Slow playback (Wave, midi, cdaudio)

[SA1988]

When I select speeds (on all emulated machines), higher than 120Mhz/133Mhz with cache "A bit", I get slow playback on Multimedia devices. Is there a fix for this issue (I know Win2000, Win98SE, and WinME are quite heavy for speeds that are lower than 100Mhz).

[SarahWalker]

Buy a faster host machine. PCem is slow.

The speed indicator in the title bar is an indicator for this sort of thing.

[SA1988]

actually my host speed is 3.3Ghz with 8GB of RAM (quite powerful) and I suspect it has something to do with cpu idle management, because it gets 100% of speed (which is normal for a main execution) when I move the mouse, also cpuidle pro 6.0 (for NT) and cpu idle 6.0 greatly increase perfomance on NT and Win9x and DOS: http://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=16&p=17

[Battler]

Buy a faster host machine. PCem is slow.

The speed indicator in the title bar is an indicator for this sort of thing.

First off, please don't assume we can accord a faster host machine. Remember we're now in the biggest crisis since 1929 and at least in my country, jobs are hard to find now. In SA1988's country, the situation is not much better.

Second off, PCem is too slow, sorry. I've run just about everything here - DOSBox, QEMU, Virtual PC 2007, VMWare, etc., and PCem is by far the slowest. When Little Big Adventure 2 runs fine in DOSBox but is too slow to be playable in PCem, that says a lot. I don't mean this an offense, PCem is a great emulator now, but the speed needs to improve.

[SarahWalker]

actually my host speed is 3.3Ghz with 8GB of RAM (quite powerful)

My machine is a similar spec. PCem currently averages about 80 host cycles for one emulated instruction, hence the upper limit is about 40-50 MIPS, which when emulating a 486-class CPU works out as somewhere between 66 and 133 MHz depending on what software is running. Use the status window to monitor what current CPU execution looks like. I am well aware of how poor this is.

When they are set up correctly, Win9x and NT will start idling the CPU when appropriate, which will show up in PCem as a very low instruction rate, which is why you keep seeing 100% until you get the emulated machine to actually start doing something. This is also why CPUidle appears to help.

First off, please don't assume we can accord a faster host machine.

Why do you think I'm assuming anything? I'm not saying you should buy a faster machine, I'm just pointing out that there are limitations to the emulator.

PCem is slower than DOSBox, QEMU, Virtual PC, VMWare etc because all of those emulators are either using dynamic recompilers or native execution, and PCem is just an interpreter. This is mainly because all of those emulators are older, and have more than one person working full-time on them. I've been wanting to work on a recompiler for a while now - I've written an ARM->x86 recompiler before, so could do an x86->x86 - but decided that compatibility was more important for now, and I've been wary of committing to a recompiler due to the sheer amount of time it would take. I'm intending to look at it for v10, but I'm not willing to guarantee anything at this stage.