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Epic Pinball - menu music stutter, crashes when playing Enigma table

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First post, by morphine

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Hey, relatively long-time DOSBox user here. Thanks for all the great work!

Now, for the details: Epic Pinball's music in the menus (after the "Epic Pinball" screen) stutters, no matter how many CPU cycles I give it. Also, when playing the Enigma table, the game invariably crashes. Sometimes the DOSBox VM just hangs (I can change CPU speed, but it's still frozen). Besides the list below, anything else I can provide to try to solve this?

Dosbox version: 0.74
Game: Epic Pinball, full
Sound mode: Gravis Ultrasound, set to 44100Hz (mixer too), 22050 didn't help.
Video mode: DDraw, hq3x, fullscreen (1680x1050), double-buffered, ratio-locked; card set to vesa_oldvbe

Problems: music stuttering while in menus (in-game music ok), crashes or hangs after some time of playing Enigma table. Hang = DOSBox apparently keeps running because CPU cycles can be changed, but the VM is frozen.
Reproducibility: menu audio jerkiness - always, game crash - always (eventually)

Motherboard: Gigabyte P965-DS3
Processor: Core 2 Duo E6400
RAM: 4GB DDR2 800Mhz
GFX: ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB GDDR5
Audio: Realtek HD Audio ACL888
OS: Windows 7 x64

Reply 1 of 6, by rcblanke

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Did/could you try to use SB instead of GUS, morphine?

Reply 2 of 6, by morphine

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Using SB16 seems to have solved the crashing problem 😀. However, the music still stutters, even with a lot of CPU cycles. It's worse on the menus than in-game. It's not too bad but it's not smooth either. Any ideas?

Reply 3 of 6, by Stick

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I just loaded Epic Pinball, and I don't hear any "stutter" at the menus (or in-game). The music sounds real smooth, to me. So here's what I did just in case in helps.

Running "setup.exe", I chose "Sound Blaster 16". At the next screen (Select Playback Quality), I chose "Ultra high quality".

I'm using DOSBox 0.74. The only changes to the default .conf I made is:

fullscreen=true

and

cycles=fixed 50000

I'm sorry I can't offer any additional advice.

My DOSBox machine:
Core 2 Duo E8400
2GB DDR2
GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
Win XP Pro SP3

Reply 4 of 6, by morphine

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Ok, I've figured it out:

- Double-buffering causes the stuttering. "Keep aspect ratio" causes very minor skipping. Other games are fine with these settings though.
- Using the GUS leads to the game invariably crashing in Enigma (well at least this table, maybe others). Which is a shame, since it sounds so much better than the SB16.

I don't know the usual modus operandi for these things. Should I submit bug reports, edit the wiki regarding this game...?

Reply 5 of 6, by eL_PuSHeR

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The Readme says it all wrote:

fulldouble: Use double buffering in fullscreen. It can reduce screen flickering, but it can also result in a slow DOSBox.

Intel i7 5960X
Gigabye GA-X99-Gaming 5
8 GB DDR4 (2100)
8 GB GeForce GTX 1070 G1 Gaming (Gigabyte)

Reply 6 of 6, by morphine

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Well the thing is, we're not talking about a slow computer (Core i5 760, very recently upgraded), nor an abnormally high CPU cycles setting.

I did some experimenting with double-buffering on, and even with 200k cycles it would still stutter (I checked Task Manager to make sure the CPU wasn't overloaded). As mentioned in the FAQ, I also tried pretty low CPU cycles settings, which helped somewhat. Around 4500 the stuttering was almost gone, however some times the graphics were slow.

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