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Author Topic: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?  (Read 4444 times)

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Offline haywirepcTopic starter

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WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« on: February 08, 2010, 03:56:04 AM »
I put together a dedicated amiga emulation pc, which is a 1.2 ghz duron compaq pc with 512 megs of ram, an accellerated video card, and sb live.
 
I've been very happy with it until I tried to run some sound software like protracker and the like...
 
What I get while trying to play a mod file is it seems to start okay, then turns to a choppy mess and even when you click stop, the sound seems to be ghosted, continuing to play.
 
I would think a 1.2ghz amd is enough to emulate an 8mhz or 25mhz amiga, but I don't know. Seems like everything else works great except sound, I tried increasing sound buffers to 7 in winuae, tried lowering from 44khz to 22khz, but same thing.
 
Interestingly, digibooster, octamed soundstudio and protracker all having the same problems, but seems like games and other stuff works fine.
 
Since I wanted this especially for sound work, this is a bit of a let down.
Any ideas how I can fix these problems? I'm going to go try and install protracker and digibooster on my main windows machine that has amikit and see what happens...
 
Any help, tips or ideas on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. I'm stumped.
 
Steven
 

Offline haywirepcTopic starter

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2010, 07:33:50 AM »
I tried octamed in amikit on my main windows machine, which granted is much more of a powerhouse, it works fine. I will try digibooster and protracker next I suppose, but I'd rather run it on the other machine, which I intended to be a stand alone amiga emulation system with windows as host but more or less removed...
 
I am wiping out my entire windows installation and trying the kxlight installation of amiga forever on this machine next...
 
Hopefully, the sound drivers for linux will be better and this will work as I hoped it would for protracker and sound trackers in general.
Steven
 

Offline haywirepcTopic starter

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2010, 11:05:31 AM »
Apparently, kxlight install blows...
 
I tried 3 different computers, a dell gx260, an older compaq and an older e-machine.
 
All 3 the install went through, and fully copied but then would not boot, all 3 with the same strange errors... Its really an amiga forever problem not a hardware one, this install is buggy for sure.
 
Wow there is really something to be said for real amiga hardware. Hosted on a superfast modern machine, I think aforever is great, but this kxlight option is worthless if it can't work on most common machine types.
 
Dell and compaq are petty command hardware... So much for a dedicated amiga emulation pc. Okay so now I will try winxp hosted with the faster 2ghz dell and see if my choppy sound problems persist... Geez why does winxp take so long to install?
Steven
 

Offline tone007

Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2010, 11:56:06 AM »
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Offline fishy_fiz

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2010, 12:08:01 PM »
Accurate sound emulation (Paula) is quite hardware intensive. Even on my old dedicated "amiga" pc box (Athlon64 3400+) I was left wanting more from time to time when using Winuae, although I much prefer Amithlon, which is faster on same hardware and more authentic feeling (much less reliant on a host system), so that could be part of my bias when it comes to using an amiga emulator. This may not be an option for you however if you have particular software needs (although nuldepah reroutes paula audio to ahi, so still may be an option for you.)
Near as I can tell this is where I write something under the guise of being innocuous, but really its a pot shot at another persons/peoples choice of Amiga based systems. Unfortunately only I cant see how transparent and petty it makes me look.
 

Offline Bazzaq

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2010, 12:10:07 PM »
duron 1.2 is far too low spec.. 2.4ghz p4 or a 1.8 core2duo would probs be enough. sound has always been the cpu hog.
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Offline redrumloa

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #6 on: February 08, 2010, 01:06:37 PM »
Quote from: Bazzaq;542009
duron 1.2 is far too low spec.. 2.4ghz p4 or a 1.8 core2duo would probs be enough. sound has always been the cpu hog.

Probably correct.
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Offline haywirepcTopic starter

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2010, 01:18:51 PM »
Yes I think the cpu is just not enough... Funny I started my dedicated amiga emulation pc on a 500mhz celleron... That had issues with slow video, so on to the next attempt... next to an 800mhz itel, still slow, then 1.2ghz compaq duran which worked fine for all but audio apps... Next up, a 2.0 ghz dell.
 
On my main windows machine, a quad core 2.4ghz pc... Sound works great, in all apps...
 
So now I am going to switch my "dedicated" emulation pc to a dell 2.0ghz pc and see how that works... Kxlight did not like this dell at all. Boots from cd but forget the kxlight hard drive install so I am left to try and get windows working first, which is a big challenge without an original cd from dell...
 
Off to sleep, I downloaded all the drivers will try tonight to get the dell going with windows first, its stuck in 640x480 with no sound and network right now because I used a generic xp install disc without the dell drivers.
 
Dell sucks BTW unless you speak indian, forget getting any help from those jokers. Not to worry, found drivers, downloaded but I'm out of energy for today. Will try tomorrow or later tonight to get this going again.
 
Am I the only person that finds it incredibly amusing that you need a 2,000 + mhz  windows computer to properly emulate an 8mhz amiga?

Maybe I'd be better off getting 3.1 roms and a hard drive for my old 500, but I really thought I could get a kick ass amiga system through emulation with rtg graphics and all that with little cost...
 
Turns out it costs LOTS in aggravation and trial and error and hair pulling.
 
I'll keep trying...
 
Steven
 

Offline ElPolloDiabl

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Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2010, 02:00:58 PM »
The duron is a pretty low spec processor (not much cache). You need at least a 1.4GHz Athlon to run UAE with the sound on 100%. It worked fine on my old Tbird.
If you remember onboard audio takes a good 10% of your CPU compared to a soundcard. It doesn't sound unreasonable that emulating an Amiga chipset takes a lot CPU power. I hope they get around to optimising that.
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Offline x303

Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2010, 06:23:52 PM »
Sounds to me your sound buffer size is wrong. If you don't have a powerfull machine you should set it to 3 or 4. I quess it's now set to 1, that's why it works better on the other machines, but not on yours.

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Offline paul1981

Re: WINUAE sound choppiness and problems...?
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2010, 07:54:59 PM »
If you download an older version from way back, like "WinUAE 0.8.23" for example, then you will notice how much faster the emulation will be and your problem will be solved.  I had no trouble at all with my old 466 MHz Celeron a few years ago.  I had to use it in OCS/ECS mode though, the 466 MHz Celeron just wasn't fast enough to emulate the AGA chipset.
So try selecting either the OCS or ECS chipset, see if that solves your problem.  If not, download an old version of WINUAE from around 2002.