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Asychronous Audio...and why it should not have been removed

I want to point out that first...I find it easier to play games using Asynchronous audio when using any emulator of consoles that used optical discs. The truth of the matter is this. The accuracy of emulation of hardware using the optical disc based media (ie CD's and DVD's and mini-DVD's...) depends upon asynchronous audio.

I have heard the excuse that since asynchronous audio has been taken away, Dolphin has become more "accurate" in emulation. This cannot be farther from the truth than saying that the grass is blue. The problem is that the GameCube used a variable bit-rate audio format rather than what normal CD's typically use (meaning CD's use the synchronous continual bit-rate format). In this case, it means that VBR formatting allowed the special effect audio to synchronize with the XFB and EFB video input and output in the console...but allowed asynchronous playing of music. This freed up a lot of computing power in the console's somewhat limited (but very powerful and extremely scalable) CPU and platform which is based around the IBM Power architecture. I do not see how it is more accurate to use synchronous audio as more accurate to the console because it is impossible to make VBR audio synchronous at all without making things skip.

If these complaints are always from the same person, why would anyone go through so much trouble to create thousands of zombie accounts to get what they want?
 

kode54

New member
While the DSP was asynchronous in its own right, it ran at the same speed relative to the rest of the console. Technically, the only reason it can stall when emulated synchronously is if your system is too slow to run the emulator. Asynchronous emulation of the DSP, regardless of how well the main core keeps up, would only serve to produce uninterrupted audio, which is only slowed down in tempo.

Slowdown of the type which would ordinarily cause that to happen, or cause stutters now, would not happen with a real console. It has a tendency to cause synchronization problems, which may manifest as the games outright crashing. They were asynchronous, but not that asynchronous.

Perhaps it is time for you to upgrade your computer? After all, they did not design the Game Cube or Wii to act like it has a core CPU or GPU which is half as fast as spec, or even worse, if you cannot afford the full speed console. Some things just cannot process as fast as actual hardware in an emulator, and that causes the emulator to slow down. Introducing the variance of the DSP running full speed all the time, regardless of how slow the core is running, again, can cause games to crash, or otherwise misbehave. Are you following me?
 
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Wally123

Aspie
I do follow, but I never really fully expected it to run perfectly...however...Dolphin also doesn't seem to fully utilize a computer's GPU at all. It would be nice to have a good graphics speedup utilizing that. Other than MP...the games I play work just perfectly...and while I admire the attempt at accuracy, speed is also important. If dolphin utilized the GPU a bit more (note only 10% of my GPU ever gets used using dolphin and it's not a hardware bottleneck as my PS2 and Original XBox emulation is flawless and regular gaming is freaking awesome) I'm sure it'd be perfect...but it actually doesn't. It's relying on integrated graphics or for the sake of accuracy "CPU" only. Maybe I should run my audio through my graphics card's HDMI cable to see if that does anything to redirect some sort of power...

The other thing I have noticed is that I always had crashes when using headphone jacks on my computer when when Async was being used...I started using my digital coax cable and the issue with async audio disappeared and merely slowed the tempo a bit.
 

winter_mute

Galactic FREAK
Moderator
Dolphin also doesn't seem to fully utilize a computer's GPU at all. It would be nice to have a good graphics speedup utilizing that.
Dolphin, as any emulator need CPU power to emulate console GPU instructions. Graphic card only enhance visuals and ofc displays it on your screen. So if you want utilize your graphic card power boost up visuals with fullhd resolution, hi-res textures, filters/shaders, etc.

And slightly off-topic, but could you tell me what emulator are you using to play any Xbox games in a playable state?
Also wonder about that. AFAIK there are 3 working xb emulators, xeon, cxbx, dxbx, and none of them I would describe as good, or even able to run commercial titles without major problems.
 
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etking

New member
Without async audio all AMD APU users and all mobile Intel Sandybridge users with a good GPU cannot use Dolphin anymore. While Dolphin 3.0-750 can play games like Mario Kart Wii and Xenoblade perfectly fine at good speeds, the current version only outputs garbage as audio.

If the developers would bring back a simple option to use the old audio code, the number of PCs powerful enough to work with Dolphin would be 10 times higher.

I used to actively play Zelda SS, Xenoblade Chronicles, Mariokart Wii and even Mario Galaxy on my mobile i7+GT555M and have written many bug reports, but with the current version of Dolphin my PC got tot weak to play even Gamecube games. This is just stupid and a slap in the face of most users because I am by far not the only one that has major issues with the missing async audio.

Dolphin was once a great piece of software but the current developers did a lot of harm by expelling 90% of their users with wrong design decisions, making it impossible for a normal real world PC to get audio instead of garbage.

The argument that async audio causes accuracy problems is just made up as there were no problems before and the current code enforces time stretch and async audio in a arbitrary way. Of course it also fixes some quality problems but not because it is now synchronized.

The old audio code would run as well and I see absolutely no point why they do not add a compatibility option to use the old faster code on older hardware that requires it. Especially since 90% of the gaming PCs on the world are older hardware and not even the fastest overclocked i7-Haswell is fast enough to always reach fullspeed with the new code.

And by the way I never created any zombie account anywhere.
 
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