Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure Loads the Music Too Fast

[vorvek]

I was playing this game in real hardware, but loading it through a PSIO and found out that the musical segments where not synchronised properly, so I gave the MiSTer a try. It actually runs slightly better, but still far from perfect. Easiest way to see it is with the song "Evil Queen", where both the beginning and the ending should have flashes sync'd with the music, while instead this happens:



As you can see, there's some weird sound right at the very beginning, and when the music starts it runs one flash too early (around 1 second). In real hardware with a PSIO the song finishes before the last three flashes, so it's even worse. Sadly my PSX has a dying laser lens, so I can't really record how it should actually look, but thanks to the magic of editing, I can give you something close:

[vorvek]

Nevermind, this seems to be an issue with the English version of the song. The Japanese song works fine. I managed to load the song from the disc, and the first flashes aren't synchronised in English, but they are synchronised in Japanese (you can switch languages in the menu). The song loses sync over time, but that might as well be my console.

I don't know why this happens, as the music is the same for both the English and the Japanese version of the song, and only the lyrics change. It doesn't seem as if any of the songs takes longer to start, so it must be part of the game code. There are a couple of moments during the song where the sprites seem to stop for a moment, to catch up, I assume, but by the end it seems to be always desync'd.