Sound Stuttering and D3D vs Ddraw

[Yenome]

I can tell you from experiance that mame has been running KI2 at 100% for a while now and that is on dual core amd. every new mame i get is tested with the MKs and KIs for some odd reason lots of people say KI doesnt run at full speed since like mame 141. so i can say your OS and your CPU are both more than enough to get it to 100% i would say it is a software problem somewhere. to be sure it is not a hardware issue i would remove anything extra and to eliminate sound run mame with -nosound.

[AMDman13]

Thought I'd give everyone an update. Tried many tweaks now, but the sound issues remain. It is from GM running at different speeds. Sometimes slightly too fast sometimes slightly too slow. Even Ms Pacman's sound can be slightly too fast or slow at times.

Things I have tried. All to no avail. Not much improvement one way or the other.
1. Different OS's.. XP 32 Win, Windows 7 and now Windows XP 64.
2. Different versions of drivers for MB (for each OS).
3. Updated to the newest Bios.
4. Different versions of GM.
5. Removed SB Audigy and attempted onboard sound instead.
6. Swithed to liquid cooling for my Mame Cab PC.
7. Upgraded to GM 155 and romset.


I'm at a loss. Calamity suggested GA-64 which I still have not tried.

[krick]

Thought I'd give everyone an update. Tried many tweaks now, but the sound issues remain. It is from GM running at different speeds. Sometimes slightly too fast sometimes slightly too slow. Even Ms Pacman's sound can be slightly too fast or slow at times.

<snip>

I'm at a loss. Calamity suggested GA-64 which I still have not tried.

The speed shouldn't vary wildly between runs unless the computer is under different loads each time.

Could it be a hardware problem with the CPU and/or motherboard?
I know that Intel had issues in the past with SpeedStep throttling and certain CPUs / motherboards.  Maybe there is something similar for AMD stuff.

Could it be a QueryPerformanceCounter type of issue?  More info in this post...
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,135230.msg1447703.html#msg1447703

[Calamity]

Thought I'd give everyone an update. Tried many tweaks now, but the sound issues remain. It is from GM running at different speeds. Sometimes slightly too fast sometimes slightly too slow. Even Ms Pacman's sound can be slightly too fast or slow at times.

So even the same game can run too fast or too slow randomly? That's too odd.

BTW won't you have -frame_delay enabled?

[stellarola]

Is there a speedstep option enabled in your bios? I had a similar issue and turning speedstep off was able to solve my unstable frame rate issue.

Thought I'd give everyone an update. Tried many tweaks now, but the sound issues remain. It is from GM running at different speeds. Sometimes slightly too fast sometimes slightly too slow. Even Ms Pacman's sound can be slightly too fast or slow at times.

Things I have tried. All to no avail. Not much improvement one way or the other.
1. Different OS's.. XP 32 Win, Windows 7 and now Windows XP 64.
2. Different versions of drivers for MB (for each OS).
3. Updated to the newest Bios.
4. Different versions of GM.
5. Removed SB Audigy and attempted onboard sound instead.
6. Swithed to liquid cooling for my Mame Cab PC.
7. Upgraded to GM 155 and romset.


I'm at a loss. Calamity suggested GA-64 which I still have not tried.

[AMDman13]

Its been awhile, but i have made progress with my speed issues. I have finally got it clocked to where I'm pretty happy. I appreciate everyone's help. Really the biggest improvement I received was from compiling my own version of 64bit GM and optimizing it for my AMD. I used Headsoft's Mame Compiler 64 and applied the HS and GM patches.

I also played around with adding the usepmtimer option to windows boot.ini that made little to no difference with my set up. Disabling HPET in bios made things worse. I also tried a combination of the two. Setting Hpet to disabled in bio and usepmtimer in boot.ini etc. etc..

I ended up with not using usepmtimer and keeping HPET enabled in bios.

Here are my results with custom compiled version 64bit GM. Pretty good I think.

[haynor666]

For windows XP HPET should be disabled in BIOS. I know that XP SP3 can somehow use HPET it might be problematic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer  <- See note 4 at the bottom.

[AMDman13]

Thanks haynor666. I went ahead and disabled HPET. I see no difference. Better to be safe then sorry.

[stellarola]

Thanks haynor666. I went ahead and disabled HPET. I see no difference. Better to be safe then sorry.

Are you using any monitor presets in mame.ini? I am using DDRAW btw.

Even running at 4.5ghz I had frame drops/audio stutter when I used MS929 as my preset. When using arcade_15 it was fine.

[Calamity]

Even running at 4.5ghz I had frame drops/audio stutter when I used MS929 as my preset. When using arcade_15 it was fine.

Only difference being the modeline used... it'd be interesting to see which one is used in each case.

[stellarola]

Even running at 4.5ghz I had frame drops/audio stutter when I used MS929 as my preset. When using arcade_15 it was fine.

Only difference being the modeline used... it'd be interesting to see which one is used in each case.

Mind you, this game is VERY CPU intensive. I don't think it's possible to run CV1000 games at 100% without at least 4ghz overclock or close to it. I don't believe I experienced this on anything older.

[Calamity]

Mind you, this game is VERY CPU intensive. I don't think it's possible to run CV1000 games at 100% without at least 4ghz overclock or close to it. I don't believe I experienced this on anything older.

Yeah but the speed percentage bouncing you see in that video is the typical you get when using -frame_delay, even with games that are not CPU intensive.

[haynor666]

Mind you, this game is VERY CPU intensive. I don't think it's possible to run CV1000 games at 100% without at least 4ghz overclock or close to it. I don't believe I experienced this on anything older.

The slowest game in cv1k is mpork and this games works with stable 100% with 4670k with turbo 3,8 GHz. Probably it will work great on overclocked G3258 to 4,5 GHz but right now I don't have board to test this.

[AMDman13]

Even running at 4.5ghz I had frame drops/audio stutter when I used MS929 as my preset. When using arcade_15 it was fine.

Saw the video. This is very interesting. I will have to give it a try and report back. Yes I am running D9800 for my Betson Kortek. Not to mention I am running monitor presets to modify in my Mame.ini as well.

To give this a try do I need to uninstall Emu_driver or just re-run VMmaker with the new settings? I don't want to mess up my current setting as it is a fresh install. I still don't have a firm grip on how the modelines are set up. They are written to Window's registry. Correct?

[stellarola]

Even running at 4.5ghz I had frame drops/audio stutter when I used MS929 as my preset. When using arcade_15 it was fine.

Saw the video. This is very interesting. I will have to give it a try and report back. Yes I am running D9800 for my Betson Kortek. Not to mention I am running monitor presets to modify in my Mame.ini as well.

To give this a try do I need to uninstall Emu_driver or just re-run VMmaker with the new settings? I don't want to mess up my current setting as it is a fresh install. I still don't have a firm grip on how the modelines are set up. They are written to Window's registry. Correct?

More than necessary. I'm ONLY referring to preset in mame.ini only. This is something you can change on the fly. Default I think is set to generic_15 in mame.ini. I think we'll need to do further testing to see why people are dropping frames. Seems to be different issues for different people atm.

[AMDman13]

Oh! I get you. Yep mine is currently set to custom. Let me fire it up and report back! Thx!

[AMDman13]

I just gave it a go with generic_15 and removed my presets.. no difference. Speed issue remains the same. It was worth the try though. Also can confirm same modeline selected by GM each time.