Sound stuttering in MAME .153 (especially Street Fighter II)

[Benzinbruder]

Hi everybody,

During testing a few different games yesterday I noticed that the sound in Street Fighter II stutters to the point it renders the game "unplayable".
Is this a usual behavior or am I doing something wrong?

My PC is fairly decent and handles most other games I have tried just fine. Could this be triple buffering related?

I have read http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,139817.msg1446334.html#msg1446334]here[/url] that enabling multithreading might to the trick.
Any other suggestions?

There are some occasional sound hiccups in Bubble Bobble and Donkey Kong as well, but it's nowhere near the problems I see with Street Fighter II.

Edit: BTW, I am running the onboard sound of an ASRock H87M!

[dkersten]

I am not gonna go back and look, but I was reading the .154 update notes the other day in prep for doing my own mame build and I swear I saw something on sound with the street fighter games in there.. maybe try a .154 build?

Usually though, stuttering in mame means you don't have enough processing power.  The onboard sound should be more than sufficient, so I wouldn't worry about that. 

[PL1]

Are any background processes bogging down your system? (anti-virus, etc.)


Scott

[BadMouth]

My PC is fairly decent and handles most other games I have tried just fine. Could this be triple buffering related?

Your idea of a decent PC and someone else's idea of a decent PC are probably not the same.
Processor specs might shed more light on the problem.

Are you using HLSL?
If so, the pre-scale setting is a killer.  Try turning HLSL off.  If that fixes the issue, then your problem is the prescale setting.  Go back and try a lower one.
A game that doesn't look any more or less demanding than another can in fact be much more demanding due to things like discrete sound, etc.
I had to turn the prescale down on things like Frogger because of this....and my PC can run NFL Blitz (at low rez with no scaling).

[lamprey]

When in doubt, try a different version of MAME.

I don't mean to seem negative, but it is frustrating how some releases have pretty big performance deltas in certain games. I realize things change and this is all about documented and emulating hardware, blah blah blah. But, still frustrating.

I was doing some testing a while back of some of the more power hungry games like Gauntlet Dark Legacy on my workstation (dual Xeon @2.6GHz, 96GB RAM, GTX 650 ti). And the difference between 0149 (or 0145, I forget) and 0152 was around 20-30% (0152 being slower). On my cabinet, I an still play at 100% speed with 0152 despite the performance dip because I have a fairly decent older CPU (i7 920 @ OC4.4GHz). But, it is curious to see those sorts of deltas between versions.

Then if you throw a different flavor of MAME, like SDLMame, all bets are off. SDLMame is buttery smooth on most things, as I'd expect. But, seemingly, innocuous games like Donkey Kong have terrible sound "stuttering" issues.

[Thenasty]

give this a try and lower the sample rate to 22 instead of 44 for that game.

[mgb]

do you have hlsl enabled by chance?
I thought that will give some stutter issues.