Sound in MAME

[brianoneill]

Hi,

I've got a Athlon 2.2 with 512 DDR RAM and Geforce ti4200 128MB and Creative SB 4.1 audio.

When I run MAME I cannot set the sound higher than 22050 sample rate as any higher and I get really bad crackling effect every few seconds. It is driving me nuts

Also, MK series of games ? Anyone figured out a way to get the best sound out of these without turning sound down ?

Regards.

[AlanS17]

What games have the problem? What version of Windows do you have? On-board, isa, or pci audio? Have you checked recent posts of this nature?

[brianoneill]

Hi,

Pretty much ALL games run under MAME. I've got Win98SE SB PCI 4.1.

I've checked for other posts but did not find any.

Cheers.

[AlanS17]

Does running at half sample rate bother you that much? Most games won't be terribly affected by it. Over 99% of games use mono sound and one or 2 tiny speakers. If running at half sample rate fixes the problem for you, then I would think that the only real problem would be learning to live with an acceptable solution.

I can't imagine what your problem would be for such a nice machine. Make sure you turn off any fancy sound options for your audio card like fancy speaker array configurations. You don't need them. In fact, I would remove all the software that came with the sound card and just keep the drivers.

The only hole I can see in your setup is Win98. It's not the best at handling resources. Is there any particular reason you chose that OS? For a PC of that caliber I think WinXP would be a lear choice for an OS. If you do decide to keep that OS I would first suggest removing half the RAM. Win98 seems to actually slow down iff it has TOO much RAM in it. (I've experienced it myself as have others on this board.)

[brianoneill]

thanx for your help.

I guess 22050 should be good enough

[Odonadon]

Hi,

Pretty much ALL games run under MAME. I've got Win98SE SB PCI 4.1.

I've checked for other posts but did not find any.

Cheers.

You didn't check hard enough.  There have been tons of posts regarding this issue - some by me  .  The root cause seems to be Windows - if you try DOS MAME, you'll find you won't have this problem.  I would love it if someone could fix this so we can run our games with high quality sound.  But I believe the original sound for most (?) games is outputted at 22050 anyway.

Odonadon

[cdbrown]

Can I ask why you run 98SE with such a good PC.  You'd be much better off running XP.  Also is there some problem with the memory limitation of 98SE being around 512MB.  I have Athlon 1800, onboard sound, 512MB DDR on XP and there are only a few games that have sound problems - midway mainly.  Also don't forget the audio latency options you can change.