Laggy sound

[Canoe513]

My cabinet is all but done!! (I just need a monitor) I was testing out my system with my desktop monitor and ran into an annoyance. MAME runs at about 85% which is playable and enjoyable however the sound is real choppy. I am running onboard sound and wonder if that is the problem. My emulators run great on it but for some reason the MAME is not.

[krick]

What version of MAME are you running?
What build of MAME are you running?
What operating system?
32 or 64 bit?
How fast is your CPU?
How much memory?
What game (or games) are giving you problems?

[Canoe513]

I am running MAME .139. My system is Intel Celeron 340 2.93GHz, 32 bit, 256MB of memory, 512 MB Ram, and I have an ATI Radeon 9550 Video card

[BobA]

CPU is a bit slow a dual core would be better and you need more memory for sure.

[krick]

For a cabinet with an arcade monitor, try CabMAME or GroovyMAME (what I use) and use the "SoundSync" option to smooth out the sound.

[Canoe513]

Ok I got more memory ordered and I will try a different front end. Thanks for the help, hopefully I can get out there and enjoy all my hard work soon.

[lilshawn]

make sure your sound isn't using any shared resources (IRQ's DMA's etc)

having shared resources can cause stuttering like what you describe.

CPU is a bit slow a dual core would be better and you need more memory for sure.

i concur, more is definitely better, you don't have to go crazy. i was running alright with a 2.2ghz athlon 64 with 1.5gb ram and a radeon 9550 videocard.

using all onboard stuff sucks the power out of your CPU for sure. if your using onboard stuff, consider using cards to get some of the load off the CPU

[Canoe513]

Ok so I just put my new RAM in (now running 3 sticks of 512) and it helped out my video problem, however my sound is still laggy as hell. I am almost to the point of  getting a sound card, but I really don't want to put any more money into it. Is there any way I can do some adjustments or anything?? (I should also say that MGalaxy is my front end and it is the only program I am having the sound trouble with. NES Genesis and SNES work just fine.)

[lilshawn]

run a game and then ctrl+alt+del...

mame should have most of the CPU load

see if mGalaxy is using CPU % when it's in the background. it shouldn't be... but if it runs animations of screenshots or video,(and still doing so in the background) then it's an issue with the program and you will have to take it up with the mGalaxy developers.

mGalaxy looks relatively new, it likely still has bugs. report the issue to them and see what happens. maybe they have dealt with this issue before.

[Canoe513]

Ok so I went and opend MGalaxy and ran a game. I opened task manager and saw that MAME was taking 87 percent or so. However I noticed that with Task manager open and in the foreground, the sound worked with no lag at all. As soon as I minimized or closed Task Manager, the sound went to ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- again. MGalaxy was not taking up any resources.

[DrumAnBass]

Another thing that can help is set MAME sound to run at 22khz instead of the default 44khz. Did the trick for me.

Also be aware that older versions of Mame tend to use less CPU resources and might make it sound fine at 44khz. Try Mame .103 or so.

[Canoe513]

Went and bought a sound card for 6 bucks.....my MAME works perfectly. Thanks for all your help

[lilshawn]