Farty sound...


Axeman

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(sorry - posted this as a reply on another thread, though am curious so decided to create a new topic)

does the amount of popping in the sound vary on different GP32s? The reason why is that some people are reporting a bit of popping, whilst it constantly farts on the background on mine, and the farting is louder than the sound itself, amking the sound all but unusable....

Anyone tried it on several GP32s to see if this is the case?
 
I believe this is a mixup of some hardware problems (I heard of a bug on the Samsung ARM - don't know if this is a fact though) and software capability of going around it (the old SDK does not go around it, the new one does). I am not a programmer so I might be saying bull here.
What I have noticed is that it really varies from software to software. Some have relly bad sound, some have good sound. For instance, All for Princess has excellent sound. Dungeon and Guarder has a lot of clicks and pops. GPEngine has excellent sound, SMS32 has a lot of clicks and pops.
 
phoda posted on May 5 2003 said:
I believe this is a mixup of some hardware problems (I heard of a bug on the Samsung ARM - don't know if this is a fact though) and software capability of going around it (the old SDK does not go around it, the new one does). I am not a programmer so I might be saying bull here.
What I have noticed is that it really varies from software to software. Some have relly bad sound, some have good sound. For instance, All for Princess has excellent sound. Dungeon and Guarder has a lot of clicks and pops. GPEngine has excellent sound, SMS32 has a lot of clicks and pops.
That sounds about right; though I'm not sure about sound libs.. need to find out where one finds new versions, if thats indeed the case :)

It is an issue in the hardware, but there is likely some workaround.

The volume and frequency of posp could vary unit by unit, but more likely varies on a per-sound basis -- some games like Xenon 2: Megablast are barely noticable pops, but when you're at the GEM desktop.. its very noticeable :/

jeff
 
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Have you spoken to Criag about this? I'm sure I saw a message in a forum from him talking about the problem and that there was a fix.
 
GPengine is a very good example of sound working well on GP32. They've got a LOT going on with that emu: 7+ Mhz CPU, fairly complex graphics hardware emulation, plus the PCE sound chip. The GP32 is pushing along at 133Mhz, and if you've loaded a 1MB game, memory must be under heavy use as well. Yet the sound is very good, I don't notice any significant crackles or pops.

Same with a few other games as mentioned. Super Plusha also sounds very good, and there's multiple parallax and lotsa moving objects in that game.

There must be some good techniques, hopefully this information will soon become common knowledge for anyone developing apps for GP32 that use sound.

I wish Game Park had given the GP32 some specialized chips to handle sound and/or blitting. That's the only reason emulators work to any degree on GBA - because they can use the sprite chip to take the load off the slow CPU. Imagine what the GP32 could do with some custom chips to help its fast 133Mhz CPU along... Maybe in a year or two. :)
 
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