to affect The Second Chapter as well.