USB Drives not saving

[fehrard]

Hi guys

The ITG machine (r21 upgrade cab) at my local arcade has a problem with the USB drives. When you play 2 player with 2 USB drives inserted, at the end of the credit it will only save player 1's USB drive. If you play one (or two) player with one USB drive inserted, it'll save on the drive no matter which slot it's inserted in.

It's been like this for as long as I remember, ie I don't remember it ever saving both over the years that I've been playing.

I searched a bit for this issue (and have in the past) and haven't been able to find anything on this issue. Has anybody had this issue before and/or know how to fix it?

Thanks in advance!

edit: Just a thought, is it anything to do with the fact it uses a 2-port USB hub? Which would suck because it'll take a crapload of convincing for the arcade owners to let us fix that for something so minor -_-

[Derkomai]

If this is a hacked cab, there might be too much crap on it to begin with.

The machine at 8 on the Break will only recognize USB drives after the first boot up and then will completely crap out even before we could reach the first song. =/

That might be one possibility.

[fehrard]

The thing I don't understand is it reads both USB drives fine;
- Card scores on the songwheel
- Everything in Editable.ini
- Custom songs from BOTH usbs

And when only plugging in one USB drive (whether it be 1p or 2p) everything works perfectly. It just doesn't save stats to player 2's USB drive if there is one in the player 1 slot at the same time, therefore any screenshots or scores you got during that credit will not save. Friend just told me the USB hub shouldn't be the issue, but I don't know what else it could be. Even if it was, I don't think there's any spare USB slots left that we can try it. I just hope there's something I can do (non-cosmetic) that can resolve this issue!

Yes it's a hacked cab, but I don't remember it ever working.

[rikame]

This is a shot in the dark but if somebody hacked it incorrectly something in the machine may only tell the write function to work once, which would explain why P2 doesn't work IF P1 does. I mean, I don't know what exactly it's running but if you know who hacked it it might help. /maybe/ if you could do a full reset and start from scratch you could get it working.

[darklink87]

The simple response to this problem is that there are simply too many songs on the machine. This builds up the size of the catalog.xml and stats.xml which get saved onto memory cards, and the machine times out before it can save to Player 2's card.

Also the USB hub in front is a 4-port USB 1.1 hub, 2 ports are just blocked from view. No installing a USB 2.0 hub will not make it save faster, the ITG 2 kernel had USB 2.0 capabilities removed for stability. It will however make hacking the cabinet with SLAX 10 times faster since it uses the SLAX kernel. (Learned this the hard way.)

In short, there's really no way around the issue, you just have to deal with it or remove a lot of songs and rebuild your catalog.xml by deleting the old one from the machine profile. You might have delete the stats too, which will nuke the machine scores. (People might not like this.)

Anyways, hope this helps.

[fehrard]

Would you know if changing the machine to oITG would fix the issue? Does oITG deal with score saving in a better manner than r21? Would the "UseCatalogXML" function in oITG fix the issue? The catalog file on my USB drive is 2.4mb which saves every time, so I assume that's 4.8mb less it has to write (plus whatever else it has to do to prepare it) without that function. Why do the USB drives have to have a catalog file anyway? Suppose that's my only other idea haha. Other than that it looks like we'll just have to deal with it. The machine scores have been reset before by mistake (switching the machine off during scores saving) but I'm not aware that it fixed the issue, probably because it wasn't a proper "reset", ie deletion of catalog/stats xml files.

There are currently around 2200 songs on the machine, many of which don't get played. I really want to remove some packs that don't get played but I don't know how many I'll need to remove to get this working, nor would I want a score reset.

That kinda sucks how there isn't really any other way. I figured it was a timing out issue Anyway, at least that clears up my curiosity. Thanks darklink

[8ftmetalhead]

Update on this. We're apparently closer to adding more songs to the machine, and are looking into putting OITG on the cabinet, but most recently we've had to deal with CARD MOUNT ERROR.
I turned up and it was doing it to a friend, it started randomly during his 4th credit. It liked my card fine, and another friend who had a random 16gb kingston around.

Apparently this has been happening for a number of people (it DID do it to my card a few times about 3 days ago) and I'm wondering if perhaps this AND all the other issues are due to a failing USB controller.

I would say the hub is at fault but given that it's almost brand new I somehow don't think that's likely the case.
Equally so working on some drives and not others doesn't seem particularly hub related, since the non working ones didn't work when shifted in and out of the slot slightly (like another machine that had mount errors in another city two weeks back, left my card half in and it read it)

What do you lot think?

[xHitmarkerx]

find out what the mount points are for the p1 card and p2 card. (i.e. the f:/ drive and k:/ drive) make sure you increase the timeout for the machine from the default 5 seconds to 15 seconds so that way it can fully save the catalog.xml data onto the card. i recently made a bug fix for this with an old itg3 theme and it works pretty well on my local arcades upgrade cab. we are running a personally fixed version of oITG alpha 8. i rewrote how it worked and its a hell of a lot faster than even beta 2 or even beta 3 is. but enough about that

i dont know alot about dedicabs, but i do know when the .ini files are messing up everything

if you use a custom theme, make sure the line MemoryCards is set to 1. I noticed when i didnt touch it before that it was set to 0 for some reason. also, if it has a weird subdirectory like itg3 themes do, include that into the importsubdirs line. that got my theme working with cards perfectly. but seeing how we use a usb hub on an upgrade cab, we cant set the p1 and p2 card ports correctly without causing problems with the hub we are using. that shouldnt be a problem with a dedicab though, as it is preset for that type of port layout.

hope this helped. saves should work after this and if you had any signature failed crap, itll fix that too.
best of luck.

[8ftmetalhead]

it's an upgrade.

I got a signature failed error just yesterday but I figured that was because I used it on my OITG setup at home. But then, I didn't save anything with that. It also ignored my editable.

yeah it's not doing so well.
OP (Jamie) will be vacuuming out the machine and boxor hopefully this saturday, since the guy who was NZ's itg guru for years doesn't reckon it's the controller and it hasn't been done for years anyway.

[Elipsis]

find out what the mount points are for the p1 card and p2 card. (i.e. the f:/ drive and k:/ drive) make sure you increase the timeout for the machine from the default 5 seconds to 15 seconds so that way it can fully save the catalog.xml data onto the card.

Where is this timeout value set?

[8ftmetalhead]

the source code I believe.