Groovyarcade: Attract mode freezes

[strontium]

I just wrote a response to another thread and wanted to update this one too. Just to frame this, I was having lots of issues with a cabinet I have not fired up for two years and  ended up rolling back to a 2017 version of GA as I was getting AM freezes in all other versions. But the other problem I had with my solution was an old kernel and I had to turn autosync off in order to not see terrible emulation. I couldn't find a solution to these issues and so turned to trying the substing iso which I have to say works amazing. here is the quote from my update to the slow sound thread I started

I want to be clear turning off autosync is not the solution. Like Calamity has clearly said this makes groovymame pointless.

So to update on my situation which I have been working on I have had some success. Long story short turning off auto sync never sat well with me so I downloaded the iso that substring has worked so hard on. And bingo perfect emulation, auto sync is on and working.

I opened another thread about lock ups in attract mode, these were also gone as well as some things I was seeing like black screens when closing a game ( Original Atari StarWars ) for example.

All in all my cabinet was not happy and now thanks to this community it's working on a very recent kernel ( added bonus my wireless card works out the box ) with all the lovely things groovymame gives me.

So to sum up, don't give up, don't turn off auto sync and definitely give @substring excellent iso release a go. 

So yeah attract mode is working and I have no issues any longer so massive thanks to all the guys working on the @substring ISO.

I don't have much time right now to get involved but I may try and get more involved in the substring project iso when I do, I really do think that it's a great way to move forward and collaborate.

[Jimbo]

I replaced the GA stock videos with those from the mame SQ emumovies pack, and I no longer have ANY crashing with attractmode.

So I can only assume AM doesn't like something with how those videos are encoded.

I looked at the video/audio codecs and they seem the same, except the emumovies have the bitrate set when looking at the properties, whereas the stock GA ones don't seem to.  I don't understand enough about video codecs to know if that would be an issue, but swapping them for the emumovies videos for sure solves AM crashing.

[Substring]

Thank you for this very useful tip. So technically speaking, a variable bit rate would be an issue for some people ...

[Jimbo]

No worries, I guess so though!    Thanks again for your work on this GA - it's brilliant.