Beetle Saturn crackling sound

Is there any way to deal with the distorted crackling sound when things get busy on screen with this core? I have a fairly powerful system and games run at a playable speed but when things slow down slightly the sound becomes distorted. I can handle the slowdown in gameplay since it mostly occurs with dialogue boxes in RPGs but the sound is just a bit too irritating as it is.

I understand this is a demanding core and there might not be anything that can be done at the moment without a frameskip but thought someone might know a solution. It’s a bit frustrating because I have an original Saturn with the games I want to play through but using an English language patch and the Saturn’s tough security means have to resort to emulation.

If it’s from framerates dipping below 60 fps, there’s not much to be done about it. You can increase the audio_rate_control_delta but that will make the audio sound terrible in a different way (i.e., fewer/no crackles but it’ll sound like a flock of seagulls)

I thought that might be the case guess I’ll just have to put up with it for now. Easier option than learning to read Japanese I suppose.

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What’s your “fairly powerful system” ?

Perhaps you should try yabause, it performs better on slower system (try increasing the number of threads to 8 in core options if you have a cpu with more than 4 logical core).

Powerful enough to run the latest games with no issues but I know Saturn emulation is quite demanding so I guess it’s not quite up to the task for that. I’ve also tried Yabause and Beetle’s accuracy still makes it a better option. The drops in frame rate aren’t really visually noticeable but you hear it in the audio.

Yeah I have GPU sync disabled. I was hoping for some sort of audio setting that I might not have tried but doesn’t look like one exists. Thanks for the help anyway - maybe the core will become less demanding as development progresses.

Sorry I’m on my iPad so can’t check specs right now but know it’s an i7 with GTX1080. Can’t remember Ram or processor speed off the top of my head though.

Don’t think there’s anything I can change in the settings anyway. Its performance is great with modern gaming so it’s set up correctly as far as Nvidia settings go and everything else in Retroarch runs full speed.

It seems to me like the demands of Saturn emulation unfortunately and will just hope it gets better as it’s developed.

I don’t get sound crackles with Beetle Saturn on my i5 2500k from 2011, though the 4.4ghz overclock might help. I have hard sync enabled and hard sync frames set to 1; at 0 it crackles. Other latency reducing settings like runahead and frame delay are usually too strenuous with this core. For some reason I no longer get performance problems in RetroArch when my Windows power profile is set to Balanced, but you might want to try setting that to High Performance. Same with the power setting in the NVidia control panel.

I’m not technically prepared to state that, but as far as I read, cores like mednafen PSX and Saturn are currently executed in something like interpreter, is that right? Once they get dynamic recompilation implementation they should run smooth as butter even on a good old core 2 duo, I bet. I remember an old notebook from a friend of mine, he could run SSF in the early dual core notebooks smooth while my Pentium 4 struggled to run any game on that emulator.

I have now a 2nd i7 and I noticed the latest builds of mednafen Saturn run most games flawlessly, I have threaded video ON and GPU hard sync off. In Shining Force 3, when the 3D battle gets lots of stuff going on it does drops below 60 FPS. The same friend above has a 7th generation i7, that beast runs Cemu like it was nothing, but I saw it crawling to its knees on Mednafen PSX (normal core) on 4x internal resolution and surprisingly has basically the same performance as mine, 5 generations below, in mednafen Saturn, so it’s probably something we’ll have to wait to. Dynarec.

Shining Force 3 is the game that I’m playing and it does get particularly bad on busy battle scenes. When in some villages it can run flawlessly but camera angles and dialogue boxes can make a big difference. It might be this game is particularly demanding on this core. I’ve also tried Daytona USA which strangely seems to slow at the Sega logo and has crackling sound in the intro but gameplay seems to be smooth enough (well, as smooth as Daytona Saturn usually is). Sega Rally performs the best of the games I’ve tried and the sound seems to be pretty steady throughout.

I’ve played with a lot of the graphics settings but don’t get much improvement. Beetle/Madnefen PlayStation does run flawlessly though.

Yeah PSX is an overall easier system to emulate, but you notice how demanding it gets when you try increasing 4 times the internal resolution, even a modern CPU will have a bad time. I’m not talking about the HW core. Have you tried letting Threaded Video ON for Saturn? I have no sound crackling at all, except for what I mentioned in my previous post. I can run Grandia (a gorgeous 3D world) and even use fast forward on it. Duke Nukem 3D, etc, they run at steady 60 FPS here.

I haven’t tried SF3 or Daytona, so those must be particularly heavy for some reason. I’ve played through to credits in the three Panzer Dragoon games, Asuka 120% Limited, Sega Rally Netlink Edition, Bulk Slash, Burning Rangers and Guardian Heroes. And played a fair amount of NiGHTS, Magic Knight Rayearth, Cotton Boomerang, Radiant Silvergun and Shinobi Legions. Just setting hard sync frames to 1 was enough to fix performance issues on my system for those games.

Is it a laptop? What model i7? I7 have been around for over a decade. Also laptops are about 3 times slower than their desktop equivalents. I’ve got a desktop ivy bridge i5 and an ancient AMD gpu and i can run beetle saturn perfectly on it even with mid frame sync turned on in the core options. Something must be wrong in your settings. Disable all the latency reduction options first and check your audio delay rate is set no less than 64ms. Also try changing audio drivers, they don’t all work properly on every system.

It could be some throttling, CPU or GPU (can slow down perfs with shaders or hard sync 0, frame delay).

One thing I noticed is that, when it stutters, which only happens rarely in some cases, for example I can play Burning Rangers that I consider a heavy 3D game for the console at steady 60 FPS, but when it does in other games, monitoring my CPU, GPU and RAM, it’s barely using 30% of the CPU.

I’ve somehow managed to reduce the stuttering on busy screens a bit but changed so many options I’m not sure which did it. It seems to be when I turned GPU sync to 1 but is that supposed to be more demanding? Could be something else but that was last thing I changed. Yes it’s a laptop but a gaming one. I’m aware they’re not as powerful as the desktop equivalent and it might simply not be up to the task for Saturn emulation, but it hasn’t struggled with any modern games yet so it’s far from a creaky old machine at least.

Emulation is really good with this core though and visually runs at full speed so just trying to iron out an irritation since I usually just play on an original Saturn. If I can figure out a way I’ll report it but maybe those of us with the stuttering might have to wait a few years for when we buy more powerful machines.

I don’t think a modern laptop would be the problem emulating this system in particular, believe me, a desktop 7th generation i7 running over 4GHZ still has similar performance to my 2nd generation in this, there’s no miracles here, only dynarec can solve it in the future.

No, it’s quite a bit less demanding. There’s slightly more input/display lag at 1 than 0, but much less than turning off Hard Sync completely.

Hard GPU Sync worsen Shining Force 3 in battle scenes, I just tried it, using the lightning magic, frames dropped below 50 FPS around 46-50, while Hard Sync turned off, it stays above 52 frames, if this option can help other games, I’m not sure, but it surely won’t help in this game.

Edit, I had to test again, because I remembered I had Threaded Video ON, turning if OFF, with Hard Sync ON with 1 frame, it does help like Awakened says. So basically it improves a little, with the same magic I mention above, which has different effects, the frames almost keeps 60 FPS, which is great.

For reference, here is what you should be looking at when determining how capable your CPU is: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

As you can see, a $200 CPU can often beat a $2000 CPU as it all depends on what strengths they decided to focus on when developing the CPU. An i7 isn’t necessarily better than an i3 or i5. A 20 core CPU is useless if its single thread performance isn’t up to task.