Sound is choppy with MAME 0.147 and ROMs 1.47

[Major Mame]

Pardon if this has already been addressed,

Are other users of MAME 0.147 having issues of choppy sounds/repeats, etc.? 
Running XP with a Pentium 3, and 1 gig of RAM.

The sound is choppy with any game running, and I have already changed audio sample rate, no improvement.

Major Mame

 

[Major Mame]

Is anyone using MAME 0.147 and NOT having choppy sound issues?

Major MAME

[brad808]

Yes most people run it fine. It's almost certainly because your running it on a pentium 3. If you aren't willing to upgrade the computer then you should try a much older version of mame.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

[Major Mame]

I had started this topic on the MALA frontend forum, there is a user on there with a similar sound issue with 0.147 and running a Pentium 4.  Do you think MAME 0.147 is too much for a Pentium 4 to handle?
The other computer I am setting up has an AMD CPU from around 2004 and running XP Pro.  I plan to verify if the sound issue goes away with that computer.  I had the Pentium 3 tower hanging around the house, and it will wind up out in the garage with the arcade cab.  I don't want to go buy another computer/assemble another just for this.
It is funny to read old posts, people writing "...maybe when XP comes out, it will take care of this choppy/repeat sound issue..."
What version of MAME are you using, and which front end?
Realistically, what are the min. specs to run 0.147, with MALA, and ROMs 1.47?
I was going to order the PS/2 iPac encoder.
Thanks for the post.

[MacGyver]

I have an extremely fast i7 running on an SSD and my audio was choppy and stuttering too on 147 and 148, on things like Mario Bros no less, it turned out to be video settings in my mame.ini.  Also note that if you have your main mame.ini set to "writeini" then settings made in there won't affect any games you have already ran once (unless you delete the old .ini for those ones first).  I'll post the relevant settings when I get home, unless someone does it first.

[MacGyver]

Here are the relevant settings, I'm sure that not all of them are the culprit, but these work for me and look the way I want, so I leave them alone.

Code: [Select]


#
# CORE SOUND OPTIONS
#
sound                     1
samplerate                48000
samples                   1
volume                    0


#
# WINDOWS PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
#
priority                  0
multithreading            0
numprocessors             4
profile                   0
bench                     0

#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     d3d
numscreens                1
window                    0
maximize                  1
keepaspect                1
prescale                  1
waitvsync                 0
syncrefresh               1
menu                      1

#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
hwstretch                 0

#
# DIRECT3D-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
d3dversion                9
filter                    0


#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#
triplebuffer              1
switchres                 0
I know you can change "keepaspect                1" to 0 and the sound will stay the same because I use that setting for horizontal games.

Not saying these are great or perfect, just that with mine set this way, my sound issues went away.  Perhaps an expert could interject and make them better for the right reasons.

[Major Mame]

Thanks MacGyver.  I made the changes tonight, still have the audio repeats/choppy sound.  Under "Windows Performance Options, the setting was "1", and you had "4".  Does that setting deal with how many cores a CPU has?  this is a Pent 3, so would a setting of "1" be fine anyway?

The version of D3D is 8, so I had changed it from "9" to "8" previously, no improvement anyway.

++++You had mentioned a "writeini" setting, where is that?

One last thing, when MaLa launches, there is a message of "MaLa exe-Entry Point Not Found  WMCreate reader could not be located in WMV core.DLL",  then I just hit enter and it continues on.

Maybe MAME version 1.46 would be a better option for this computer?

[MacGyver]

Yep the 4 is because I have a quad core. Did you install directx 9 as well as change the setting?
The writeini settings are right here in the mame.ini

Code: [Select]

#
# CORE CONFIGURATION OPTIONS
#
readconfig                1
writeconfig               0
Some people had had success with setting the samplerate to 22100 instead of 48000.

Code: [Select]

#
# CORE SOUND OPTIONS
#
sound                     1
samplerate                22100
samples                   1
volume                    0Also, did you check that the sound was choppy on a game you haven't ran yet?
Confirm also that you don't already have a per-game ini in the ini folder as in "mario.ini".  If you do, then any ini changes you are testing in the main "mame.ini" are not being applied to previously ran games. 
I would set the "writeini" setting to 0 in the main "mame.ini" file, and delete any per-game.ini's first, then try making setting changes in mame.ini.

I don't run Mala, so I can't really help there.

[Major Mame]

I put the sample rate back to 22100, no change.

Verified that read config is set to "1", and
Writeconfig is "0"

I could not locate the "per-game.ini"

What front-end are you using?

Still using D3D version 8, maybe that is the problem?  Do you know if MAME was written with the intent of using D3D 9, or at least MAME 1.47 needs D3D ver. 9?  I plan to try version 9, and if there is no improvement, the plan is to move on to a more new computer.