audio crackle on some older games

[pavlov70]

Hello again,

I've noticed that on some older games (Pacman, Galaga, etc) the sound crackles, enough to become distracting. Playing the game directly from the command line, without GameEx in the equation, works just fine. It worked fine on my other pc so I realize it's probably some compatibility issue, but was wondering if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks,

Rob

[Toonces]

Hello again,

I've noticed that on some older games (Pacman, Galaga, etc) the sound crackles, enough to become distracting. Playing the game directly from the command line, without GameEx in the equation, works just fine.  It worked fine on my other pc so I realize it's probably some compatibility issue, but was wondering if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks,

Rob

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi Rob,

I had the same thing happen so I switched to a PCI Soundblaster Live card and there was no difference. It was really noticable with Williams games like Robotron. Tom had said to try lowering the sample rate and play with the sound settings in MAME32 then transfer the settings that worked to MAME.ini. The overall problem is CPU usage taking away from MAME which is probably why it works fine without GameEx in the picture since the CPU usage would naturally be lower without it. What I ended up doing was removing UltraVNC (remote management), turning off the Jukebox and removing the Soundblaster card and going back to the built in AC97 sound. Once I did that, the sound returned to normal. I also went through and eliminated pretty much everything in startup and started going through the optimisation guides for WindowsXP disabling unneeded services, etc. I was able to reinstall UltraVNC so I can manage my machine remotely and have not had the sound problem reappear. I have not yet reenabled the jukebox because it plays whatever it feels like rather than when and what I want. It's probably just me but I haven't quite figured out the proper way to control it so I get what I want. Yet.

What it all seems to boild down to is optimizing WindowsXP (or whatever OS you are using) to be as light as possible so GameEx can get the resources it needs.

Hope this help. Sorry it can't be a simple "turn this on/off" and it will work answer

Toonces

[pavlov70]

Hi Toonces, thanks for the reply. I lowered the sampling rate to 22050, increased the buffer from 1 to 2, and enabled the priority setting in MAME and everything sound great. I think I'll continue to play around with those settings and see if I can bump up the sampling rate a bit more.

[Tom Speirs]

Hi Toonces, thanks for the reply.  I lowered the sampling rate to 22050, increased the buffer from 1 to 2, and enabled the priority setting in MAME and everything sound great. I think I'll continue to play around with those settings and see if I can bump up the sampling rate a bit more.

Couple more things I noticed. Turning off Triple Buffering fixes audio issues in some MAME games. No idea way. I guess resources again or a long standing MAME bug.

Also, I dont want to repeat myself The proper way to test if it is a GameEx issue or not is to select the run last game shortcut from the start menu. This will ensure you run MAME with the SAME cmd settings as GameEx so is impotant.

Thanks,

Tom.

[David R Hilgendorf]

Guys, I did some tshooting on this FROM CMD prompt myself the other day and here are my results.

Audio problems in older games like mspacman, digdug, dkong, galaga seemed to be caused by having wait for Vsync enabled. Once I disabled it I had NO more sound stutter at ANY audio setting from 11025 up to 44100 or with delay of 1 or 2.

However this caused almost all sidescrolling games to "tear" or flicker as one other user wrote in TOPIC.

When I enabled wait for Vsync I had to lower my audio to 11025 with a delay of 3 which prevented sound stutters, BUT caused the audio to be unsycronized. i.e. throw a fireball, wait 1 second then hear Ha-do-ken audio.

So At this point I merely disabled wait for vsync and suffer through the tearing that is involved. Looks like I really need a faster CPU, this does not appear to be an audio problem at all.

As a side note triple buffering and other settings did not seem to impact the framerate or the audio in any noticable way on my config.

-Dave

[pavlov70]

I haven't tried disabling waitVsynch yet, but disabling triplebuffer did the trick for me along with enabling high_priority and setting audio_latency=2. Sampling rate is back up to 44100. I'm very happy with this combination.

Dave - try enabling high_priority. It's off by default and maybe that'll fix your tearing problem. Worth a shot anyway.

[David R Hilgendorf]

I did some more playing around with my Mame Settings, and have not found a perfect solution but here are my observations:

autoframeskip 0 (never)

frameskip 0 (never)

waitvsync 1 (disabled causes even more tearing than triplebuffer 0)

triplebuffer 0 (1 breaks sound in old games, 0 causes slight tearing in scrollers, ultimately requires too much CPU time)

##also note the mame docs state: "Unfortunately, due to some DirectDraw issues,

##this doesn't always work out as well as it should. This is still being investigated.")

window 0 (never)

ddraw 1 (this screws up a lot if disabled)

direct3d 0 (this causes more problems than it solves)

hwstretch 0 (using custom ini files)

# screen <NULL> (not set)

cleanstretch none

resolution auto (using custom ini files)

refresh 0 (never)

scanlines 0 (never)

switchres 1 (always)

switchbpp 1 (always)

maximize 0 (irrelevant, I only run fullscreen)

keepaspect 1 (always)

matchrefresh 1 (doesn't seem to enhance performance, too bad)

syncrefresh 0 (enabled runs mspacman at 300fps!)

throttle 1 (always)

effect none (or why have an arcade monitor?)

screen_aspect 4:3

### Windows misc options ###

high_priority 1 (thanks Pavlov)

### Windows sound options ###

audio_latency 1 (just hurts to much to turn this up)

### Input device options ###

mouse 1 (used as trackball)

lightgun 0 (wish I had the ACT Labs)

dial_device mouse

trackball_device mouse

### Mame CORE sound options ###

samplerate 44100 (I just have to)

samples 1

resamplefilter 1

sound 1

volume 0

skip_disclaimer 1

skip_gameinfo 1

skip_validitychecks 1 (Thanks TOONCES)

[RSAntilles]

If I set up my mouse to be used as trackball like you have does that mean I can play Arkanoid properly coz its useless to control accurately with my joypad.

[pavlov70]

If I set up my mouse to be used as trackball like you have does that mean I can play Arkanoid properly coz its useless to control accurately with my joypad.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes you can. You can just add -mouse as a mame option to enable mouse/trackball support.

[RSAntilles]

Awesome, its working fine now thanks. Aww Ill be on Arkanoid all night now, its 1987 all over again!