Yakata: Nightmare Project - Battles do not function, overworld textures don't load on Vulkan renderer

[gooseberry12]

Hello!

First time filing a bug report here so I'm hoping I'm doing it correctly.

Game title: Yakata Nightmare Project (SLPS-01045-7)
Retroarch version: 1.21.0 (it's a bit old, I know)
Beetle PSX HW Version: 0.9.44.1 f339f63
Hardware: Ryzen 9 7900X, GeForce RTX 5080, Windows 10

(This game is a bit of an obscure kusoge that I don't think anyone is lining up to play, but I believe a compatibility report would be beneficial to you nonetheless.)

Issues:

1. [This issue renders the game unplayable] When the game goes into battle mode, it seems to freeze up. The music continues playing, and the characters continue to do their battle idle animations, but no battle actions take place and the battle menu fails to load. Tested on software renderer, Vulkan, OpenGL, with any multitude of options that I could think of---though I guess I didn't mess much with CD load time factors or dynarec. Turning on dynarec plus checking turning dynarec code validation to DMA doesn't help, and I didn't mess with timer options because I have no idea what I should be looking for with that. The game shows correct behavior when tested with Swanstation, so it's not a gigantic game bug.

Beetle PSX Behaviour: it just stays like this forever, nothing else loads.

Expected behaviour tested in Swanstation: the enemy takes a preemptive action, and then the battle UI appears.

This is kind of anecdotal, but I feel that in Beetle PSX it also takes WAY longer for a random battle to trigger than Swanstation. Of course it's a random battle so maybe it doesn't mean anything, but since I only needed to take 5 steps into the dungeon zone to trigger a battle in Swanstation and it took wandering around for three sub-areas in the dungeon zones to trigger one in Beetle PSX, maybe it has to do with something. I don't know, it IS a random battle. I'm just mentioning this in case it's helpful.

2. When played with Vulkan renderer, the overworld textures do not load. This wasn't the case with uhhh, whatever revision of Beetle PSX HW that I was using in January, but now that I finally worked up the energy to make this bug report, it seems to be thing now with the newest version so I'm reporting it as well. Every other function is as much Beetle PSX default as I can remember them, and I've kept them the same as I switched between renderers.

Vulkan renderer behaviour

Software renderer behaviour

These two shots are taken in the same area. You can see the trees and the cliffs in the Vulkan renderer screenshot. IIRC, everything rendered correctly in the build that I was using in January. I'm sorry I can't remember what build it was. I was using a different video card (3080 Ti) in January, if that means anything.

I think that's it with my report for now. Thank you very much for making an excellent emulator! It's my favourite in the Retroarch PSX stuff.