So What Cause's The Stuttering Sound Problem With DirectDraw??

[Howard_Casto]

-Edit-  Ok ok I missed a few important posts in this thread  apologies to anyone who saw that.    Andy I've been programming in direct3d for a while now and I've never ran into what you are talking about.  What exactly are you trying to do?  It was my understanding that mame worked on the sprite/poly level and didn't render one pixel at a time.  In either case you use polys or pre-transformed polys to render things.  Resolution should be irrelevant in such cases as you have all of your positioning setup in a percentage base.  If on the other hand, mame is using something like a sprite/blit method to render in d3d then it actually isn't using d3d, rather it's using left over remnants of direct-draw, which are not fully compatable with d3d, thus the problem.  I *might* be able to help with the issue but i'd need more info on exactly what you are trying to do. 




Regardless, and getting back on topic:

as of .118u2:

"NOTE: If you are experiencing sound stuttering due to not being able
to run your display at >60Hz, please give the -speed option a try.
You should be able to run MAME at a small emulation speed decrease
in order to get the game under your monitor's refresh rate."

So the issue is being addressed as we speak, so there is no need to argue over it anymore.

[ahofle]

The first thing anyone should do on a mame cab, regardless of the monitor is to turn off any blending effects, scanlines, ect.  Once you do this, all of these artifacts tend to magically disappear. 

I assume you are talking about D3D here?  Please share your settings if so.  I already had all those things turned off when I took the Puckman screen shot.  The ONLY way to run at native resolutions on an arcade monitor with no artifacts that I've found is ddraw, nohwstrech, and switchres.  FWIW I would love to be able to switch to D3D since ddraw is falling out of favor with mamedev (and Microsoft apparently), but only if my Pacman dots are all the same size. 

[Tiger-Heli]

So the issue is being addressed as we speak, so there is no need to argue over it anymore.

And further down in the What's New:

Added new experimental control for overall emulation speed. This
lets you specify how fast/slow the gameplay should happen relative to
the original. -speed 1.0 means run at normal speed. -speed 2.0 means
run at 2x speed. -speed 0.5 means run at half speed. Note that the
sound pitch is shifted as a result. If you are running early Namco
games that normally run at 60.60Hz, you can run them at -speed 0.99
and it should run at under 60Hz, which should prevent sound stuttering
if your monitor is not capable of greater than 60Hz refresh rates.
If this turns out to be useful, future versions may support a
-speed refresh parameter that automatically tweaks the speed to keep
you under your monitor's refresh rate. [Aaron Giles]

[headkaze]

Do you guys get the feeling Aaron is reading our posts? hehe He seems to address all the issues raised here recently. Great work Aaron!

[AndyWarne]

Andy I've been programming in direct3d for a while now and I've never ran into what you are talking about.  What exactly are you trying to do? 

I am not actually trying to do anything as such. I am just wondering why Mame using Ddraw gives a perfect, centered picture at native resolutions while D3D gives an unusable one. Seems to be a bug.
But I think Aaron might be able to throw some light on this, I will raise it with him.

The "speed" setting sounds like a great addition. This seems to be contrary to the intention that Aaron mentioned in his email about sticking rigidly to the original but its good news. In reply to his email I suggested that sticking to original is a great idea provided you can over-ride if necessary to enable the game to be more playable within the hardware limitations. This seems exactly what has been done.

Andy

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah, the only way I can replicate the wierdness that mame is doing in my apps is if I turn off all scaling filters in d3d and scale an image below it's native resolution.  In d3d scaling filters are not the same thing as blending filters.  For something like mame it'd be a good idea to use one of the filters that uses complex math to scale. 


Just on a side note... it seems odd to me that mame is locking the sound to the video refresh.  Not that this isn't a good way to do it, but most lcd monitors, for example run at 60hz, so it seems like this stuttering would effect a lot of people, not just mame cab users.

[headkaze]

Just on a side note... it seems odd to me that mame is locking the sound to the video refresh.  Not that this isn't a good way to do it, but most lcd monitors, for example run at 60hz, so it seems like this stuttering would effect a lot of people, not just mame cab users.

Most lcd monitors run at 60hz? Don't know if I agree with that one. All 3 of mine run at 75hz. Maybe most did a few years ago, but I doubt it's the case now. Technology is always better than last time we check

Andy: If Aaron doesn't address the scaling issues in Direct3d you raised, what about the idea of using the bezel files to add them in. I thought it was a good idea and probably not such a difficult program to write to generate them. But if it can be addressed at the source (pardon the pun), that would be a good thing. While I don't think it's a huge issue (I'm not a big fan of Pacman and other games with more noticable defects of missing "vertical columns of pixels") I appreciate that others might find it annoying and probably should be addressed.

[Avrus]

The latest 118u2 of Mame allows incremental changes to throttling:

0.118u2
-------

NOTE: If you are experiencing sound stuttering due to not being able
to run your display at >60Hz, please give the -speed option a try.
You should be able to run MAME at a small emulation speed decrease
in order to get the game under your monitor's refresh rate.

Now you guys can go back to arguing about pixels.

[lettuce]

Is there an effects setting with in mame ( i know Aarons done a few) that sharpens up the image. As using D3D make the image blurry, maybe using a 'effect' that sharpens the image may counter act this blurryness??

[8way]

Try "sharp". Not sure if this has changed in the latest build, but that’s it used to be.