Re: [hatari-devel] Fix for Falcon's noisy sound

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I tested music playback applications from our compatibility list.

* GemPlay "AM" playback sounds good now (unlike earlier)

* AceMidi demo and AceTracker sound good despite frameskip of 1.
  In AceTracker case, also AM module playback sounds now good, at
  least until frameskip raises (i.e. my CPU is too slow for DSP emu).

* FlexTrax still has some awful loud noise in the background
  after one starts playing anything (even single notes). Full
  FlexTrax module playback is too heavy for my machine
  (it's constantly at max frameskip)

* FalcAMP MP3 playback still complains about DSP timeouts (-> no sound)

* FlaySID SID playback still works only for YM, DSP playback is silent

* Aniplay MP3 playback says that it cannot synchronize DSP and
  compat list says that this uses DMA + DSP


Note: right from boot, I get writepos warnings constantly.


	- Eero

On 10/07/2016 10:33 PM, Nicolas Pomarède wrote:
> Le 06/10/2016 à 00:12, Nicolas Pomarède a écrit :
>
> > There's a second problem with falcon sound : sometimes, there's no DMA
> > sound at all (I often get this with 030 demo by Doug). This is a
> > different issue, but the good news is that I found a way to fix it too.
> > I need to fully check it, but I'm confident this will be OK.
>
> Hi
>
> regarding this problem, a case to reproduce it would be the following :
> I want to watch "030" demo by DML, so I start Hatari in Falcon mode.
> As this demo requires FPU + more RAM, I press F12 and set FPU to 68882.
> When I exit pref screen, Hatari asks to reset the machine to take the
> changes into account.
>
> At this point, this is where the crossbar 25 MHz interrupt gets
> completely disabled and never gets active later. So there's no more
> sound under Falcon in that case ;(
> But if you start Hatari with FPU already enabled and don't need to reset
> it to change prefs, then sound will be OK.
>
> This is why some people (including me :) ) often had the feeling of
> sound randomly not working at all.
>
> There's a nasty situation at the moment where shortcut keys are tested
> during the internal VBL handler. But if the shortcut requires a reset,
> then the VBL handler will still try to ack the current int, except it's
> not the VBL anymore, it can be any int that was re-enabled during the
> reset part.
>
> In the case of the falcon, this nuked the 25 Mhz sound int used for DMA
> sound :(
>
> This is now fixed, so hopefully Falcon DMA sound should be really more
> stable now. A better fix will be made after Hatari 2.0 is released, to
> handle shortcut keys in the main cpu loop, not during the interrupt'
> callback handler.
>
> Let me know about game/demo/program not using DSP for sound that would
> still not work, I hope there's not that much now :)
>
> Nicolas