from another forum:
"for me: Do not use asynchronous SPU.

Long explanation of (what I think) is the problem that causes the freeze:

As you may have noticed, the freeze only happens during those spoken monologues (or scenes alike to those). The programmers used a smart way of determining when to progress to the next scene: They waited for the sound file of the spoken lines to end playing. Now, on a genuine PS Hardware, that's not a problem since CPU and SPU work in sync automatically, they're not affected by emulation delays... now we got emulation and things suffer delays. What happens is that the SPU stutters and jumps and most likely "misses" the point where it has to inform the CPU that it finished playing it's soundfile and that the CPU has to continue loading.

My personal "freeze favourite" was the scene where Arngrim said he would rather kill that knave. It seems that there were actually two seperate soundfiles to be played... that "I got better things to do" one never got to play in async, hence it never ended, hence the scene never progressed.


I'm using Eternal SPU, turning Audio Out Method to Thread solved the freeze problem (and made the playback stuttery like hell

Hope that helps some people here. Note: It won't help if you savestate at the frozen screen and reload there, that train is already gone, you have to load a savestate before the freezehappy part finished. I usually simply smashed my savestate the moment one of these spoken dialogues or monologues started playing."

wonder if something like this can be done or might work for fpsecce