Sound Plugin Development

[the_randomizer]

Originally Posted by Azimer

Testing for regressions is a pain in the ass. I mostly have a set of roms I use a test images and cycle through them when I make every incremental change to ensure I don't mess something up. If it's a major rewrite, I copy the source file so I can refer to it later if I end up with serious regressions. That is all I can suggest.

SSB is annoying and part of my cycle of test roms. The XA2 plugin works best with PJ 2.x.

I am releasing my source code for all to contribute to on github. https://github.com/Azimer/AziAudio

Thank you for all the hard work you're doing, man, keep it up

[Frank74]

Can't build due to missing xaudio2.h. Damn xaudio2, its pointless and slow in XP anyway.

[RPGMaster]

Originally Posted by Azimer

Testing for regressions is a pain in the ass. I mostly have a set of roms I use a test images and cycle through them when I make every incremental change to ensure I don't mess something up. If it's a major rewrite, I copy the source file so I can refer to it later if I end up with serious regressions. That is all I can suggest.

It sure is a pain. I think I got the hang of it now though . I just have a bad habit of not making backup copies. Even this week, I had to use file restore .

Originally Posted by Azimer

SSB is annoying and part of my cycle of test roms. The XA2 plugin works best with PJ 2.x.

Testing the intro in that game sure is a pain. Too many issues. Turns out that the stuttering seems to be caused by the CPU recompiler & video plugin, although I still don't know why some audio plugins don't have the stuttering.

[Azimer]

Originally Posted by Frank74

Can't build due to missing xaudio2.h. Damn xaudio2, its pointless and slow in XP anyway.

This is available through the DirectX SDK... the lastest one available for XP. It is rather pointless for XP.

Originally Posted by RPGMaster

It sure is a pain. I think I got the hang of it now though . I just have a bad habit of not making backup copies. Even this week, I had to use file restore .
Testing the intro in that game sure is a pain. Too many issues. Turns out that the stuttering seems to be caused by the CPU recompiler & video plugin, although I still don't know why some audio plugins don't have the stuttering.

I found it to be a buffering problem... but some of it also is at a certain point in that intro the graphics/cpu usage skyrockets momentarily. I certainly get less when I change the buffer from 0x600 to 0x800 or 0xC00. I haven't found a good value to use.

[RPGMaster]

Originally Posted by Azimer

I found it to be a buffering problem... but some of it also is at a certain point in that intro the graphics/cpu usage skyrockets momentarily. I certainly get less when I change the buffer from 0x600 to 0x800 or 0xC00. I haven't found a good value to use.

Thanks for the input . I did notice that typically in intros, I had to use a higher number for the buffer size, compared to normal gameplay.

Just did some testing, and now I think I understand the issue. In resource intensive scenarios, the buffer needs to be higher. I guess I see what people mean now, when they say lower buffer requires a faster cpu. That also explains why it seems kinda random sometimes.

[HatCat]

Originally Posted by Frank74

Can't build due to missing xaudio2.h. Damn xaudio2, its pointless and slow in XP anyway.

I managed to finish a pull request to get it compiling via MinGW, if it's installed to C:\MinGW. Haven't gotten the XAudio2 portion of it working yet, though I can build the plugin with GCC/g++ now and use it to play sound from Project64 via DirectSound.

Though I have no idea how Azimer will be able to respond to it since it's a relatively large fork.

Although I have little preference between DirectSound and XAudio2 since they are both DirectX, COM-based, C++-bound mediums of Microsoft's control.

[Frank74]

I'll try your branch. I didn't have dsound headers either, so downloaded the June 2010 DX SDK, and it has xaudio2 as well.

Been playing with Steingberg's ASIO 2.3 SDK. 413kb for ASIO SDK vs 571Mb for DX SDK.

[HatCat]

I think I read that might be the only way to get XAudio2 working with this MinGW build, read some instructions online saying you have to install the Microsoft SDKs and include that to the MinGW include directories/paths so that gcc will just read that.

I had the standard <dsound.h> that everyone seems to be using and/or including with the source to their projects, though, so I just uploaded that to my fork of it. Unfortunately for the time being there's still that bug where starting emulation with the DirectSound plugin uses up a full CPU thread, at least on my end.

[Azimer]

Originally Posted by HatCat

Though I have no idea how Azimer will be able to respond to it since it's a relatively large fork.

I will have to do a few build tests to ensure I can get it compiled using the VS2013 IDE with no obvious flaws and have to take your word for it on the rest with MinGW. I should have a spot of time this evening to do so.

[HatCat]

Yeah, think I checked about 4 to 6 times in-between some commits on MSVC to check that none of my MinGW changes, accidentally'd anything in the MSVC build. Seemed to work fine for me. (Well might have only ran it by the audio playback in actual runtime testing like once.)

Also I can always edit/update the pull request branch if you see anything that looks like there might be a more understandable way to do it. I'm used to doing that a bit from zilmar's feedback on my project64 PRs haha.