syncaudio setting

[oliver]

Hello.

Lately, I have been experiencing sound wobble while running games like batsugun or sf3 third strike after updating groovymame to newer versions.
This morning, I checked which groovymame version started to show this and could identify this started happening on version 0.232, while 0.229 was running perfectly.
The wobble is not very noticeable, but can be annoying.

I stumbled accross this post http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,166561.0.html by pure coincidence
And then looked at the changelog that explains there was a new syncaudio setting introduced in 0.232 with a comment about sound wobble issues from Calamity.

Turns out setting this to 0 in mame.ini fixes my sound wobble issue on releases after 0.229.
Since I am running groovymame on a free/old but still fast i5 2400 based HP elite 8200 that has no problem keeping up with emulation as shown by the task manager, it looks like the default setting kinda breaks me.

Is there a reason why I should keep this setting enabled?

Thanks.

[haynor666]

I recently updated groovymame to latest version and the best option for me was completly re-generate configs (ini, cfg etc.)

Maybe you could try put latest groovymame in different directory, re-generate configs and change only in ini roms directory for a start.

[oliver]

Whenever I update, I use the entire folder coming with the new release, including the ini. I only update the rom path and the ctrlr definition in the ini, the reset i leave it as is untouched.

[haynor666]

What I did was put new version in separate and empty directory and run groovymame -cc there. After this I started changing ini file.

[oliver]

I am not talking about an ini file problem. My mame.ini is correct for the version i run.
I am saying that after groovymame 0.229, the syncaudio option was introduced and is set to 1 in mame.ini by default (and yes I have it in the .ini), but I need to set it to 0 otherwise it leads to a few sound/music wobbles while playing.
Prior to version 0.229, the setting was not available, syncaudio was still enabled, but is not causing sound issues.

[haynor666]

Look at my inis fro groovymame 243.

[oliver]

You have audiosync on. Whats your CPU? Maybe you have not noticed but on my i5 2400 the issue is definitively there.
Run sf3 thrid strike, and you can hear the music pitch lowering for a short instant at the start of the ORO stage. It comes back from time to time in the game, like once at every stage.. If i set audiosync 0, the issue goes away and the music plays perfectly in rythm.

[haynor666]

It's G3258 overclocked to 4,3 GHz

Your processor in PassMark score has Single Thread Rating - 1580 points. Mine have about 2500 points in Single Thread Rating (when overclocked).

What games appear to be a problem?

[oliver]

Street fighter 3 third strike and Batsugun are the ones showing the issue the most noticeably. They are also the ones I know the sound tracks the best.
I have tried some more games, neogeo/snk are ok, SF3 2nd gen is ok, many more are just fine.

[Calamity]

The "syncaudio" or "soundsync" has been there since the beginning, always activated. It just appeared as an option a few versions ago, to be able to avoid the issues described here.

In old versions, previous to the existence of fame delay, the emulation speed was assumed to be perfectly constant, so syncaudio was a good compromise to deal with situations where the speed was slightly (or greatly) off 100%, provided it was a constant value. This tipically happened when running vertical games such as 1942 or galaga on a horizontal monitor. The pitch was lowered as a trade-off.

Now, since the introduction of frame delay, it's become common to have "erratic" speed rates, even if just in a few situations. These speed drops cause annoying pitch variations. If these cases are common, it's a better compromise to dissociate audio from video, and just maybe just cope with an sporadic sample underrun that will probably pass unperceived.

Other sources of these speed fluctuations may be the actual apis used for timing in C++, that might be changing their behaviour over time and provide bad measurements on certain hardware. This would explain some appearently random speed flutuations on otherwise perfectly capable hardware.

For all these reasons I think nowadays it's better to leave syncaudio disabled. You'll just notice crackling when speed can't follow the original like with vertical games on horizontal monitor and progressive modes, that you can bypass by lowering -syncrefresh_tolerance.