Lakka runs slow on some games, also audio issues

Libretro Lakka
,
#1

Hi, I just got a Pi4B for the first time, never messed with these SBCs. I downloaded Lakka on it, but I needed to download a nightly version since the one on their site appears to be too old and doesn’t boot. The specific version I have is this: “Lakka-RPi4.aarch64-nightly-20210116-88780ea”. The menus seem to work fine (tho lately they seem to lag every so often for no apparent reason). I’m testing some games and this thing is slowing down on SNES, friggin SMW is giving this thing a run for its money, this isn’t the kind of performance I was expecting. Then I try PS1 and those games seem to run fine, with some minor hiccups but mostly fine. Then I tried PSP with GTA LCS, which some people say runs at full speed, and it lags a fair bit. But I’m derailing myself, SNES, why the hells is this machine struggling on SNES?

I tried every single core, old ones, new ones, bsnes, hiland, everything, nothing changes, it runs fine for a bit, and then it starts to lag like crazy (it usually lags when i reach the block where yoshi is in in the first level).

Then there’s the audio issues. It seems that whenever any game goes below full speed, even by the slightest bit, the audio mutes. This couple with the subpar performance is an issue. Not only the game lags, it also lacks audio because of it. I suspect this is done to prevent audio crackling but come on. Some games seemingly run fine, but apparently drop a single frame here and there, causing the audio to get muted for a bit, so audio is intermitent. Any way to turn this off? I don’t really know what to do.

I might add, I don’t have any sort of cooling for the pi, I wanted to buy a heatsink but there’s nobody around that sells them. I did put a big fan next to it to try to cool it, and if running “cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp” gives me the correct values, then it hovers at around 40°C, which is perfectly fine.

So I have no idea what to do. Given the videos I’ve seen, this SBC should be performing much better. If possible I want to stay in Lakka, it has a better feel to it and it’s a more coherent system than retropi (which I haven’t tried, but have seen) that isn’t as nice (I don’t like emustation).

Hope somebody knows what’s going on or what I can do to figure it out. Thanks.

#2

Well I have found a “solution”. Apparently the issue is the audio latency. Default is 64, I don’t know how this affects the game, but I upped it to 256 and voila, SNES games run full speed now and the audio is present at all times without any kind of glitching going on.

However, now, sometimes, I notice games speed up a bit, maybe I’m imagining things but I’m almost certain games are getting a biiiiit sped up at times, it’s odd because it’s not even consistent, they are running fine and then they get sped up slightly… weird. Any ideas for that? Also how can this fix the problem? What does the audio latency have to do with game speed?

#3

Have you updated Lakka, For me I was also experiencing those audio issues with the nightly builds for RPI4 for quite a while.

Tutorials for Lakka, this one is for manually updating it.