Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Nestopia Nestopia 1.41 unofficial release

Alright, guys, I think me and c0d3h4x0r have finally gotten to the bottom of this. It turned out to be driver issue. The newest Creative drivers for my soundcard and the newest SoundMAX drivers for my onboard chip both exhibited this issue. As soon as I uninstalled either one I had installed for testing and used the standard Windows HDAD drivers, this issue disappeared completely on two of my desktop machines here.
Yes, it appears only Realtek and Microsoft have gotten it right so far--Of course, I'd also like to hear that from CMedia, IDT, and Sigmatel chip users. Funny thing is, I immediately also noticed more FPS (beyond the usual margin of error) in both recent games and demanding emulators such as Dolphin and PCSX2. So the solution for now is to use Windows' standard HDAD drivers and go bug SoundMAX and especially Creative to fix their buggy mess. It's sad to not be able to use your manufacturer's drivers, but hey, if there are alternatives available...

By the way, FireBrandX managed to fix his problems via upping the 2D clocks of his ATI 5770 HD card's CCC profile. He was actually suffering from a known problem which can also cause stuttering issues watching 1080p movies via DXVA.

hi all,

i'm having a small issue with nestopia that i'm hoping i can get resolved.

i recently installed "soft 15" so that i can get my 800x600 arcade monitor to display 1024x768. i've gone thru al my emu's and with a bit of tweaking, i've gotten them all to display correctly.

nestopia tho pans vertically. meaning, to see the top/bottom of the screen, i have to use the mouse to scroll up/down. i have the monitor mirrored to my projector and it is displaying correctly (the projector handles 1024x768 natively).

i was having this same panning issue within windows and a few other emus but after forcing the refresh rate, they became fine.

so, my long winded question, is there a way to select a ustom refresh rate within nestopia or force nestopia to use the desktop resolution/refresh rate?

fyi, my refresh rate is set at 84.

thanks all for any input

han7solo: Does unchecking "auto" under "monitor frequency" in the video options fix the problem?

checked, unchecked, no difference. i also checked/unchecked the vsynch option under timing, still the same.

i'm at a loss, those are the exact kind of options in other emu's that fixed my issue...

couldn't get it to behave with my set up so unfortunately, i had to move over to fceux

EDIT! i take that back, i found a setting in my ati catalyst control center that forces apps that aren't playing nice to run at my specified refresh rate.

I'm still getting the input lag when running in fullscreen.

PC Specs:
Windows 7 x64
3.0GHz Intel Core2Duo
4GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 9800GT
Monitor 1:1920x1080 [This it the one I am running NESTopia on]
Monitor 2:1440x900

NESTopia Settings:
Video:
Device: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT
Mode: 1024x768
Filter: Standart [No Scanlines, no Bilinear]
16 bit
Memory Pool: Video
Monitor Frequency: Auto

Timing:
Synchronize to Refresh Rate
VSync
Use high-precision timer
Enable triple buffering
Default speed

I think that's comprehensive enough. If not let me know and I'll post the log/xml.

Please either post your log file or send it to me in a private mail.

nestopia.xml

nestopia.log

EDIT: Those files are taken after I ran it with fullscreen set to 1920x1080 to see if maybe the lag had something to do with downscaling the resolution to 1024x768 on the LCD monitor. It didn't.

Thank you very much gummybear and c0d3h4x0r! I had been having the exact same problem gummybear described for a while now and spent countless hours trying to determine the source. I knew it wasn't specifically a problem with Win7 x64, because Nestopia had been working great for me. I noticed the problem after installing a new video card a while back, going from an nVidia to an ATI one. So I was under the misguided belief that it was a video driver issue and the sound glitching was some side effect of it being unable to sync correctly.

When I think back, I do believe I updated Creative drivers sometime around exchanging video cards. I guess I'm not surprised it's a problem with their drivers, they are notoriously shitty. Only reason I still use their cards is because all others seem to have problems with multichannel sound in games.

Anyways, what I've done is left my Creative X-Fi as the default system device and reinstalled my HT Omega Claro+ (C-Media based) and have Nestopia use that card. Then I hooked up the line out of the Claro to the line in of the X-Fi so I get the best of both worlds.

BTW, how did you determine it was a sound driver issue? How is Nestopia using it in such a way that causes problems but no other emulators (or anything else) have this problem?

It was really very simple in the end: Uninstalling Creative's bad drivers and using Windows' default high definition audio device driver fixed the stuttering completely. I could reproduce this every time I tried.

As for why only Nestopia seems to suffer from this, I'm not really sure and c0d3h4x0r hasn't ventured any guess so far. I thought it may be the DSBCAPS_GETCURRENTPOSITION2 flag in NstDirectSound.cpp, as I've read that the GetCurrentPosition implementation in Creative's shitty drivers messes up the hardware buffers, but I'm really very much out of my league here and this is something c0d3h4x0r would have to investigate. He doesn't seem to have a Creative card and couldn't reproduce the problem in the first place, so I'm not sure if he'd be successful.

By the way, FirebrandX also demonstrated that due to ATI's cards being underclocked by their drivers too much in 2D mode, this can also manifest as unstable VSYNCing and thus be followed by sound stuttering. If you've already edited your CCC profile to rectify this and the Creative card was still the culprit, well, that only adds to the evidence against Creative's drivers.

Their drivers are a buggy, bloated mess which barely works adequately, and yet over there no one seems to care. I understand they've been going through rough financial times (they're slowly becoming obsolete thanks to integrated chips) and might not have had as much to spend on driver development, but the state they've left them in is in disarray. Their forums are filled with complaints regarding that.