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[BUG]: Sound effects trigger very inconsistently in Gift by Cryo (SLES-50296) #14640

Description

@SuperSajuuk

Describe the Bug

When playing Gift by Cryo, despite sound effects being turned up to 100% (or really just being audible), there's a very high chance that the relevant sound effects that should play don't play. For example, if you spam the attack button (Square) 10 times in-game, the chances are that just 1 of those will trigger the sound effect to be played (you could also be unlucky and have it never play).

This affects all SFX (excluding music) in the game, and as the game has several requirements to hear sound effects to do things (such as cackling laughter from an enemy that needs a quick reaction to toggle a power-up), not having consistent playback of SFX makes for a harder than necessary experience (alongside making the game quite quiet outside of music).

The PCSX2 wiki page for this game notes that this has been a bug since v1.7.5564 [that would suggest that any previous version like 1.6 doesn't have this bug], but hasn't been fixed because the game is very obscure and so most people won't be aware of the bug happening: https://wiki.pcsx2.net/index.php/Gift#Known_Issues

Reproduction Steps

  1. There isn't any real steps to reproduce this: simply launch the game, start a new game from the main menu and play it, you will find most sound effects don't play. You can compare the emulator behaviour against YouTube videos of the game captured from console hardware, where the SFX plays normally.

Expected Behavior

All sound effects play as intended.

PCSX2 Revision

v2.6.3 (I'm on stable branch, but given my earlier note that this has been a problem since an earlier version, I don't think this matters much as the bug is still there).

Operating System

Windows 10 (64bit)

If Linux - Specify Distro

No response

CPU

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K @ 3.60 GHz

GPU

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER

GS Settings

Not particularly pertinent to the reported issue, but will note here: when launching the game (after the PlayStation 2 logo screen), there are four FMV video clips (three covering Cryo Interactive, Ekosystem and Wanadoo; plus one showing the games' logo). If the game is launched using anything other than Software Renderer, these videos will have regular flickering, due to the videos not playing correctly. This can be avoided by either launching the game using Software Renderer, or setting a per-game override to force software renderer for the FMV's (needs the advanced dialog button to be available)

Emulation Settings

N/A (this is a bug in the sound system: even if defaults are used, the bug will still trigger).

GS Window Screenshots

No response

Logs & Dumps

N/A: no logs are generated when the sound effects fail to play, suggesting the issue is either not output to the provided log, or there's some other bug that causes no error to be raised about the sound effects.

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