MAME sound problems in GameEX

[Dublin London]

I've had this problem since I've been using Game Ex. When I play games like Donkey Kong and Mappy (among others) the music messes up a bit. Kind of like a lag skip in it. The games play fine though. If I just launch MameUI32 to play the game, the music is fine. I use the default Game Ex settings to run Mame version .123. Games like Street Fighter II and more run great though. Seems to be the older ones. I'll provide any other info needed to get this fixed up. Thanks!

[bkenobi]

A lot of times the sound problem can be fixed by removing the -tripplebuffer argument from the MAME command line.

[Dublin London]

A lot of times the sound problem can be fixed by removing the -tripplebuffer argument from the MAME command line.

This seems to have fixed it. I only tried Donkey Kong, but that was better. I'll try more later. Thank you for your help.

[Stu1983]

A lot of times the sound problem can be fixed by removing the -tripplebuffer argument from the MAME command line.

I must give this a try too, I alwasys assumed it was something wrong with the driver for donkey kong and had never looked into the stuttering sound but I know I have tripple buffering enabled so disable it when I get home and see how plays

Is there any advantage of having tripple buffering enabled for other games?

Stu

[bkenobi]

-tripplebuffer is used to create 3 locations to write screens to. As far as I know, you have:

1) The frame on the screen

2) The next frame to be displayed

3) The frame being written to

If you have tripple buffer turned off, you will only have 2 frames available. As a result, if the PC isn't fast enough or the game slows down for whatever reason, you will get tearing because the next frame will not have been written completely yet. The down side to using this extra buffer is that it takes more power from the PC which could affect other system resources. For instance, if you have an onboard sound card like pretty much everyone does these days, it may not have enough CPU cycles to keep up and may stutter. One option is to use a dedicated sound card if you REAAAAAAALLY want to use tripple buffer.

This is as I understand it. If I missed something or misrepresented, could someone please correct me.

[Stu1983]

-tripplebuffer is used to create 3 locations to write screens to. As far as I know, you have:

1) The frame on the screen

2) The next frame to be displayed

3) The frame being written to

If you have tripple buffer turned off, you will only have 2 frames available. As a result, if the PC isn't fast enough or the game slows down for whatever reason, you will get tearing because the next frame will not have been written completely yet. The down side to using this extra buffer is that it takes more power from the PC which could affect other system resources. For instance, if you have an onboard sound card like pretty much everyone does these days, it may not have enough CPU cycles to keep up and may stutter. One option is to use a dedicated sound card if you REAAAAAAALLY want to use tripple buffer.

This is as I understand it. If I missed something or misrepresented, could someone please correct me.

Thanks for the info, disabling triple buffering worked a treat, my processor is fast enough (core2duo wolfdale 3.16) but I've on board sound so that must be where the problem is

Cheers

Stu

[Dublin London]

Yep. They all sound great now.

I know you said it had to do with the onboard sound, but I had the problem using my desktop PC (Q6600, 2 gigs of ram, 7950 GX2, and the Fatal1ty X-Fi sound card) as well. Doesn't matter though, since it's fixed. Thanks!

[bkenobi]

Interesting. With quad core and a dedicated sound card, I didn't expect there to be a problem. Guess that means that -tripplebuffer isn't really a good option to use!

Are you running a 64-bit compile of MAME? I wonder if that would help when using -tripplebuffer.

[Dublin London]

Interesting. With quad core and a dedicated sound card, I didn't expect there to be a problem. Guess that means that -tripplebuffer isn't really a good option to use!

Are you running a 64-bit compile of MAME? I wonder if that would help when using -tripplebuffer.

No. 32 bit and I'm running Windows XP home on both. Maybe you're right about the 64 bit thing, but I've never used it. Love the feedback of this forum. GameEx is fantastic!

[Tom Speirs]

Interesting. With quad core and a dedicated sound card, I didn't expect there to be a problem. Guess that means that -tripplebuffer isn't really a good option to use!

Are you running a 64-bit compile of MAME? I wonder if that would help when using -tripplebuffer.

I actually think its a long running bug in MAME. I have it turned on on my cab. It works much better when its on if you have an AVGA hooked up to a JPAC, as it doesnt support VSYNC.

I actually use these command line options instead:

-triplebuffer -audio_latency 3 -samplerate 22050

[Stu1983]

I actually use these command line options instead:

-triplebuffer -audio_latency 3 -samplerate 22050

Had a play about with these settings but it seems to me that if I change the sample rate to anything other than the default 48000, my sound goes haywire, must be a per system thing

I also tested keeping triplebuffer turned on, on my other PC which is also dual core E8500 but with a XFI Extreme card and the sound is fine on it, I'm on Vista x64 with a x64 compile of MAME so you could be right bkenobi

Stu