sound becomes garbled sometimes during gameplay...is this my speakers or my emu?

[hulkster]

sometimes when i play a game, the sound will be come real garbled, like the speakers are blown out or something.  i dont think they are, because during the game(mame, zsnes, virtuanes, etc.), i will press pause, and then unpause it and the sound will be fine for a while, and then become garbled again a little, then i just pause and unpause again and this acts as like a temporary fix to the sound problem.  

what gives?  is this a speaker problem or are other people having the same problem i am?

[hulkster]

just in case anybody is thinking about giving advice...i just played some music on the speakers (rap with lots of bass) and it works fine, no garbling.  so whats the deal??  is there a setting i need to mess with?  

[ekopp2]

Hulkster -

I don't have the solution, but I can confirm it's not just you. I put mame on my new machine and I'm having the same problem. I've been too busy with cabinet construction to look into it, but it's on my "needs fixing" list.

[AlanS17]

Do you have on board audio or a seperate card? What games does it happen in? Does it happen even on older games? What version of Windows/MAME/emus do you use?

Is there any thing you can tell us that might help us help you?

[hulkster]

i have a sound blaster sound card.  its not one of the audigy's or anything, its just a standard sound blaster card, but it works fine with music and all that.  i think in some games its more noticeable than others.  mortal kombat by far is the worst.  like when you punch somebody the sound that guy makes (after an uppercut) is really garbled, so much so that i dont play the game!  im running win98 SE with Mame32 and Mamewah v954b.  hope that helps

[AlanS17]

I've found that more recent games (like the MK series) tend to get more garbled. I don't know if it will work, but have you tried reducing the audio sample rate? The switch for the command line would be:

-sr 22050 (to cut it in half) or
-sr 11025 (to reduce it to a quarter)

Reducing by half usually has almost no effect on audio quality except for maybe Capcom and some newer games. (This can also help speed up games too.)

I'm not gonna say this is gonna work, but you can try. You can also try to cut back your frame rate:

-fs <number>

Maybe you can get a tradeoff between video and audio.

[paigeoliver]

Also. Try it with some headphones first, to rule out the speakers as a possible suspect.

[hulkster]

I've found that more recent games (like the MK series) tend to get more garbled. I don't know if it will work, but have you tried reducing the audio sample rate? The switch for the command line would be:

-sr 22050 (to cut it in half) or
-sr 11025 (to reduce it to a quarter)

Reducing by half usually has almost no effect on audio quality except for maybe Capcom and some newer games. (This can also help speed up games too.)

I'm not gonna say this is gonna work, but you can try. You can also try to cut back your frame rate:

-fs <number>

Maybe you can get a tradeoff between video and audio.

hmmm, yeah i dont want to sound too stupid, but i dont know where to put those commands in.  what file do i open up to edit?  i have no clue what to do with those commands you just gave me.

[AlanS17]

Well I'm familiar with the garbled sound. I'm still trying to figure out how to get rid of it, myself. Happens with some games more than others. I honestly still haven't figured it out yet. It just doesn't happen very often. It certainly doesn't happen often enough to make a fuss over it. Maybe once in every 50 games.

[Odonadon]

This is a common problem that's been floating around the Software forums for quite some time now.  It happens on both my computers - my main machine, and my cab.  We've pretty much narrowed it down to being a problem with Windows.

If you try MAME in DOS (not a DOS prompt) you will find that you won't have this problem.  But if you want to use mamewah, you're basically screwed as there is no DOS compile.  The other emulators I've chosen to use in my cab have forced me to stay with Windows, so I have to live with the sound problem until I upgrade my hardware

But try out AlanS17's suggestion first.  Reducing sample rate might help fix your problem, or fix it alltogether.

Odonadon

[AlanS17]

Well you would attach to a command line like this:

MAME <rom.zip> -sr 22050

I noticed you use MAME32, though, right?

You've got 2 options. You can use the modified MAME32 line:

MAME32 <rom.zip> -sr 22050 (almost the same)

Or you can edit the mame.ini file. Find the entry for "Sample Rate" in the audio properties and change the number (which should be 44100) to 22050. You should find this file in the same directory as your mame32 executable.

[hulkster]

yeah i started messing around and saw that sample rate thing but wasnt sure if that was it....so what does changing this sample rate do?  does that make my sound quality suck donkey balls?  well i guess it already kinda does, but you know what i mean

[Cisco Kid]

I had that same problem ... especially with Mortal Kombat 2 ... after a few minutes of gameplay ... garbled sound heaven.

I found that with the right sound card  (switched from a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1) and adjusting the volume inside the BIOS to a reasonable level ... not maxed out all the way ... that the garbled sound problem when away all together  

[hulkster]

well i just changed the sound sampling thing to 22050 like you said,and i played mortal kombat.....as far as i know, works great.  one little garble in the sound at one point, but no where near where it was before.  if it happens in another game, ill let you know though.  thanks!

[AlanS17]

You're right about what sampling rate does. It affects audio quality. Think of it like a frame skip for your audio instead of your video except rather than getting choppier when you reduce it it just sort of takes some of the depth out of it.

However, for the majority of games that are just a bunch of beeps and whistles, this makes no difference. Capcom has better audio, but I would venture to guess 99% of arcade games have mono sound, anyways.

[hulkster]

okay, probably the most complicated games i have are like mortal kombat and street fighter, and games like nba jam....oh and while im on that subject...nba jam is lagging real bad.  i have a p3 1.1ghz processor with 512mb SDRAM...is it the game or the computer thats slow.  and if its the game, can i fix the frame rate or something to make it run smoother?

[cdbrown]

A lot of the Midway games require a reasonable PC and some even have sound emulation problems so you'll always get them (NBA Maximum Hangtime is one).  In the newer versions of mame32 there is the audio latency slider which you can play with to see which gives the best results.  

Have you had a look at the frame rate when the sound gets garbled?  I found (with no autoskip) the framerates will slightly drop and then the sound messes up - it's trying to speed up or slow down to match the frame rates and is causes all sorts of audio problems.  By lowering the sample rate you are reducing the load on the cpu and sound card slightly, change the latency one number at a time and see how you go.

[bleakboy]

Hi i get this problem on my CAB Pc, but on my test windows XP Pc the sound is does not have this problem, on my cab i am running Windows 98 and Mamewah

I might change this to XP as on my xp pc this does not happen

[Homebrew]

bleakboy,
       what are the specs of your cab's PC and your other PC(the one with XP on it).  The reason i ask is because part of the reason for the garbling sound is the strain on resources being used during gameplay of some games.  As mentioned the later MK series games require a decent processor to run.  I struggled with this same problem for quite some time myself.  
    I found 2 things that really helped me get rid of the problem.  1st since i'm using XP on my cab, i had to make some adjustments for performance since XP is a resource hog.  Things like turning off the fancy XP graphics and deactiving uneeded services and other programs.  Secondly after doing this, i upgraded to a XP1700+ cpu, and my problem was gone.  People underestimate the amount of resources used by the sound card.    
    As it stands now i have my CPU overclocked to XP2000+ speeds and am running overkill in ram at about at 896MB DDR PC2100. The only game i have sound problems in is Killer Instinct and even there its not bad at all.  My sample rate is still at the default 44100 as well.  I don't consider myself an audiophile, but i could tell the difference when i lowered the sample rate.  This is just my experience.  While it was a minimal difference, it was enough that it bothered me.  Granted you might not a system with specs like mine to get rid of the problem, but will most likely need something higher than the miniumum requirements for those games.  For instance, around 1ghz is needed to run MK3 and UMK3.  Thats the minimum to play the game with decent frame rates.  As a result sound is suffering because all the resources are being used to run the game.
     I'd be interested in hearing the specs of the guys who are having major trouble with this and those who are having just a little trouble.  I suspect that the guys with the most problems have the slower of the systems.  If running windows XP, tweaking that will help.  This has been my experience anyway.

-Kevin

[Dr. J]

Stuff like this has been posted in the software forums.  It seems to be big with midway games like mk2, mk3, nba series.  There are a couple things to be done:
1.  Playing around with the sample rate as mentioned above,
2.  Some people said that the more recent versions of mame fixed it for them, while others said older versions fixed it.  Go figure.
3.  For me it was processing power.  Even though I'm running an AMD 2.2ghz, I found that if I tweaked the advanced options in mame32 (matching refresh rates and stuff) the sound would correct itself.  This is pretty much the same as what homebrew said above, except I'm running win98se.  Maybe in future releases of mame the emulation will be more resource friendly.  

[bleakboy]

Homebrew

My Specs are for my Test (Web Browesing PC) mame, the pc is a

P4 2.4 Ghz
With 1gig of 333DDR Ram
Advance AC97 Audio
80 Gig 7200RPM
Geforce 4 ti4200

on my Mame Cab

AMD 2400 XP +
1Gig of 333DDR Ram
80 Gig 7200RPM
Arcade VGA
SBlaster Live!

Both running XP completely Tweeked, the only think that runs is xp and mamewah everyother service is gone

And i do have some sound issues in KI1 & KI2 but not much, i.e not noticably