LLE speed - Skies of Arcadia

[Tiay]

Hi!

I've been trying to get Skies of Arcadia working on a playable level, but it seems that the sound issue hasn't been fixed for ages looking at the amount of similiar posts.

Going via the tips I dumped le DSP and the audio seems to be perfect, but the huge problem is speed. I have a edible rig (i3-540@4ghz - 4gb hyperx - radeon 6870) which under normal circumstances easily throttles to 300%+ speeds.

When using LLE I have serious speed troubles. The game boots, menu music, splash video is great. All full FPS. When I pick New Game and the intro cinematic starts to play, the moment the Imperial ship shows up and the music starts playing I get a drop to 60% of speed, and it won't budge.

Is LLE really that slow it kills a 300% to 1/5 of it's speed, or am I missing something I could do boost it?
SoA is incredible in HD, but with the sound issues on HLE it's just unplayable.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

[ExtremeDude2]

Did you try "LLE on thread"?

[StripTheSoul]

LLE IS much slower than HLE, yes...unfortunately.

[Tiay]

@ExtremeDude2: Thank you, yes, it didn't change the speed even one bit unfortunately.

I'm surprised that audio emulation can gobble up such incredible amounts of CPU power, I don't know wether to think it's a problem in the way the LLE engine is written or it's just that complicated and only a stronger CPU is the solution.

There is no way to fix the audio via HLE I gather correctly?

[Duke Nukem]

Unfortunately a better CPU is to prefer when it comes to LLE emulation since it's 99.99% perfect in terms of sound emulation.

[RetroX]

Tiay: I did some profiling on that part and it looked like there is huge dsp load.
For example... normal games have like 6MIO dsp_get_long_acc()/sec while at that part there was 15MIO /sec while game was running @20%.
Another thing was unusually high % of opcodes being executed inside IROM.

This is similar to other games ("they have missing notes/instruments in HLE") like
- Tales Of Symphonia
- Mario Golf Toadstool Tour

[Tiay]

Thanks for the info, so it looks like it's the game itself. I noticed that when the music has little instruments, 100% speed is easy to achieve, whenever it becomes more 'orchestral' and many notes are played, slowdowns occur. Midi-stylish I guess.

Any chance the chopiness/missing notes can be fixed in HLE, or it's been long abandoned?

[LordVador]

Abandoned? I don't know but don't expect too much... As it was already said the best solution is LLE (for that game at least...)

[Duke Nukem]

I think HLE might get canned someday but not for a very long time.
You'll want perfect sound you use LLE anyway, for me HLE is as good as forgotten.