Slowdown & choppy audio

Dreamcazman

I'm hoping someone can help me, I'm new to Batocera & having major issues with the latest build 5.22. I've tried it on two PC's now, first was a HP Probook (i7, 8GB Ram) & the second is an older Asus VivoPC VC60 (i5, 4GB Ram, Intel HD Graphics 4000). I ideally want to get this running properly on the Asus as it'll fit in neatly under the TV. Unless I'm doing something wrong, the thing runs games like crap.

I mainly want to use this for Atomiswave, Naomi, Dreamcast & Gamecube, pretty much anything that doesn't work on Recalbox or Retropie, but from what I've tested, I'm getting horrendous slowdown & choppy audio on both machines, namely on Atomiswave (eg. Dolphin Blue, Metal Slug 6). Just doesn't make sense.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dreamcazman

Bump.

I played around with the graphics modes (Atomiswave advanced) & it seems to have helped. Dolphin Blue & Metal Slug 6 run much better now, but Samurai Showdown 6 is still a stuttering mess.

Darkpool2019

Dreamcazman I have the same problem with Samurai Showdown, with my specs the only workaround i found is turning frameskipping to 1 in retroarch, and the lag and audio issues are gone, usually i dont like frameskipping but i dont see much problem when using it in this game.

Dreamcazman

Darkpool2019 Excuse my ignorance but where do I enable frameskipping?

I've searched the Retroarch config via F1, Applications but I can't find it anywhere!

Dreamcazman

Thanks, so the CPU in the Asus should be sufficient?

It's an i5-3210M with a base core frequency of 2.5GHz. I have the option to upgrade the CPU to an i5-3380M which has a base frequency of 2.9GHz.

Would the extra 400MHz make much of a difference?

BZZ

Did you try the legacy nvidia drivers ? To be hones anything like atomis or naomi is hard to run "great". List all the settings changes you've done if you can for other people that suffer 😉

Dreamcazman

BZZ The computer only has Intel HD 4000 graphics, it doesn't have the capability to install a video card.

In regards to settings, from memory I first set ratio to 4:3, smoothing on, turned off rewind & saving & set video mode to 1280x720.

I've only played a few Atomiswave games & most run better. I will also try the frameskipping as Darkpool suggested.

BZZ

Dreamcazman did you also try using roms from another 1 or 2 sources just to compare ?

Dreamcazman

BZZ I did, yes.

Darkpool2019

Dreamcazman When you start the game, press hotkey+b, and navigate the options, thats game specific config, so you can create a config file just to this game (the first option) and change the option Frameskipping below to 1 or 2, in my setup setting to 1 did the job

Dreamcazman

Just a quick update, I sourced an i5-3380M & installed it in the Asus PC.

From what I've tried thus far in Atomiswave, the extra 400MHz over the stock 2.5GHz CPU does seem to make a difference. Probably not as much as I would've hoped, but the odd hiccup is most likely due to the emulator.

Hopefully things impove with future updates.

Dreamcazman

Just like to add, I did some more experimentation. Now I'm not sure whether the internal HDD I was using has a problem or using HDD's with Batocera in general, but I wrote the image to an old Samsung 840 Evo SSD I had here & I saw improvements across the board!

Any brief pauses & the odd sound cut out are gone which I'm surprised with because I thought ROMs were loaded into RAM. Can anyone elaborate the inner workings & ROM handling of Batocera?

Thought this may help those of you experiencing similar issues.