In the most recent MAME Current / RA combination I’m getting some strange sounds that were not present on previous versions. I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this. It only happens in some games… one example where it is very consistent is Asteroids Deluxe. It is a ever-present droning electrical sound for lack of a better description.
If anyone has experience with this and can give me some tips on getting things back to “normal”, I really appreciate it. Thanks for the help.
Wait… I think I have answered my own question. It appears this is related to the vsync swap interval setting.
I had read that with a higher screen refresh rate, I should use a vsync swap interval setting of “2” for smoother video. It turns out this is the cause of the bad sound in MAME.
My monitor runs at 165hz… can anyone tell me what the best vsync swap interval setting would be for smoothest video without sound artifacts? Thanks again for the help.
You can run at 60 Hz without messing with that, or you can run at 120 Hz and use the swap interval of 2, or you can use the VRR/gsync/freesync setting “sync to exact content framerate” and it’ll run at the exact correct speed with low latency.
Thanks, Hunter… so, I have Gsync on… can I also change the vsync swap setting to further improve the smoothness of the video, or should I just leave it on auto?.. or something else? Thanks for the help, and for answering so many of people’s questions on the forums.
np, thanks for the kind words 
If you have the ‘sync to exact content framerate’ setting enabled, you’re all set and can keep the swap interval at 1. You can use auto-frame delay to shave a few more milliseconds off, but that should be all you need to mess with.
Thanks for the advice! 
My STV games, in general, are slightly laggy in MAME (current). Anyone else? Should I use another core? Kronos maybe? What is everyone using for these? Thanks for the help.
i7 8700 32gb ram nvidia 3050
I remember playing rsgun on my i7-2600 a few years ago, so i don’t think an i7-8700 is supposed to have issues. It might be different from a STV game to another though.
You can try, but keep in mind Kronos has lesser compatibility.
Yeah, I thought they would be ok… I tried rsgun and die hard, both were choppy. Maybe it’s settings.
Yeah, I use Kronos exclusively for ST-V games. Not 100% compatible with all MAME roms but good enough for me.
Oddly, I’m trying to launch some games with Kronos and it appears to be launching in Saturn mode. Do we need an extra bios for STV arcade?
Yes. You need the MAME “stvbios.zip” and it needs to be in the /system/kronos/ folder. along with the “saturn_bios.bin”.
