Castaway and sound.. two builds?


skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
8,063
Website
www.codejedi.com
Heres the issue..

If your app is running really optimized, and using up lots of bandwidth, the GP32 pops. Its a design flaw in the hardware apparently.. big drag,a nd not too much you can do about it. I'll be looking into it.. gotta talk to a few others, and figure out whats going on in there.. but looks like everyone has to try and work around it, and success varies by a number of factors.

So for now, I'm thinking of including two binaries in the distribution..

Castaway.fxe -- the normal build.. screamingly fast without audio, and pretty darned fast with audio, but you get popping noises.

Castslow.fxe -- a really slow build that needs a much higher frameskip in order to run halfway well, but with clear audio. Drag. I doubt peopel will use it :) (like frameskip 5 or so to run normally :/)

What do you think?

jeff
 
Is it possible to include an item on the keyboard menu to select between the two settings? Or something similar? That way your not developing 2 different builds of the EMU?

Beat me round the head with a trout if its a crappy idea... ;)
 
Would it be possible to stick to the normal build version for the moment and concentrate on the emulater being compatible with more games ?
 
I personally would like to see the following - I think the binary with popping is good enough

-- Highly sought after - Disk swapping for games with more than one disk - also to save to blank disks(for which some games need!)

-auto frameskip for loading

-Clearing text at bottom of screen

These issues are more important than sound in my opinion
 
Two binaries or one with options, either way is fine to me.

But a question for you - when you say the sound is a weakness in the hardware, do you literally mean the machine itself, or the infamous SDK bug that supposedly causes pops? I guess what I'm really getting at is this - if the SDK is improved by Game Park, could these poppings be eliminated? Or is it truly an unavoidable issue regarding the machinery itself somehow? Feel free to elaborate to any technical degree you want, I'd love to understand what's involved a bit more.

Thanks for any insights.
 
I can easily put up with the popping sound, Brain kinda blocks them out after a min or so,

I would personally like the 'Frameskip' options to be accessed by another key such as 'Select', a toggle for the frameskip speed menu. The 'Save' option currently mapped to the 'Select' key could be mapped to 'Start' so when the emu pauses you can also save the game.
This would leave the left-trigger for swapping over controls Mouse\Joystick\Cursor\Keyboard

Oh and what about saved memory States for games?
 
I'm sure Craig said the popping was fixed in some update to the code libraries?
 
Hurm whilst deving my game at the moment I got popping. I just put it down to using too much raster time up. I knocked out a couple of un-necessary gpbitblt's and the sound stopped popping. I was use to this effect having worked on the C64 for a number of years. If you used a full screen of raster time, the whole machine would grind to a halt, sound would skip or worse and the gfx would slow down immensely :)
 
Axeman posted on May 4 2003 said:
Yeah - I heard it was to do with the SDK too.....

Heard that it had been cured with the later ones??
Tell you the truth, I'm not sure. Was chatting with Mr. Spiv, and going by resultys of many tests.. it *seams* like a hardware or firmware issue, but it is conceivable upgrades to the libs coudl fix it. I need to look into it more.. as I say, sound systems are my weak side :/

FYI, its not something that can be alleviated with options.. its just a compielr optimization swetting that causes the problem, due to the perceived h/w issues. Compiler optimizations are at compile time, not runtime. Such is life.. hence two binaries.

The good news is 005 is pretty swank ;)

Lots of changed you guys will enjoy :)

jeff
 
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