Sound glitches when playing game

I recently installed WinUAE v1.4.2a after having not used WinUAE v1.3 for several months. However, now when I try to play games, the sound starts to go crackly after 10-20 seconds, in both windowed mode, and fullscreen mode. I have tried removing all configurations and replacing them with newer ones, and changing the buffer size, to no avail. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Ironclaw]

Try with "Fastest possible, but maintain chipset timing".

That has already been set

[Toni Wilen]

What configuration? (AGA? JIT? CPU?) What games? PC specs? (always include names!) Using fastest possible usually means non-disk games and not A500 games but I hate guessing..

Edit: Check "SND%" meter too. Compare it to previous WinUAE version. There should be big difference.

CPU: 68020, 24-bit addressing, More Compatable, Fastest possible
Chipset: AGA, Faster RTG
Sound Emulation: Emulated, 100% accurate, Automatic switching

Games tested & confirmed: Assassin, Cannon Fodder, Fire Force (setup for A500), The Clue! (AGA), Rodland, Rainbow Islands

I can get the PC specs easily enough, but I'll need to know which ones are essential. Here's what I'll give you so far though. If you need any more, just say.

CPU: Intel Celeron 2.5GHz
GFX card: HIS Radeon X1650 Pro 512 MB
RAM: 640 MB (128 MB DDR, 512 MB DDR)
Sound card: Onboard, C-Media Wave Device
Hard Drives: Western Digital 40GB ATA/IDE, Seagate Barracuda 300GB ATA/IDE

Finaly, where do I find the SND% meter?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Keiko Hiraoka

Finaly, where do I find the SND% meter?

Leftmost "on screen led" ("SND: xx%" in windowed mode, next to CPU: xx%)

Cheers, the meter looks to go below -50%, sometimes close to -200%. I have yet to compare this to the previous version, but I will update when I do, and I doubt the fact that it goes so low is a good thing anyway.

A little thing I have noticed; starting in fullscreen mode, switching to windowed mode, and switching back to fullscreen tends to fix the problem. Any idea why this is?

[Toni Wilen]

Do they work properly in A500-mode? (A500 games in "wrong" configuration isn't really supported, somtimes something unsupported works, sometimes it may not work..)

Does latest beta have same problem? Could you attach both winuaelog.txt and winuaebootlog.txt? (tick logging option in misc-panel, play until sound problem happens, play few more minutes and exit winuae) thanks.

[Dic_Ray]

Dear Toni,

I have the same problem like "Keiko Hiraoka". When I load PPHammer at the first screen - a CRYSTAL intro - the SND meter is at -99 and the sound gets very choppy. Later in the game everything sounds well. I attached my configuration and the requested logfiles.

In my mind, WinUAE is great beside the timing critical parts. So will it ever be realized to get the same experience as hardware amiga produce? An answer to this question from Jens Schönfeld is "NO" and thatswhy he is realizing his CloneA prototype, which is absolutely exact also in timing critical parts.

Can you or at least would you like to win this competion against a real hardware solution with you great software?

I'm very interested in you answers.

Kind regards
Dic_Ray

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Dic_Ray

In my mind, WinUAE is great beside the timing critical parts. .

You are confusing emulation<>host interface and emulation internal timing.

This is easy to confirm by doing video or audio recording with internal recording system. (only in A500-mode, it can mess up "fastest possible" modes). If you have perfect output (even if real-time display or sound is crappy), it is not internal emulation problem.

Internally 95% of things are timed correctly. Getting the output (video and sound) "out" in sync from emulation is the problem due to PC side.

Some things are really different in PC world (like vsync), different drivers, different CPU speed.. (and this makes it pointless to do PCI-card-style Amiga hardware, you would still have same interfacing problems without DIRECT connection to 50Hz or 100Hz display)

Some things are easier in hardware, some are easier software and as usual, you can't have both

Biggest problem is that I CAN'T DUPLICATE ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS. Very difficult to fix. Every PC and Windows versions seems to do things slightly differently and emulation is very different compared to games, it needs near real-time audio and video output.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Dic_Ray

I have the same problem like "Keiko Hiraoka". When I load PPHammer at the first screen - a CRYSTAL intro - the SND meter is at -99 and the sound gets very choppy. Later in the game everything sounds well. I attached my configuration and the requested logfiles.

I am not so sure this is same problem. (Keiko said same happens in windowed and I think your problem only happens when vsync is enabled?)

What does CPU% show? It it ever gets larger than 100%, sound will get choppy because there is not enough processing power.

Does it work without vsync or in windowed? Vsync can cause problems easily because it is difficult to do in PC world. (most display drivers busy-wait when waiting for vsync... yeah, don't ask..)

[Dic_Ray]

I am not so sure this is same problem. (Keiko said same happens in windowed and I think your problem only happens when vsync is enabled?)

Does it work without vsync or in windowed? Vsync can cause problems easily because it is difficult to do in PC world. (most display drivers busy-wait when waiting for vsync... yeah, don't ask..)

The choppy sound problem occurs everytime at this intro in window, fullscreen or fullscreen+vsysnc mode.

What does CPU% show? It it ever gets larger than 100%, sound will get choppy because there is not enough processing power.

At this intro it shows even more. The CPU meter up 146 % and FPS goes down to 35 Fps. So I guess you are right. My Athlon XP 1800+ with 1533 MHz is to slow for emulating a Amiga 500 with 7MHz. I have to realize this.


Btw what specs does you development station has? Please could you take the PPHammer.adf from the zone and test it with your machine?

[Ironclaw]

You comp IS powerful enough... heck!, even a twice as slow comp would do it, I think... it's all about settings..... I have a crappy slow PC myself.. and with some settings, CPU usage could be like 40%, while with other settings CPU usage of the same game could be 100+%...

Try activating Filter: Null filter.... and activate chipset: immediate blitter (not cycle exact).. those 2 are speed up alternatives... but shouldn't be needed...

If playing a game like PP hammer, don't use JIT or AGA, or fastest possible and stuff like that.

And what is this with vsync I see in so many threads??.. I never use it, and those time I have, to see what it could do, I havn't noticed ANY difference.. not in scrolling or anything... so it's always off, for me.



Or it's just your PC which is set up wrongly.. like no gfx drivers for your card etc .

ps: havn't read all posts.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Dic_Ray

At this intro it shows even more. The CPU meter up 146 % and FPS goes down to 35 Fps. So I guess you are right. My Athlon XP 1800+ with 1533 MHz is to slow for emulating a Amiga 500 with 7MHz. I have to realize this.

Your CPU is fast enough (and more) except in special cases like this. Try without sound first but I am quite sure it does not help much.

Copper color effects need lots of CPU power, normally emulation is line-by-line but mid-screen color changes (and other custom registers) force cycle-by-cycle mode which is very expensive. There is no other way or result would be really crappy..

I only care about accuracy in A500 mode, playability is only a bonus

(and my reply to your last comment: "You can have your money back". Do not take this seriously.)

Btw what specs does you development station has? Please could you take the PPHammer.adf from the zone and test it with your machine?

"too fast". E6600 (Intel Core Duo2), overclocked to 3.33GHz (2.4GHz original), 4G RAM, mainboard is GA-965P-DQ6, 8800GTX (was ATI Radeon 1900XT few weeks ago, no difference in WinUAE), using on board sound (crappy Realtek but it has DD/DTS realtime encoding) Vista Ultimate 64-bit. SATA harddrives and SATA DVD R/W.

PP hammer cracktro: about 16% without CE, 25% with cycle-exact.

[Coagulus]

Isn't the onboard C-Media sound a similar or identical sound to the AC97 sound which is known to not work too well with WinUAE? I have C-Media onboard but have soundcards lying around which I intend to put in to alleviate this prob.

[rsn8887]

Originally Posted by Ironclaw

And what is this with vsync I see in so many threads??.. I never use it, and those time I have, to see what it could do, I havn't noticed ANY difference.. not in scrolling or anything... so it's always off, for me.

afaik vsync "on" and 50 Hz (alternatively: 100 Hz) for PAL and 60 Hz for NTSC is the only way to get perfectly smooth scrolling in WinUAE without hickups, e.g. it forces your pc to display each amiga frame exactly once (or twice for 100 Hz) like a real Amiga display would. Vsync forces WinUAE to never "update a frame in mid-scan", which could create screen-tearing during scrolling. Screen-tearing was very prevalent in old dos games, it looks like a part of the screen is "lagging behind" another part of the screen during scrolling.

I guess in your case, it might be that your gfx-card is set up to "force" vsync on, and you are already set to 60 Hz, so you will have perfect scrolling anyways. However, I don't think this really guarantees perfect scrolling always, as WinUAE will be less anal about timing of frames if its own Vsync option is off. So occasionally you should still get a bit of choppiness in scrolling still.

Vsync _is_ very important IMO. For any emulator in fact.

[Ironclaw]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

afaik vsync "on" and 50 Hz (alternatively: 100 Hz) for PAL and 60 Hz for NTSC is the only way to get perfectly smooth scrolling in WinUAE without hickups, e.g. it forces your pc to display each amiga frame exactly once (or twice for 100 Hz) like a real Amiga display would. Vsync forces WinUAE to never "update a frame in mid-scan", which could create screen-tearing during scrolling. Screen-tearing was very prevalent in old dos games, it looks like a part of the screen is "lagging behind" another part of the screen during scrolling.

I guess in your case, it might be that your gfx-card is set up to "force" vsync on, and you are already set to 60 Hz, so you will have perfect scrolling anyways. However, I don't think this really guarantees perfect scrolling always, as WinUAE will be less anal about timing of frames if its own Vsync option is off. So occasionally you should still get a bit of choppiness in scrolling still.

Vsync _is_ very important IMO. For any emulator in fact.

Ehm, all I understood about all that was the word in bold.



Kidding of course :P.

[turrican3]

with 150 hz it's always good for me.
no hickups and smooth scrolling.

[turrican3]

i have a question for you TONI:
which impact has the graphic card ?
Because every body speak about cpu!
and what about gpu?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by turrican3

i have a question for you TONI:
which impact has the graphic card ?
Because every body speak about cpu!
and what about gpu?

It has minimal impact except in special cases which are

- D3D/OpenGL filter (+new filters that use shaders, not in winuae yet)
- video recording without filter enabled

Non-3D hardware emulators need only raw framebuffer write speed.