98% Satisfied, 2% P.O.'ed...

96% Satisfied, 4% P.O.'ed...

(Whilst running under VisualBoy Advance 1.7.2, on a P4 2.53 GhZ, with 512 MB DDR SDRAM, 64MB DDR SDRAM Intel Extreme Graphics - Crappy, but hey, I need to wait more to get an upgrade - , and other carp - yes, carp - ...)

For the past 2 years, I've possessed this computer, and everything on it runs perfectly fine... scratch that. There are certain programs that don't run perfectly fine. However, I've managed... again, scratch that. One program, one problem in particular has caused me to break down. As you may have read from the beginning of my post, this particular post deals with VisualBoy Advance 1.7.2 (and earlier, as the program and problem have occured for quite some time - 2 years, as previously stated, on this computer, at least - ) , and I shall now proceed to describe the problem in whatever detail I can muster.

Actually, how much detail is necessary? It's a simple thing, really. No matter what generation Game Boy game I play (*.GB, *.SGB, *.GBC, *.GBA...), they all run fine, or at least, they WOULD run fine, but there's something stopping it all from running at 100%. Jerky music, jerky sound, jerky motion (though it's not all that bad, because... - read on - ) , despite the fact that the top of the screen claims that it's running at a rate of (a randomly chosen number of) 96-100%.

It's also amusing to note that the problem was able to be temporarily solved (back whilst I was running at 1024x768) by going into Full Screen mode at the aforementioned resolution, hitting ESC to hide the menu, and then saving a state or pausing and unpausing (CTRL-P kinda pausing from within the emulator, not START button stuff) the emulation in progress. Nowadays, running at 1280x1024 with a new monitor, it's not such a good idea to do such things, as the emulator seems to have learned my tricks and is now no longer accepting them, heh... either way, it WAS annoying to do that when the problem got worse (try it, do something now about 100 times in a row, at an interval of 20 seconds in between each action). Annoying, but amusing, nonetheless.

So, it's all carp - yes, carp, mwahahaha - like this that made me think to myself, "Game Boy games (any sort) ... running at a rate of 98-100%... on a computer with these specs? Heh, where have I seen this similar problem before? Oh, yes, on emulators that actually emulate true power-chuggers (Seattle Hardware & ST-V on MAME, etc...) ".

So, my question is, what's the problem here, and what's the list 'o steps for solving it?

Thanks in advance.

Clements said:

Try deactivating frameskip and setting the skip manually to a value since it skips too many frames on fast systems. Experiment with these values until the frame rate is smooth. If it's still slow and you are using too many filtering options, turn them down.

Click to expand...

*Skippable Note: Previous post edited slightly, look over if ya wanna*

*/me looks over settings*

Automatic Frameskip already disabled (learned about this back when I started using MAME about 6 years ago, neat little trick - the speeding up with this - , ain't it?), there is no Throttling, Filter Options state Normal, Disable MMX is not checked, and Interframe Blending is None (I don't use filters, as I don't need no fancy schmancy graphics - Computer Space & Pong addict, here - , heh) .

However, your suggestion of the manually setting the Frameskip never came to mind until now. I did use this back on an old K6 300 and set it to 4 to get a decent framerate on some GBC games back in the day (when those were still the norm, heh) , but my memories of that sort of thing got a bit rusty today. Thanks for reminding me of that. I'll now be checking with setting that, I'll report back with results if I should find a good setting.

It would also be neat if there was a GB/GBA benchmark for emulators that said something along the lines of "change the Manual Frameskip setting until the blinking 1x1-or-so box and the beeping sounds made synchronize with each other as best they can" and had the blinking box and sound to match the text (pathetic description, but I'm not really good at describing things like that - for a better description of what I'm looking for, load up the MegaZeux game "MegaZeux Superstar", and check out the test at the beginning of the game), but that may not be necessary. If there is one however, and it's gone over my eyes without me even noticing it, please suggest/mention it. On an amusing note, for this purpose, I'm currently using "Pia Carrot he Youkoso! 3.3" 's Config screen, as it almost fits what I'm looking for, somehow.

Any other suggestions are also welcome.