Midway Games, mainly Mortal Kombat series

[NickC]

When playing Mortal kombat games in mame the sound is very scratchy, and unclear like other games, I have a p4 2.8 with and on board ac 97 sound chip, any ideas?

[Dr. J]

Yes.  I scratched my head over this too for a while.  I'll explain how to fix it in using Mame32 because it's easiest.  Other's are similar, but in the ini files.  Go to "options" and to "default game options."  First for the sound tab.  Midway games are best at the 220500 (or which ever is closest to that.  I'm at work and can't remember the exact frequency).  
   Now for the wierd part that I still don't understand.  Go under the "Advanced" tab and uncheck most of the "change resolution to fit" and "change color to fit."  I started by unchecking all of them and testing the game.  One by one I added the checkmarks until I discovered that several of them had that effect on the sound.  I know those two above gave me trouble, and I think the Match to game refresh did also.  Play with it and you'll get it.
   I remeber that this was making me furious for a while also.  Glad to hear that I wasn't insane after all (and also to spare you the trouble).
  Post back if you get it.

One last thing.  I don't know how good the AC'97 chip is or not.  I'm using a Soundblaster live.  Try what I suggested above first, but if that doesn't do it you may want to consider a soundcard.

[NickC]

well it hasn't completey gone away but it helps.
 another question, whats the best way to get the Mk series to run in its normal resolution? or arcade resolution, the picture seems a little long with all those buttons turned off?

[Homebrew]

Are you running windows xp by chance?  If you are, it could be that xp is eating up too many resources.  I had the exact same problem.  I tried degrading the sound quality as suggested and like you, it helped but it didnt' fix it completely.  I recently decided to make many xp tweaks(i searched the web for xp speed tweaks) and when i was done, my sound problem was gone and my frame rates even improved.  If you're running xp and are interested in the tweaks, i can send you some links to things i used that you can try.  How much ram are you running?

-Kevin

[Homebrew]

Actually, for anyone interested, here' some tweaks i highly recommend for a an Windows XP based Mame machine.

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=1554
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=408
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=545
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=1231

-Kevin

[jets]

MK series are weird ones ya. I found that the sound problem got fixed when I disabled any frame skipping & hardware stretching. The only thing I have enabled in mame32 in the advanced tab is "use direct draw" and what res I want it to run at. I left the sound @ 44100 though.

[Howard_Casto]

The issue has nothing to do with the resolution settings for the record.....

It has to do with the combination of three things....

#1 Midway games sound chips are constantly synced with the video.  So skipped frames=scratchy sound as it re-syncs itself.  

#2 Midway games are a resource hog (umk3 used to be the benchmark for a suped-up mame machine), especially the audio chip... it contirbutes to crusin's slowness. Because of this the sound is given a lower priority and thus it suffers the most on a pc that can't run it well.  

#3 The midway drivers are still unoptimized and just a tad glitchy in mame.

Messing with the resolutions might give the illusion that they are effecting the problem, but what they are doing is freeing prescious resources to the sound chip emulator, so it works better.  

I know none of this info really helps, I just wanted to explain the wierdness somewhat.  

[Homebrew]

That explains why the tweaks, which in the end seemed to help my frame rates, helped.  Thanx for the info Howard.  I hope some day i can achieve the knowledge some of you guys have.  I'm glad there's people like you around.  More importantly i'm glad i found this site where i have access to you guys.

-Kevin

[NickC]

I have 512 mb of pc 1066 rd ram, so what would it take to run this game without a sound hitch?

[Homebrew]

You have plenty of ram, so you're good there.  Your system is definetly no slouch.  Freeing up resources and improving frame rates are the best things you can do judging from what howard said.  If you're running XP try the tweaks suggested in the links i posted.  A cheap sound card may also help as built in sound eats up resources.  Also judging from what howard said, near perfect sound is the best you can achieve.  Please correct me Howard or someone else if i'm reading to much into that. Hopefully this helps.

-Kevin

[Dr. J]

I'm running win98se on a AMD 2.2 with 512 DDR and an SBlive.  After doing what I mentioned above it's been flawless (as far as scratching or fuzz).  I can't tell much difference (if any) from the one at the local arcade.  When experimenting with it I definately got the impression that the sound was synched to the video and that anything that might cause it to run fast or slow or skip frames made the sound skip and scratch to keep pace.

[Howard_Casto]

You have plenty of ram, so you're good there.  Your system is definetly no slouch.  Freeing up resources and improving frame rates are the best things you can do judging from what howard said.  If you're running XP try the tweaks suggested in the links i posted.  A cheap sound card may also help as built in sound eats up resources.  Also judging from what howard said, near perfect sound is the best you can achieve.  Please correct me Howard or someone else if i'm reading to much into that. Hopefully this helps.

-Kevin

What he said .... also the computer's processor get's hit the hardest, so 1 gig might not cut it.  I know on my 900mhz that no matter what I do there is still some scratching.... but as I said, part of that has to do with the driver.