nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...

[saada]

$ nintengo Super_mario_brothers.nes
PRG Banks: 2
CHR Banks: 1
Mirroring: Vertical
Battery: false
Trainer: false
FourScreen: false
VS Cart: false
RAM Banks: 1
Region: NTSC
Mapper: 0 (NROM)
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
...

You can find the NES file here: http://www.nesfiles.com/NES/Super_Mario_Bros.aspx
The game works great, but the sound stutters continuously while showing the above error over and over again.

[nwidger]

@saada: Thanks for reporting this. Nintengo isn't terribly efficient so it may not be able to play games at full speed, that may be the reason for the sound stuttering. On my fairly beefy Mac desktop I'm able to play Super Mario Bros. at full speed without any stuttering so I suspect that is the issue.

Myself and @slimsag have been working on improving the audio/video rendering performance using his Azul3D package which nintengo recently switched to (I was using Go-SDL previously), so it's also possible that improvements could be made there.

Either way, the feedback is appreciated. If you notice any other issues and want to report them (or maybe even send a PR!), please do.

[nwidger]

@saada: Would you mind updating and seeing if the resync issue has gotten better for you? We've made a number of performance improvements recently.

[saada]

I updated all my packages including nintengo and Azul3D.
Still getting

nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...

and the performance is still slow.

I'm running on a MBP

[nwidger]

I guess we still have some work to do then. It would be great to get a set of minimum system requirements up on the README to set people's expectation, I just don't know what those are precisely. I do know that the requirements are much higher compared to better, more mature NES emulators, but that's not terribly helpful. Anyways, thanks for trying it out again.

[mango314]

Mine is similar. Testing it using SMB3. The buttons seem to work fine, but I can only hear some audio. Literally it sounds like it's trying but failing to keep up with the video.

PRG Banks: 32
CHR Banks: 128
Mirroring: Horizontal
Battery: false
Trainer: false
FourScreen: false
VS Cart: false
RAM Banks: 1
Region: NTSC
Mapper: 4 (MMC3)
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...
nes: Failed to feed audio to OpenAL fast enough; resynching...

[nwidger]

@MonsieurCactus: Sounds like nintengo's APU just can't feed samples to OpenAL fast enough on your machine. I'm working on finding ways to free up CPU cycles. I just committed some changes to the video rendering code that might improve your performance a bit, but I'm sure there's plenty left to do.

[slimsag]

@nwidger I've noticed something interesting: audio clicks on my slower laptop, but only 50% CPU is being used across the four cores! I wonder if there is a sort of lock contention somewhere/somehow between audio and rendering or something?