Hi All
To get decent sound performance on E-UAE in Linux:
1) Use the latest source snapshot.
2) Compile against ALSA or OSS for sound (not SDL). SDL sound performs poorly
under high CPU load in E-UAE on Linux. This is not something that's
easily fixable. All future official builds will be built against ALSA
instead.
3) When using ALSA, the default behaviour is the E-UAE uses the default ALSA
device. What this is depends on your ALSA set-up, but this will probably
use the ALSA dmix plugin on recent Linux systems. This may add to the CPU
load and sound latency. By-pass the dmix plug-in with the config file
option 'alsa.device=plughw:'.
4) Definitely don't use dmix with ALSA (or rather libasound) 1.0.9 or 1.1.10.
The dmix configuration doesn't allow low latency set-ups there. You'll
typically end up with a 300ms latency (unless you re-configure your dmix
set-up). Yuck!
5) If you know that your audio system only supports a fundamental audio
frequency, configure E-UAE to use that frequency. This will avoid
unnecessary rate conversions. For example, the ALSA dmix plug-in is
typically configured to work at 48000KHz. Set E-UAE's audio frequency with
sound_frequency=48000.
6) If you can configure, build and install a Linux kernel yourself, build a
pre-emptible kernel.
Note: if you have a 1 GHZ or better PC, there's really no reason why shouldn't
get decent audio performance in E-UAE on Linux. If you don't, it's probably a
configuration issue somewhere.
Comments, anybody?
