[Stella-main] Sound problems with stella.x11 & .sdl, stella 1.3

[Thomas B. <bo...@bo...>]

First, thanks for Stella, it's great stuff.

Now, the problem:

On a Debian Woody system running Linux 2.4.23, with sound working
correctly for other applications, I find that both stella.x11 and
stella.sdl have problems when sound support is turned on. 
Specifically, both of these will allow the game to function for
a split second, then FREEZE for a second, then allow a bit more
normal-speed movement, etc. stella.sdl (and possibly stella.x11,
it's hard to be sure) produces some stuttery sound at these times.

The presence or absence of -accurate makes no difference.

I have tried both -sound oss (with stella.x11) and
-sound sdl (with stella.sdl).

If I specify -sound 0, games run at full speed and the CPU isn't
working very hard according to top (it's a PIII). 

I have done a great deal of googling on the subject and haven't
found any specifics, other than some warnings about KDE that
don't apply to me (I am not running arts, in fact I'm not running
KDE at all, I run stella as the only X client in the system).

Help? Suggestions? Ideas? Thank you!

P.S. I've put this into a little custom table which has four
USB trackballs attached as game controllers. They are really
cheap on EBay and I am (very, very slowly) creating custom
games for the resulting party table. Today I hacked stella to 
support these as paddles one through four, which works really 
well for Warlords. If only I could get the sound, I would
be a very happy man. Yes, I do plan to release my changes
as a patch as the GPL requires. No, it is not the source
of the sound problem -- with my changes completely #ifdeffed out
the sound is still broken, and with sound turned off it's
perfectly happy.

-- 
Thomas Boutell
Boutell.Com, Inc.                                       
http://www.boutell.com/

Sync my card with your PDA or address book: http://tocard.biz/a7oiljb6