Audio issues on CPS2 games

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hello everybody, I am new I was using Retroarch 1.3.6 and the audio was fine in every game. Then I tried a nightly release a few days ago and the quality of CPS2 game’s audio got a lot worse. It reminds me of Gameboy advance sound quality but in some games it is even worse, a lot worse. In Dungeons and Dragons is just slightly noticeable, in Street fighter alpha 2 it sounds like a drill in my brain. I tried downloading again Retroarch 1.3.6 on the same computer but in a different hard drive but now I experience this issue on this stable release too. Anybody can help me and solve this problem? I am using Final burn alpha CPS2 core since both in MAME core and generic Final burn alpha core my CPS2 games don’t run and Retroarch just crash or freezes. I hope somebody can help, many thanks

BTW I’d like to thank the developers for the support of multimedia cores other than just retrogames, it is amazing, I really love to watch my favourite photos with the same program I also use to play some of my favourite games. I have seen that now there is also a core for video playback, I haven’t tried it yet but I really love this kind of stuff, it’s great :slight_smile:

#2

First thing to try would be moving your retroarch.cfg somewhere else (or backup and delete it) to see if it’s a configuration issue. If it still does it with 1.3.6 and a clean config, it’s something elsewhere on your machine.

#3

I tried this both with the nightly release and with 1.3.6 but the audio problem is still the same. The audio is fine in other cores I am using as well as in my regular pc native games, music and video files and so on. Is there anything I can try now other than just wait for the next stable release hoping it will fix my problem?

#4

Ah, this sounds like a regression that’s crept into the core, then, if other cores are fine. I’m assuming you’re using the same core downloaded from the buildbot with both the nightly and 1.3.6? My guess is that it’s the same issue as this one, which just cropped up a couple of days ago:

#5

I downloaded the core using my browser from the archives because I cannot find Final burn alpha CPS2 amongst the downloadable ones using the downloader inside Retroarch, there is only generic Final burn alpha right now and my games does not work with it as I said. Another core I cannot find anymore is Snes 9X next and I don’t know why but it seems that Snes 9X works just fine I don’t even know what was the difference between those two so I just use Snes 9X and everything seems ok with my Snes games.

#6

Can you make a recording of the audio issue that you are experiencing and post it here? I’ll be happy to compare your results with mine if I can hear a sample or two.

I have performed extensive tests yesterday using the current FBA core and ROMs from a compatible set (MAME 0.175 in this case) and comparing the results with an old version I had lying around. On Windows 10 I cannot really hear any regression. Quite the opposite actually: some non-CPS2 titles that previously exhibited completely inaccurate sound (Makaimura, for instance) are now rendering properly.

You may also want to check your audio driver and sample rate, as well as other settings that may or may not have an impact on this. On Windows I’m currently using Xaudio, 48000hz sample rate and 32ms of latency.

#7

Use the correct romset with the “generic Final burn alpha” (which is the current version, all fbalpha2012 cores are releases from 2012, i kinda remember there was sound issues on cps2 in fbalpha at that time), you’ll have no issues (or if you still have issues, that’s your setup).

#8

I tried to record the audio of SFA2 but I don’t know how and I wasn’t able to do it, sorry. I will try to find other versions of the games to see if they run fine using the latest cores

#9

I’m having an audio issue in FBA with the latest nightly 1.4. This audio issue does not appear in stable 1.36. The Issue is a constant crackling audio distortion appearing in many games.

  • I have ruled out the core being the issue, as I can load the latest FBA core in 1.36 and the issue does not appear, and I can load an older FBA core in 1.4 and the audio still has issues.

  • I have ruled out ROM issues, as I have tested with the latest correct ROMs for the current FBA version as well as older ROM sets. (I am testing with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike).

  • All console cores I tested using 1.4 are fine with no audio issues (NES, SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, PSX)

I am using a 32 bit Windows 7 machine, Core i5, Intel HD integrated graphics.

#10

Hmmm could you try disabling rewind in retroarch ?

1 Like
#11

Rewind is not enabled in either 1.36 or 1.4.

In fact I’ve done minimal configuration of 1.4; I stopped as soon as I encountered this issue. (Just for clarity, I started with the default config for 1.4, and copied nothing over from my 1.36 install)

#12

I can’t reproduce this issue on my computer with retroarch-1.4.0 . Could it be your computer is struggling ? Did you try showing framerate to see if it runs at ~60fps ? Did you check the usage of your cpu ? What’s your video/audio drivers in retroarch ? What’s the frequency of your i5 ? Is that a laptop with a low frequency ?

#13

Update, the issue has disappeared in 1.4 after setting the default vertical refresh rate to the correct value detected by Retroarch.

Apologies, I usually try to be thorough before reporting issues, but this basic config setting somehow got past me. I guess what threw me off was that the issue only appeared in FBA and not other cores.