Can't Play Skies of Arcadia Legends W/O Audio Lag?

[Requiesta de Silencia]

So I'm running into some lag with Skies of Arcadia legends where it will slow down on my PC at certain, more intensive points. The video "seems" to be fine but the audio just isn't keeping up.

I have:
Asus Desktop PC CM6330_CM6730_CM6830 Series
Intel Core i5-3350P CPU @ 3.10GHz (quad core)
6.00 GB RAM
64-bit Operating System, x64-based processor
AMD Radeon HD 7470 Series

It's a little dated but powerful enough to play AC 1, 2 + expansions, and 3 without any lag. Which was what I got it for in the first place.

Here is my configuration:















Is there anything else I can do to increase the framerate/audio rate?

Oh and one more question, is there any way to disable shadows in this game? The shadow quality is just as bad as it said in the wiki and I know that removing shadow calculations can speed up the game...so I figure if I could remove shadows it'd be killing two birds with one stone. Speed up the game and get rid of those really creepy block shadows.

[delroth]

If the game does not run at 100% speed, audio will go slower and stutter. That's not a bug, it's just how GameCube audio works.

The performance of PC games has no correlation with performance of games in Dolphin since Dolphin is a lot more CPU intensive than most PC games.

To make the game a bit faster, use EFB to Texture in Graphics Config > Hacks. This might help with your performance issues.

Disabling shadows rendering isn't possible if the game does not provide the option in the first place. It also wouldn't help with performance at all. I don't know what gave you this idea, but it's wrong.

[Requiesta de Silencia]

(09-09-2013, 02:03 AM)delroth Wrote: If the game does not run at 100% speed, audio will go slower and stutter. That's not a bug, it's just how GameCube audio works.

The performance of PC games has no correlation with performance of games in Dolphin since Dolphin is a lot more CPU intensive than most PC games.

To make the game a bit faster, use EFB to Texture in Graphics Config > Hacks. This might help with your performance issues.

Disabling shadows rendering isn't possible if the game does not provide the option in the first place. It also wouldn't help with performance at all. I don't know what gave you this idea, but it's wrong.

Guess I'll use the EFB to texture and see how it goes then.

Also in some emulators such as NullDC, you can remove shadow calculations which will speed up the emulation process considerably. I know that because I started with NullDC and ended up choosing dolphin after testing the former out. So it IS possible to do so (seeing as I did so in the dreamcast version of this same game) but just not in this emulator I guess.

[Shonumi]

EFB to RAM is only necessary for certain menus and the World Map to look right. If you can deal with those (I did, for 50 hours of gameplay ) then I second delroth's suggestion to use EFB to Texture.

Keep in mind that NullDC is a DC emulator, not a GC emulator, and certainly not the Dolphin emulator. What works in one emulator doesn't necessarily apply to another. Not only are they using different code to emulate different hardware, the game code (the actual assembly instructions on the discs) is going to be different between the DC and GC versions.

[Requiesta de Silencia]

Well here's hoping it helps :3 when I get home to test it out xD

And I know that I'm just saying that it's not impossible to do depending on the emulator. It's one of those nitpicky impossible vs. impossible with this specific scenario situations....it's ocd ;3;

[Shonumi]

(09-09-2013, 03:13 AM)Requiesta de Silencia Wrote: And I know that I'm just saying that it's not impossible to do depending on the emulator. It's one of those nitpicky impossible vs. impossible with this specific scenario situations....it's ocd ;3;

I get that; my intention was to say that simply because one emulator does something doesn't mean another emulator can, i.e. it's not always possible by default. The better answer is "it depends", followed by an explanation of course.

Anyway, if you're wondering about your hardware, it should be more than enough to handle this game. Before I OCed I was at 3.3GHz (no turbo boosting either) and I ran this game without FPS or audio issues. You may find that you have to use D3D9 instead of OpenGL if EFB to Texture doesn't work out.

[delroth]

Yeah, on Radeon GPUs D3D9 still has better performance than OGL.

[Requiesta de Silencia]

Nope it still lags so terribly in enough parts that it's pretty much unplayable. Might wanna tack on a warning to Skies' thread in the gamecube section that it requires one heck of a processor to do anything without lag :/

Guess it's back to the gamecube for me on this one.

[Shonumi]

So EFB to Texture and D3D9 didn't help? Skies of Arcadia was never a demanding game to begin with, even when it required LLE audio for proper sound. I got away with 3.3GHz when using LLE, and HLE audio was definitely less demanding. Dunno what to say.

[Requiesta de Silencia]

What were your other specs because it lagged when Fina had that flashback after she was rescued by Vyse in the games...opening thing...must...spoil...nothing...for...random...guests...

Anyway during the silver society flashback and even during the opening intro cinematic (if you don't press start when the text begins) when it showed the Queen's room it started lagging. Just a little bit on the second one but a TON on the first.

Quick Note:
I switched over to the dreamcast emulator, NullDC, and it seems to work perfectly. But I ran into something very specific/interesting that I thought might help the dolphin developers. In the AICA plugin for NullDC I tried setting the sound buffer size to 4096 from 2048 and it caused the same audio lag I'm having right now in dolphin. But when I switched it back to 2048 all was well.

Does this mean anything to anyone?