Triple buffering causes micro pauses in some games.

[sean_sk]

Hi Calamity,

Im not exactly sure how to describe what I'm seeing with this problem but I'll do my best.

With my setup I decided it would be best to have triple buffering on in my mame.ini since I find it fixes issues I have with interlaced games and vertical games. I wanted it to be a case of set and forget.

Anyway I noticed it causes regular micro pauses of about half a second to a second apart in games like The Simpsons and NBA Jam. The pauses are really really micro in nature and only affects scrolling and not sound. It seems like the game is not matched to the refresh rate of the monitor. If I turn off triple buffering for those affected games, scrolling is as smooth as silk.

Is this something that can be fixed? I'm running an AVGA on Windows 7 on a generic CRT arcade monitor. Ini is set to d3d mode and using arcade_15 setting.

Thanks.

[Calamity]

Hi sean_skroht,

That's just the way it is, and why we use syncrefresh by default and only enable triple buffering for the games that require it. With triple buffering the emulation is decoupled from the screen refresh, even if it allows tearing free video. That's why you get a constant 100% speed regardless the refresh rate.

[sean_sk]

Ok yeah that makes sense. Thank you for explaining that.

I can see that better results are obtained leaving triple buffering off for most games and, as you say, only turning it on for games that I come across that require it on.

[Sledge]

Is there a way to turn it on ONLY for interlaced games?
I assume you can turn it on through vertical.ini for vertical games.. but what about interlaced... anything for that? Or can it be implemented?

[Calamity]

Is there a way to turn it on ONLY for interlaced games?
I assume you can turn it on through vertical.ini for vertical games.. but what about interlaced... anything for that? Or can it be implemented?

Not implemented, I'm afraid.

However, regarding interlaced games, and the fact that they run at 50% under W7 (W7 rocks doesnt it? ), there are a couple of solutions I believe:

- Enable -video ddraw for those games
- Enable -frame_delay & keep using -video d3d

[Sledge]

Is there a way to turn it on ONLY for interlaced games?
I assume you can turn it on through vertical.ini for vertical games.. but what about interlaced... anything for that? Or can it be implemented?

Not implemented, I'm afraid.

However, regarding interlaced games, and the fact that they run at 50% under W7 (W7 rocks doesnt it? ), there are a couple of solutions I believe:

- Enable -video ddraw for those games
- Enable -frame_delay & keep using -video d3d

But... how do we enable that JUST for interlaced games?
per game basis only?

[Calamity]

But... how do we enable that JUST for interlaced games?
per game basis only?

As I said, you can't. It's not a trivial matter. Ini files are parsed at the very beginning, so even if we could add someting like an "interlaced.ini" thing, GroovyMAME doesn't know which games are going to run on interlaced modes until it calculates it based on your monitor specs. So it's a matter of per game basis I'm afraid.