Desmume libretro core has seen some great improvement on speed since August but the sound emulation went a big step backward imo.
There’s now quite a lot of distortion and hiss, I took some samples to make sure and to show the difference:
Samples (Old means before the August rewrite)
can you open a GH issue about this?
OK, I’ll do that. I just wanted to see if it weren’t something already planned to fix soon / acknowledged first.
I don’t know about the code, I don’t ask it to be back, just wondering how to get a similar result like before. I tried the HighShelfDampen DSP which helps to get rid of those ear piercing highs but it doesn’t do more than that.
Is there any kind of Interpolation DSP filter? What about that “builtin resamplers that we integrate in the core”?
I came here seeking the same info, sorry to bump this old thread. No idea why twinaphex believes his change wasn’t for the worse because the audio in the current core sounds really low quality. That is not how a DS sounds and it’s also not how Desmume standalone sounds either. The audio in the old core was a lot better and clean of clicks, hissing and distortion which plagues the current version.
You need only fire up Radiant Historia to test. There’s a short cutscene near the beginning where a heartbeat plays. On standalone Desmume, it sounds fine. On the current core in RA, it sounds terrible and there’s a loud click after each heartbeat. Music sounds really poor too.
Does anyone happen to have a version of “desmume_libretro.dll” from before August of 2015? The only older version I can find is the archived core from January of last year which is a bit too dated and problematic.
The sound effect in Dawn of Sorrow for the Warg’s White Fang soul attack sounded nice and clean in older versions of the core, but now sounds lower quality (like a lower khz maybe). I checked with the actual cart running on my 3DS (my DSLite doesn’t turn on anymore :/) and it sounded exactly like it does in the latest core.
Just a single small example though. Obviously it’d be best to have the option to switch to the nicer sound quality.
Glad to know it’s on par with the real hardware.
…but yeah, I still use the old core. It’s a great improvement and that’s hard to switch to the lower quality one when you were accustomed to that. I think a DSP filter could be close though.
I was just playing Kirby Super Star Ultra and some of the sound effects are pretty crackly on the latest build of the core. I found I had an old build of the core from before the changes and it does sound much better.
Edit: Tested the real cart on my 3DS and the latest build again has the more accurate audio. Some of the hit sound fx from Fighter ability attacks and when you pick up food are really loud; they sound like they clip the audio or something.
I went back to a slightly more recent version and shove off 1 frame of lag I noticed shouldn’t be there (source).
Desmume old SPU for windows x64.
It’s still from 2015 so no resolution option and recent changes.
I brought up this same issue awhile ago on github. It’s cool that you’ve fixed it, but coming at the cost of high-res graphics and layout options is a really big price to pay. It’s strange, I’ve had the opposite experience of some of the posters here - when I tested on my OG DS, the sound is very close to Desmume standalone, not the crackly new RA core.
I would just use Desmume standalone but it has completely broken vsync 
So sits the sad state of DS emulation.
https://github.com/libretro/desmume/issues/81
