schellingb
Need for speed SE loses sound effects on android
A clean Need for speed SE ISO when installed and played, the sound effects stopped working after one race. All settings are default in Pure and RetroArch. Also there is a one second freeze that happens at the pure menu and in-game. The detail statistics window will disappear for a second when it happens and this repeats every 3 minutes. I wrote to you about this freezing problem with other games like realms of chaos and twinsen's odyssey. It does this with cycles set at 40,000 to 77,000. Also when the screens transition, the emulation speed drops to 88% momentarily. I think this was also mentioned in issue #317 which is now closed but not fixed imo. I'm starting to believe this is either a duplicate frames issue or a retroarch screen rendering issue.
So this is Need for Speed Special Edition, and not Need for Speed 2 SE? Because NFS2:SE has known sound issues. I just tried NFS Special Edition under DOS and running on RA 1.21 + Windows 11 and it runs fine after multiple races, with no sound problems, freezing or anything else. So this seems to be Android specific.
In another post i read that your Android device has a Snapdragon 665. There's a good chance that that's the cause of the emulation speed dropping to 88%, because that's a mid-range SoC from 2019, and a mid 90's 3D game like NFS which is entirely software rendered will be pretty CPU demanding for the SD 665.
I've got many game benchmarks here on a Snapdragon 845, which has roughly 50% faster CPU performance and 2.5x faster GPU performance, so it will give you some idea of what your SD 665 will be capable of.
It's weird because I can play Blood at 320x200 or 640x480 at 77,000 cycles (Pentium 100) and it doesn't do any of those problems either. I tried different irqs and restarting the core and reinstalling the program. The problem with need for speed still persist. Please try the full ISO of twinsen's odyssey (you need to actually play it) and need for speed se, and realms of chaos on your SD 845 phone and see if you get the freezes and audio stop working I'm describing. Thanks for replying.
I just tried NFS Speed Special Edition on Android 15 on a Galaxy S23 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) and it worked perfectly. I did 3 full races, and the music and sounds played on each track (and each race has 3 separate tracks, so 9 tracks in total). There wasn't a single freeze either and i'm very sensitive to stuttering/frame rate drops but there wasn't any. Emulation speed is also locked to 100%.
You could try:
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~~removed reference to piracy~~
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Make sure your Android device isn't thermal throttling, because that could be causing the freezing. I don't recommend doing this, but whenever i run into weird annoying Android issues like this, i put my Android phones in the freezer for 20+ minutes to make absolutely sure that they're not thermal throttling lol...
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Are your RA audio settings using the default? I see that you've changed them in a previous post. I'm using defaults.
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Try using these two Core settings but set everything else to default:
Core Options:
Video > 3dfx Voodoo Performance > Hardware OpenGL
System > Memory Size > 256MB
256MB is totally overkill for this game but those settings are what i already had configured and they worked great.
Okay I know my Snapdragon 665 probably can't run Pentium 75 games. But I just played a game at 7800 cycles (386 33mhz PC) and even at that un-demanding level dosbox pure still freezes for a second making the detailed information banner disappear also before resuming. It does this even at the dosbox pure start menu! (Best observed when freshly exiting a game) Sometimes when it does it in the start menu there is a buzzing sound. I think poloniumrain's phone is so strong that it just Powers through this glitch and y'all don't notice it. If anybody has weak phones please try to observe this. I truly believe this is a problem with how dosbox interfaces with retroarch and handles duplicate frames. Please investigate more. Thanks for the responses.
I truly believe this is a problem with how dosbox interfaces with retroarch and handles duplicate frames
And you base this random seemingly baseless assumption on what?
As your device is the one showing these symptoms, we rely on you providing more information. Figure out which games freeze at what point. Try it over and over to find a repeatable test pattern that reliably reproduces the issue. Then, there are 2 other DOSBox cores for RetroArch. Try the same games with the same settings on the other cores so we can compare.
Thermal throttling on mobile devices is the obvious culprit with random freezes though. 15 years ago I had an app on my Android phone that showed some graphs of the CPU clock and stuff. Is that still a thing? Maybe see if that is still a thing and try to observe if you see your phone clocking down when freezes happen.
Okay I use CPU float monitor overlay updating at 250ms. When I see the freeze happen, my big 4 cores stay locked at 2 Ghz... My maximum frequency. (I am emulating max cycles up to Pentium 100) playing Star Wars TIE fighter CD-ROM. The four small cores clock up to 1.3 Ghz only when I touch the screen for controls otherwise they idle at min frequency (~650 MHz), they seem unaffected by the freeze. The freeze happens every 3 or 5 minutes more or less at the same part of the game. A lot of games have this issue... Oddly I don't see this in Blood running at 640x480 (averaging 18-22 fps). I am using the android retroarch dosbox pure.
Okay now I do another thing you ask and try regular dosbox for retroarch. It is confirmed that dosbox pure is the only one that has this 1 second freezing problem that does not happen in regular android retroarch dosbox. I used the same twinsen's odyssey ISO and installation method on both dosbox versions. I ran the pre-installed version and the manually installed version and regular dosbox ran just fine without the one second freeze every 3 to 5 minutes. All settings are pretty much default. Also it is known that an old Pentium 4 at 3 GHz can emulate a Pentium at 133Mhz. My Snapdragon 665 is significantly more powerful than a Pentium 4 and should be able to run most dos games without throttling.
Okay to clarify we now know that slow writes to compressed saves on Android is the problem of the temporary freezing. I see now that you only lose sound effects by using the replay function and pausing playback before exiting the replay. If you keep the replay playing and then select done you won't lose sound effects. So it's a minor irritant.