25 replies to this topic

[toxie]

NOTE: Nowadays (VPM 2.8 and above) its not necessary anymore to set the sampling rates individually/per machine generation. So it should be good enough to always just use 48000 (or even 96000 if your soundcard allows for that) as the sampling rate. Also some of the info below is not valid anymore, as the internal sampling rates have changed dramatically on some generations

 

 

Hi,

after a lot of searching around on the net, reading the VPM source and some wild guessing, my current 'research' on optimal sound settings for VPM has become stuck, that's what i have for now:

- BSMT2000 = Alvin G, Data East (at least from Batman upwards), Sega and Stern DMDs (at least up to Terminator 3) use a frequency of 24000 Hz internally

- Whitestar II and SAM = all Stern DMDs from LOTR on use 24000 internally (or 24242 Hz, still not fully sure whats really correct, but i think its 24000Hz, and this is how its implemented at the moment)
- Capcom uses 32000 Hz internally

- WCS (=Williams/Bally) DMDs (and older WCS based sound hardware) uses 31250 Hz internally (note: older Pinmame versions (2.5 and below) use still 32000)
- Gottlieb GTS 80 uses 11025 Hz internally (for samples)

- Gottlieb GTS Sys3 uses 7575 or 6060 Hz (for samples) (except for Strikes N Spares: 15151 Hz)

obviously this list is pretty incomplete (what about the older alphanumerical games from all kinds of manufacturers? these can depend on a multitude of chips, running at different frequencies)..

also i'm confused about the myriad of different settings and tweaks that one can do via script, via VPM settings, via windows settings, via registry, etcetc.

- VPM: synclevel setting in setup window, 'threadpriority' and 'audio_latency' registry entries -> what are the 'optimal' values here to avoid stuttering?
- windows: assigning different CPU cores to windows, VP(+VPM) and B2S
- windows: preferring background processes over programs in system settings
- hardware: add 'good' soundcard

anybody has some additional comments or especially some good recommendations here? i want to have this finally solved on my pinmame setup, as sometimes i have these ugly double sounds or static noise bugs, especially on the newer stern machines.. even though my CPU should be up to it (and it's also 4 cores)..

Edited by toxie, 24 December 2016 - 01:29 PM.

[ArcadiusMaximus]

I too was just wondering about this this the other day. It would be great to have a thread listing every game and its optimal sound Hz. Can that sort of information be found in the technical documents for each table? Would there be a way to determine optimal sounds settings without documents?

[toxie]

Its definetly all there in the pinmame source code, but i'm not -that- much into it to get all of the nasty implications and what would actually be -really- recommended.
The stuff above is what i could more or less easily read out of the code, plus some additional info from the net.
As for technical documents: I guess nobody except for the original pin 'OS' coders and hardware designers would have access to the gory details, plus the pinmame and mame devs that originally implemented the sound board emulations. At least i was unable to find some real reliable info somewhere.
Also the rest (scripts, settings, etc) are also more trial-and-error based, i fear, so i hope for some input from ppl that have more experience with these.

[rob046]

Hi,

after a lot of searching around on the net, reading the VPM source and some wild guessing, my current 'research' on optimal sound settings for VPM has become stuck, that's what i have for now:

- Data East, Sega and Stern DMDs (at least up to Terminator 3) use a frequency of 24242 (or is it actually 24242*2=48484) Hz internally
- Capcom and WCS DMDs use 32000 Hz internally
- GTS 80 uses 11025 Hz internally

obviously this list is pretty incomplete (what about the newer gottliebs f.e.? what about the older alphanumerical games from all kinds of manufacturers? what about the newer stern machines like LOTR, Nascar, etc which emulate the old sound boards but added stuff like 16bit support?), plus i'm not even 100% sure on these numbers..

also i'm confused about the myriad of different settings and tweaks that one can do via script, via VPM settings, via windows settings, via registry, etcetc.

- VPM: synclevel setting in setup window, 'threadpriority' and 'audio_latency' registry entries -> what are the 'optimal' values here to avoid stuttering?
- windows: assigning different CPU cores to windows, VP(+VPM) and B2S
- windows: preferring background processes over programs in system settings
- hardware: add 'good' soundcard

anybody has some additional comments or especially some good recommendations here? i want to have this finally solved on my pinmame setup, as sometimes i have these ugly double sounds or static noise bugs, especially on the newer stern machines.. even though my CPU should be up to it (and it's also 4 cores)..

Every now & then this topic comes up but I can never remember what to set tables too. I think I usually come to the conclusion that it doesn't make a lot of difference & just leave most tables at default 44100. I think 32000 or 22050 might be ones to try for newer tables. 16000 for older tables. I think if you starting going to low below that then you'll have problems.
I think guys like destruk & others have a pretty good understanding of this & what works best. But yeah we are dealing with emulation here of usually pretty old hardware here, so there is only so much you can tweak it to make it sound better (not much) or run better. Again, I don't think it helps much from what I remember, but maybe I wasn't using the best setting.

[settingsons]

I have done lots of things to get rid of stutter and microstutter and eventually succeeded. This reminded me of one other thing which I forgot about and that was to set the sound in all tables to 11025 hz. This tip was giving to me my chriz and it did help so I have that in my default key now. For most tables I cant hear a difference. For the odd exception i go up to 16000hz but that is for 2 tables. I also played a lot with the registry settings in pinmame that you mentioned like synclevel, etc but they didn't help at all. The one thing I did find though was the ddraw setting which did reap benefits and it works for others too.

I did get a dedicated sound card but that made little difference for me. Another thing I cannot live without is setting UVP to its own core, VP its own core and everything else on another core. I have to do this for b2s as well but I know it is the opposite for others - no idea why.I occasional try turning the infinnity settings off to allow the processor to assign cores but I will always get some stutter back. The only time it doesn't stutter is if the processor is lucky enough to assign things to different cores.

[ArcadiusMaximus]

Wow 11025 hz would not be my first guess as an optimal setting . Its so exact and so odd haha. That's great if it does work. I'll try those settings out on a few tables today. I think part of the problem with optimal sound settings is usually the answer is "new games set it to this and old games set it to this". Well what constitutes "new". Where is the cut off between "new" and "old". I suppose you could say any game created before 19XX use this setting, but then you have to research a particular table to see what category it falls into. Then what do you do if the table was made in say 1976 but an updated rom was released in 1977 or something. Then there is always odd ball tables...

[toxie]

No, it's not that complicated, as usually it just depends on the hardware manufacturer and the hardware generation, both being not -that- varied and also not that hard to find out..

Also the default of 44kHz works well enough usually, but i'm just interested in the details and i'm sure it would also work out for other ppl, as there are tons of threads that carry a bit of experimental information, but no single thread that has some definite information on things..

Destruk and VPM coders to the rescue, please..

[toxie]

*bump*

by now i tried all kinds of combinations of the above mentioned settings, but with no real luck.. it's especially confusing as for some settings, the initial 30seconds or so of gameplay are awesomely working (no probs at all with sound), but then it gets worse without any real obvious reason..
seems like this is another item on my long pinball-coding-todo-list..

[thewool]

Hello Toxie,

on the subject of sound emulation, do yoiu think there is any possibility of the audio outputs of VP and vpinmame being separated? Basically to enable outputs to two different sound devices.

Thanks.

[toxie]

should be no problem, as one can always specify the device that is used for handling the sound output in directx.. so i guess one could just add this to the init code of the sound stuff in each component and have a dropbox somewhere in the user interface to select it..

[Liteuser]

Lots of other game emulators have different sound settings and audio plugins built for them. It would be nice if VP and or VPM had some kind of audio transform filter for surround sound or 3d sound and a EQ feature as well built into VP. I think that could be of help for some tables. Just a suggestion.

[jimmyfingers]

should be no problem, as one can always specify the device that is used for handling the sound output in directx.. so i guess one could just add this to the init code of the sound stuff in each component and have a dropbox somewhere in the user interface to select it..

Separating them could be kinda cool for cabinets to keep the vpm sounds at speaker towards the back and playfield sounds like solenoids and collisions on speakers placed throughout the cabinet. I suppose that might be what thewool was desiring in that feature enhancement - if not I am Glad to hear that it sounds like it would not be hard to add.

[thewool]

should be no problem, as one can always specify the device that is used for handling the sound output in directx.. so i guess one could just add this to the init code of the sound stuff in each component and have a dropbox somewhere in the user interface to select it..

Separating them could be kinda cool for cabinets to keep the vpm sounds at speaker towards the back and playfield sounds like solenoids and collisions on speakers placed throughout the cabinet. I suppose that might be what thewool was desiring in that feature enhancement - if not I am Glad to hear that it sounds like it would not be hard to add.

You hit the nail on the head Jimmy That's exactly what I had in mind, possiby using an application like this one to choose which audio goes to the desired soundcard (http://www.indievolume.com/). Some speakers in the cab just playing mechanical sounds would be pretty cool!

Thanks for taking this into consideration Toxie. Would be happy to help test this feature at any point in the future.

Cheers

[toxie]

Makes perfect sense, yes.. Never really thought about that.. Nice idea!!

[toxie]

Update: It's now commited and should get out to you guys with the next release (which isn't too far away).. And again: It makes a difference, as it's so much cooler to have two sources of sound, one in the backbox, one in the cab.. Thanks a lot thewool for the awesome idea!

[toxie]

small update, i edited the first post

[toxie]

just in case somebody still comes around here: try the newest VPM build, this should solve a myriad of sound stutter problems: http://www.vpforums....showtopic=27063

[hmueck]

Yesterday i was wondering if i should keep the 44100KHz setting in VPM, or try some modern settings.
48000 seem to work fine, but 96000 was reset to 44100 by VPINMAME.

[toxie]

i would recommend 48000 currently (or the actual sampling rate of the specific machine generation). everything else won't be useful anyhow, given that no machine actually operates at this high sampling rate, not even close.

[hmueck]

No, but it's like downsampling from 4K to FullHD - a little bit better end product.