sound stutters on win95 and win98

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rliegh
Posts: 26
Joined: Sat 26 Apr, 2014 1:09 am

sound stutters on win95 and win98

Post by rliegh »

Hi

I compiled a recent version of PCem and installed Windows 95 on it, and the sound stuttered badly, also the mouse moved very slowly. I recompiled it with the dynamic recompiler enabled, set the machine to a pentium 233MX and it didnt' appear to make any difference. I am using windows 7/64 bit on a 2011 imac ( ram: 12 gigs, cpu: 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with 6MB on-chip shared L3 cache ). I'm wondering if there's anything I can do or check to solve this; I mostly want to play with old bsds, but it would be nice to be able to play Final Fantasy VII in windows too, if possible.

Thanks for your help!
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SarahWalker
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Joined: Thu 24 Apr, 2014 4:18 pm

Re: sound stutters on win95 and win98

Post by SarahWalker »

What is the speed % displayed on the title bar? If this drops below 100% then sound will stutter, and you should reduce the speed of the CPU you're emulating. Given your host machine I can tell you that you have no chance of emulating a PMMX/233 at full speed.
rliegh
Posts: 26
Joined: Sat 26 Apr, 2014 1:09 am

Re: sound stutters on win95 and win98

Post by rliegh »

TomWalker wrote:What is the speed % displayed on the title bar? If this drops below 100% then sound will stutter, and you should reduce the speed of the CPU you're emulating. Given your host machine I can tell you that you have no chance of emulating a PMMX/233 at full speed.
I took it down to a pentium 75 and it was still bouncing around 64%, so I'm gonna fore-go using win9x for now, and just focus instead on seeing what runs around 100%.

Thanks for your help and for the emulator!
Battler
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Joined: Sun 06 Jul, 2014 7:05 pm

Re: sound stutters on win95 and win98

Post by Battler »

I think the biggest problem is that PCem does everything in the same thread. So sound playing slows down the CPU code, etc.
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SarahWalker
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Joined: Thu 24 Apr, 2014 4:18 pm

Re: sound stutters on win95 and win98

Post by SarahWalker »

CPU emulation is well over 90% of host CPU run time in most cases. Probably a few percent will be lost to sound + video through timer callbacks, but the main issue is that the CPU emulation simply isn't very quick.
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