I am looking forward to keeping up with the latest & greatest 4.x Dolphin releases, primarily for playing thru Zelda Twilight Princess (GC). I predict my rig can handle LLE Audio and maintain 25+ fps late in the game; however, I know that once Zelda uCode is tackled, running this game on HLE Audio will eke out higher fps all-around. Therefore, I was wondering if this is an issue that the devs see being tackled in the next month or two? Or is development effort being focused elsewhere? Keep up the great work.
No one's working on the Zelda ucode HLE implementation currently. I've been looking at the code and doing a little debugging myself, but nothing serious.
Fwiw, TP works 99% of the time under HLE audio. Have tried it?
Roger that. I've played a few minutes of TP so far, but mostly been keeping up with the threads here as the occasional music-related freeze is encountered. From what I've read, using the GC Memory Card to save rather than save states will prevent getting to an un-passable freeze. Let me know if there's anything an average joe can do to help with the Zelda ucode work.
Zelda TP and HLE works most of time for me except when playing cutscenes (the background music go away) and in some rare cases (occurred with me only 2 times), all sound start disappearing slowly (some music instruments, then some SFXs) until the game become completely muted. Other than that, HLE audio works without major issues in TP...
There was a developer claiming to be working on fixing the looping issues with the HLE Zelda ucode a few or so years back. He either disappeared or gave up on fixing the issues with the current HLE implementation of the Zelda ucode. Imho if developers decided to fix AX audio then eventually they should decide to work on fixing the HLE Zelda ucode. The possibility is that developers are not interested in fixing the Zelda ucode because far less games are affected in comparison to AX audio, the issue is more complicated to fix or both.
I believe one of the reasons that zelda ucode wasn't overhauled, was the outcry around the "audio popping" during slowdown. This was a constant, nagging complaint that called into question all the great work that was put into the audio rewrite for AX-HLE. To this day, we still get people who "refuse" to upgrade to 4.0 and, rather than blame their snails or PCs or use OpenAL, they blame the developers for changing the audio system to something that, you know, works.
Since the AX-HLE rewrite, I have not had one audio based crash in any of my games after having literally tons all the time. It was damn necessary to have a DSP rom dump from your Wii if you wanted to use Dolphin back then, that's just how bad it was. Yet, when it finally gets fixed, there was an outcry or people complaining. That's my rant about the merge... lesse what the other reasons/issues are...
1: Zelda ucode isn't quite the mess that AX-HLE was, but it's a different beast.
2: The Developers are definitely interested in fixing it. Though there are less games affected, checkout the games. Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi's Mansion, Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, Pikmin 1/2, and there are others I'm probably missing. Those are all VERY popular games.
3: After working with AX-HLE, do you really think anyone would willingly subject themselves to more audio code.
4: Read this,
http://blog.delroth.net/2013/07/why-dolp...rocessing/ This article is amazing and explains everything you want to know.
I agree with JMC47. I am not a Dolphin contributor but I am a coder and understand how much work and life goes into projects such as this. When ppl talk down about the projects for silly reasons, you might as well have slapped the developers children. Especially when all the user has to do is upgrade their crap pc.
Anywho, I digress: I have never had any issues playing TP with HLE other than the sound messing up. No freezes or crashes. I now use LLE up until end game because my rig is unable to get full speed, so I switch to HLE, but it is still en enjoyable experience and I thank all the folks who worked on the latest audio issues. I can only imagine how much work went into them.
You know.. some people are idiots. It's best to ignore these kinds of people and not let them bring you down. When the developers finally fixed AX audio I thought it was awesome since I could use HLE instead of LLE most of the time to improve my performance since I only had a first gen i7. I can play most games on my Core2Duo E7500 thanks to fixed AX audio and games don't sound like complete trash as they did prior to all the fixes to AX audio, backends and mixer.