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sound is very jerky when using sb emulation

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First post, by ike

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hallo

in many games the sound is jerky when im using sb emulation

depending on the game its more or less jerky but its noticable every time, also when i try to use sbpro or just sb instead of sb16 the sound is more smooth but its a bit jerky anyway and the quality is worse

i have tried many options in vdmsound like changing irq, buffer, performance options and some others but they make no difference

so i have a question - is it just my pc too slow (duron 650) for smooth sb emulation or is it something else that im not aware of?

i have attached short sample of sound from some game (please listen to this to the moment when voice begins), maybe it will be helpfull

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    vdms0000.mp3
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Reply 1 of 3, by DosFreak

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Probably too slow. NTVDM eats up processor cycles which takes away processing time needed for SB emulation. Have you tried adjusting the "idle sensitivity" option in the Vdmsound shortcut?

I would have you run system monitor to monitor your processor but it's not really necessary to do so since NTVDM by default eats up processor cycles like crazy from low-end processors to high-end processors. So unless you use the proper configuration you almost always experience the sound problems that you describe.

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Reply 2 of 3, by ike

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DosFreak wrote:

Have you tried adjusting the "idle sensitivity" option in the Vdmsound shortcut?

where is this option? i cant find it

maybe you mean "try to reduce cpu usage" option in performance tab? if so, yes i have tried that but nothing changes 😒

anyway, if vdmsound eats all cpu cycles even on fastest cpus then is sb emulation any better when run on modern processors like A64 or similar?

Reply 3 of 3, by DosFreak

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Nah, it's not VdmSound that's eating up the cycles.
It's NTVDM (Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista's DOS emulation layer).
Yeah, I think VDMSound refers to Idle Sensitivity as "try to reduce cpu usage....among other things", I'll have to look at it again tho.

As far as sound quality goes it depends on many things. Motherboard, sound card, OS, Drivers, speakers, cables, processor, etc..etc.

You could try using DosBox and seeing if the sound quality is better. Since you have a Duron tho don't expect to actually play very many games using DosBox (unless they are really old). With a computer that old I'd just have a 9x dual-boot instead of bothering with Windows XP.

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