Sound Crackles on certain Front Ends - Why? Help!

[slapaham]

Okay, this is relating to my 601MHZ MAME Cab...

I've started to play around with Simple Touch FE - excellent, however, I'm having sound issues. I have had these issues before, most notably when I ran Mamewah with a MP3 soundtrack in the background. It seems if the menu system has sound, then whatever I load from it has crackly sound issues!!

Is there anything I can do to solve this!? As I said before, I only have this issue if the menu system has sound.

Also, when I come out of whatever game that has been played, I'm greeted with a loud buzzing until it is completely shut down out of the game.

My theory is, if I can turn the sound off on Simple Touch FE this should stop the issue, right? 

I really need help on this... I really like Simple Touch and want it to become intergral to the Cab but until I can resolve this issue it isn't going to!!

Really appreciate it if someone can help me!

Thanks!

[slapaham]

Okay! I have found a solution but don't quite know how to fulfill it!

I removed the Gamestart.wav file from Simple Touch and it came up with an error message saying that it couldn't find the file. However, it still loaded Mamewah and voila! no crackly sound! I tried it with a blank wav file in it's place and it started to crackle again - so basically, I need to turn the sound off in Simple Touch!

Then I found another problem once I got into Mamewah and loaded a game, when I then quit that game, whatever note from the music/sound effect was played when I was quitting would jam until the Mamewah menu had fully loaded. Now I haven't tried my suggested solution out but I'm guessing, as its never done it before, its because Simple Touch is still running in the background and that is sufficiently slowing the system down for this to happen. Now, Simple Touch has a command you can enter on launching a program - I would like one that closes Simple Touch - anyone tell me what this would be? I haven't got a clue!

Mamewah then has an option to run an application on shut down, so I would just aim it back to loading up Simple Touch and fingers crossed that should sort all the problems out!

Just now I need someone who can help me achieve those goals, as I haven't got a clue as to how to remove the sounds altogether from Simple Touch and I also don't know what command line I would need to shut down Simple Touch on running Mamewah from it!

If anyone can help I'd be eternally grateful!!

[Havok]

Silly question: why are you using a front end to load a front end?

[slapaham]

Well Simple Touch deals with all my touchscreen games (a touchscreen menu for touchscreen games - seems logical) while loading into Mamewah deals with joystick games... perhaps its silly but I like how it works/looks...

[Havok]

AtomicFE supports both touchscreen and joysticks, among other controls. You should take a look. Click on my signature to check it out...

[Space Fractal]

I remember Touchscren support in AtomicFE did not work 100% correctly, and only used to scroll down and start a button and could not press on the icon itself (and require a skin).

If you only use mame and PC games, you could tryout my FE too, since it 100% touch freindly to running MAME and PC Games (but not sure it can run on a 600mhz machine and your graphicscard can handle OpenGL).

Otherwice You might talk to Lava Lear for this problem, because I think the buffer for the sound might been too small and/or his frontend might require a bit more CPU Power? I think a sample reduction to run in 22khz instead of 44khz might fix the problem, if Simple Touch have that option?

[Havok]

What you recall is that a member here wanted to put videos where the touchscreen zones were, and Youki couldn't do it without scripting a solution - which he didn't have the time to dedicate to. It was possible to do what the member wanted, Youki just didn't have the time to dedicate to create it for him. Otherwise, AtomicFE has been for quite some time 100% working correctly with touch screen support.

BTW - it looks like Simple Touch can't do what that member wanted to do either: he was using Xvid videos, not animated Gifs...

[slapaham]

I like the look of Atomic, however, I'm quite happy with what I have - I've just opted for tripling my RAM as it isn't too costly and fingers crossed that should solve/or at least help solve the problem.

I reckon its a memory problem as the more programs I use or the more I have open or the more I do the worse the sound gets - sometimes to the point where it sounds like someone's drowning my computer in the bathtub! Strangely, the programs themselves don't run any worse - just the sound!

[slapaham]

Also, there have been a few occassions where the sound has been fine on start up and loading into certain programs and then further down the line the sound has started to decay...

[Havok]

Memory may fix it - but you really should look into a faster computer, you'll be happier in the long run. Good luck!

 

[slapaham]

The way I see it is, I'm in no rush and once I upgrade my main computer again then I can use that instead... fingers crossed this RAM will do the trick... Thanks for your input!

[Lave Laar]

BTW - it looks like Simple Touch can't do what that member wanted to do either: he was using Xvid videos, not animated Gifs...

Actually, STFE do support xvid videos.  Has since version 1.02.