Arpicade 3.x with Mame 203 - Static Audio?

[dayoff]

Hi all,

I'm trying to narrow down a static sound I keep hearing from my setup...

I have a fresh install of Arpicade 3.x (patched as mentioned in the update thread), using all mame 203 vertical roms which I validated with romcenter and they're all complete. I have 'attract mode' sounds turned off in each rom, wherever possible. What I'm noticing is that on nearly every game, I still get some faint static noises coming through...even though the game isn't playing 'audio' in attract mode, it still comes through the speaker. It almost sounds like a loose wire being connected..just a generic static sound at random places (it's not in sync with the attract mode activity in any predictable way). Speaker connected to my jamma harness and using the amp on the Arpicade board). For example, I have super basketball running...and it'll go for 15 seconds or so then 'click click'...pause for a few seconds, then another 'click'...then go for 10 seconds, 'click'....another 10 seconds, and three 'click' sounds.. it's not even the same pattern.

Everything else is rolling along well...all the games work, vertical display...mainly early games, so i'm not pushing the limits of the Pi 3B+... I read some notes here about going into the slider settings within the game and adjusting the refresh rate, but I don't see that option in any of the in-game settings.

Any thoughts are appreciated!
Pete

[dee2eR]

Sounds a bit odd... I'm happy to look into it. What is a specific game you have the issue on? I'd rather not do a bunch of checks just to discover I've picked a game that doesn't do it. Also, does the same happen with MAME 0.172? It could be MAME settings or something... I set them up at different times so maybe I've missed something on 203, not sure yet.

[dayoff]

So I played around with it a bit last night. I found some periods of time where it was barely happening...but then found a correlation to the noise when I accessed the PI over wifi... I queued up a bunch of directories to download to my PC and kicked it off so it would run a while, and the static sound was *constant* when I was in SuperBasketball in v203. I tried switching to the menu, and it stopped. I switched to another game (also v203) and no static...switched to menu and to yet another game, still no static...back to super basketball, static.

I know the world isn't ending for Super Basketball, but I know I had this static on some other titles, i'll just have to find a couple more examples. Happy to send the rom, and I can try it in a different version of MAME and get back to you as well.

Just thought it was interesting in that Super Basketball's static got louder when I was doing file transmissions...this isn't the most taxing game, I wouldn't think, but perhaps I'm overlooking something. I almost thought it might be a shielding issue on the cable, before I found out that some games didn't seem to display the same sound static.

Here's a video so you can hear and see this whole extravaganza..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J4suEbx-Rc

Thanks!
Pete

[dayoff]

So I switched the rom to Mame172 and I don't seem to have the issue. Strange... I would love to know more about what might be happening but I'll keep poking around and see what other games this came up on.

Pete

[dee2eR]

interesting, I'll have a look for config differences between 172 and 203 - not sure why else there'd be a difference.