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Strange behaviour vsync and 22050 audio sample rate on Raspberry Pi 3

AdvanceMAME Help
Yami
2016-11-12
2016-11-20

  • Yami

    Yami - 2016-11-12

    Hi,
    since I had a lot of tearing in Advancemame 1.5 on Raspberry Pi 3 and since I have read that to enable Vsync on Linux it's necessary to run the emulator as root, I typed:

    chown root:root /usr/local/bin/advmame
chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/advmame

    But when I try to run advmame as root (or with "sudo") it stops after copyright notice (that of Nicola Salmoria etc...). If I don't call any rom, I get the "regular" error of missing rom name, so I guess the emulator is properly started... but for some reason I cannot run any game.

    Of course I can run advmame normally as a regular user (pi).

    I've also found that if I lower the sound sampling rate to 22050, tearing is greatly reduced but sound has a visible delay (almost 1 second).

    Any suggestion?
    Thanks

     

    Last edit: Yami 2016-11-13

  • Yami

    Yami - 2016-11-13

    I may have found a fix for the audio delay issue on lower sampling rates. Setting

    debug_rawsound yes

    It seems to give correct audio timing in 22050 sampling rate on Raspberry (but I have not found any additional information about this option).

    BTW, I'm really impressed on how AdvanceMAME runs on Raspberry Pi 3 without any optimization: I get a fix 100% - 100% (so, no frameskip) on many games (Final Fight, Golden Axe, Undercover Cops, Night Slashers etc.) with Magnify 2, Fractional scaling, Mean filtering and Triad6dot RGB effect on my LCD at 1920x1080@60!

    I wonder if performance will be furter improved with next SDL2-2.0.4 (that uses a hardware accelerated OpenGLES2 renderer for the frame buffer to speed up screen drawing).

    Now I have to figure out how to avoid the (sporadic) tearing without activating Vsync (still I can't run AdvanceMAME as root).

    Thanks

     

    Last edit: Yami 2016-11-13

  • Andrea Mazzoleni

    Andrea Mazzoleni - 2016-11-13

    Hi Yami,

    The "rawsound" option disable the syncronism between audio and video. If it works for you OK, but in general it could result in garbled sound.

    Maybe try using the "-log" option to get an advmame.log file. This could help in both the audio and video issue.

    Alternative approaches could be to select a different audio driver, with "-device_sound alsa/oss/sdl" and play with other options, like the "-sound_latency 0.1"
    and "-device_sdl_samples 2048" (when using SDL)

    About the video, what driver are you using ? SDL or FrameBuffer ? Are you starting it from Xwindow ?
    From discussion with other users, the FrameBuffer should be already able to scale the image, avoiding the need for AdvanceMAME to use fractional scaling.

    Anyway, I ordered my first Raspberry, so I suppose that AdvanceMAME will get beffer support for it in the near future :)

    Ciao,
    Andrea

     

    • Yami

      Yami - 2016-11-14

      Ciao Andrea,
      great news, welcome to the Raspberry community! :D
      AdvanceMAME (as AdvanceMENU) already runs well on Raspberry Pi 3, but I suspect it would benefit a lot in terms of performance with a little bit of "love" and optimization.

      Actually:

      • there is this strange "delay" issue with audio sampling rate lower than 44100 (no changes with different audio driver or sound latency value). In "rawsound" it is OK but also a bit garbled.

      • in AdvanceMENU audio (MP3) is garbled too (no workaround discovered until now...)

      Topics of interests:

      Really I can't wait to read your findings about an "official support" of Advance Projects on Raspberry. Thank you very much (please keep us informed!)

       

      • Andrea Mazzoleni

        Andrea Mazzoleni - 2016-11-20

        Hi Yami,

        OK, I made a first bunch of changes. It's a kind of pre-release for Raspberry.

        You can get it from git, or downloading it from: http://beta.advancemame.it/

        It fixes the build problem, the garbled sound in AdvanceMENU, and I hope also the sound delay in AdvanceMAME. There are also a bit of other minor issues fixed.

        Please let me know if this address the issues you found. If not, please provide the log produced with "advmame -log".

        I've also updated some docs to include Raspberry

        https://github.com/amadvance/advancemame/blob/master/doc/build.d
        https://github.com/amadvance/advancemame/blob/master/doc/install.d

        It's all still work in progress, but it's definitively better than before.

        Next things to work out is the vsync, and the real-time resolution switch.

        Ciao,
        Andrea

         

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