sound skips in GB emulation

[midget35]

Hello all. This is my first post, though it is on a problem I have had for a few years...

It regards GBx emulation. I find that in any game I load, the sound will stutter every 30sec-1 minute or so. It only does so for a split second, and the rest of the emulation seems fine.

This sound skipping happens throughout any game. I have run VBA on two Pentium computers and both have this problem.

Strangely- this stuttering does not happen with GBA games.

Has this issue been reported before? Does anyone else have this problem and know how to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also- is actual gb/gbc/sgb emulation still in development, or is all attention now aimed at gba emulation?

Many thanks again,

Regards

*Edit: If I need to include more spec/VBA config info please let me know. The skipping seems to decrease when I de-activate DDraw, but graphics suffer badly. Please help me out! thx

[ViperXtreme]

whats your system specification and what GBA emu are you usin? the stutterin seems to be the cause of slowdown,in which the cpu cant fully emulate a GBA at full speed.

[midget35]

VirtualBoy Advance 1.8.0 beta. Current PC is 2.66GHz, Pentium 4, Sony Vaio system. Is it likely to be performance related? 1964 (N64), and MAME Neo Geo / KI games run perfectly.

I am AMAZED no one else has replied to this thread. What are the odds of trying this emu out on two systems and having this issue both times? It must be more widespread. Thanks for any help.

[ViperXtreme]

whats your video config? are you using any special video filter such as hq2x? how about frame skip? is the emulation always 90-100% ? (on the title bar)

[midget35]

Graphics NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 VRAM 64MB

No filters used generaly (but when i do performance is identical)
Frame Skip=0. Changing frame skip makes no difference to performance.

The emu speed is always 97-100%.

Strange, isn't it!?

[ViperXtreme]

pretty strange indeed, how's the performance on D3D or the OpenGL framebuffer? did you try to delete the vba.ini file to reset all the configs?

[midget35]

Well, I just played through DKL, and within 4 minutes there were 5 blips. These sound blips are so subtle that I'm starting to wonder if other users simply HAVEN'T noticed them.

I spent quite a few hours playing through with various modes just now, and can confirm that these blips do not occur with OpenGL or D3D in Win or full screen.

It only occus with Direct Draw, regardless if vsync is on/off. The other graphics modes don't give me the fluidity of DDraw, so that's the one I always use.

I would urge anyone reading this post to please play through gb / super gb games with DDraw and listen out for these tiny blips. Just play through for 5 mins or so and make a note of frequency of occurence.

I don't know much about the technical side, but I'm just trying to help.

Thanks, again, for your continued support Viper.

ps. Viper- do you mean the vba cfg file (instead of ini)?

*Edit: I've noticed that with GBA emulation, the % is always 98-100. With GBX emulation, however, the % will drop more (97-95). This seems to be when the blips occur. Has the GBX engine got different timing, or is it more cpu intensive??

[Mighty Tor]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that there are some issues with Creative Sound Blaster cards/drivers. I had originally read that it was issues with the SB Live cards but I've got an audigy and noticed stutters and other sound hiccups and blips while emulation was at or near 100%. To the best of my efforts my drivers do all seem to be up to date. I haven't done too much with GBx emulation so I can't say how my performance was with that, but I was having the issues primarily with GBA games. I dropped back to version 1.7.0 of VBA and the sound stutters went away. So it might be caused by something that was introduced since that version that has caused some conflicts with some configurations and sound cards. Right now I'm running WinXP on an Athlon XP2000+, GF4 Ti4400, with the Audigy gamer card. Unless there are things that you want to run that only work in versions after 1.7.0 I'd say drop back if the sound stutters are as annoying to you as they were to me.

[ShadowFX]

You guys are not the only ones experiencing this. I have the exact same thing with 1.8.0 and even 1.7.2 did that way back then. My system also has an SB Live! 5.1 type of card. Triple Buffering on, Frameskip 0 and no VSync. Both GB and GBA have this problem. Can't remember really when this all started but I have almost used all version of VBA up until now. All my drivers are up to date as usual.

I am confident that Forgotten can explain why this happens (I hope).

[midget35]

Yeah. I've been eperiencing this problem for over 3 years on two systems (as stated). very strange. Forgotten- pls help!!

[Forgotten]

There is nothing I can say that will help. If you have tried both with Old Sound synchronization checked and unchecked, that's all I can suggest for now. If you can compile the code, you can try to see why the sound sync code is not working with your card.

[Kirby]

I'm assuming midget35 that you use a Sound Blaster Live or Audigy card

Try this patch I have been using ever since I bought my Live! 5.1 card...I had a similar problem with different programs before, and this patch did the trick for me