Final Fantasy VII Cutscene Glitches

[alpachino]

I was curious as to if anyone has experienced video cutscene glitches while playing Final Fantasy VII. So far I've experienced 2 glitched cutscenes while playing disc 1. I didn't grab a savestate of the first one because I thought it was a one-off incident. It happened when leaving Shinra HQ in the vehicles and jumping on the highway right before the mini game starts.

The second glitched cutscene (that I did get a savestate and picture of) happened in the story telling portion where Cloud is telling a story about when him, Tifa and Sepiroth left the village to go to the mako reactor in the mountains. I've attached the savestate which I saved right before the cutscene and the image of what the glitch looked like on my TV.

I'm playing the game with no cheats, no mods, no turbo, no 2x, no romhacks, etc. Playing with Hblank and Vblank both on, using a 1080p TV using a mister with digital io board. Besides the glitched cutscenes, all other video and audio performance is spot-on with no issues.

Note: the cutscene was saved in savestate slot 2. Attached the savestate and a picture of the glitched cutscene.

[AngelicLiver]

I'm finding the same issue with the Redump CHD version too using your savestate.

SHA256: 5b528a3d562d64e21fff7138e583c8ae33a93667e29f7e91a8defba5e173740e
MD5: 1ad4fa2736e62a91c5ea542fd62c0394

[Edit] I vaguely remember this being fixed in the past so perhaps there has been some unintended regression?

[FPGAzumSpass]

Cannot find any version where this worked, but then somebody must have seen it before? Maybe the savestate is already broken?

edit: the MDEC decompression tables in the savestate are corrupt. Do you may have a savegame(memcard) near that situation?

[alpachino]

So my last in game memcard save was a good ways back from that point in the game. I loaded it up and played to the point of the glitch and the cutscene worked perfectly with no issues. I also checked another save state I had made like 5 mins before that glitched cutscene, and that save state also glitches at the cutscene. Any reasons as to how my save states became corrupted? I super appreciate all the help.

[FPGAzumSpass]

Sorry, i don't know why it happened.
It could be the savestate got corrupted or there was a bug leading to the corrupt mdec state and it carry on if the game never boots fresh.

Hard to guess what the reason really was...all i can say is that i asked in discord and several people reported that it worked without issues for them when they played it, last one some weeks ago.

Due to the nature of when the problem happens and when it can be noticed, it's hard to guess.
I could add some MDEC corruption detection that runs the whole time, so you don't have to wait for a FMV to see when it's broken, but even that only makes sense if it's at least halfway reproducible.

My current guess is from the nature of how the MDEC works, one CD sector might be corrupt from a previous FMV, leading to not decoding a frame, but instead overwriting the MDEC tables, which then carries on, as the game usually only writes them when booting the disc.

[alpachino]

Thanks for the detailed info, I was just wondering. Its not a huge deal, I'll just use the memcard saves for this play through. Thanks for all of your help and you too AngelicLiver.