Emulator

I have a CoreDuo E8400 and Hd4850...not that bad...anyway the sound stretching can be only an option (like in PCSX2) to be enabled or disable at will according to the game you want to play.

Time stretching would greatly help, in fact it was being discussed about implementing it into Dolphin since it helps with keeping audio in sync with video output for PCSX2. It should be do-able even for HLE, I believe the audio plugins in PCSX2 are also HLE and time stretching is supported. Using OpenAL is a mess due to those ugly pauses, so time stretching would be the only solution to remove those ugly pauses and keep audio in sync with the video output.

DSP HLE has no concept of frames/fps and therefore cannot be timestretched. Timestretch uses the fps as an estimate of the number of samples to play at each frame. Lack of frame notification is also the reason why we cannot control video/audio sync in games like Starfox Adventures and House of the Dead: Overkill. I am familiar with this part of the code because I attempted to fix issue 2555.

PCSX2 does not use HLE for the SPU.

Then what about fixing speed issues with LLE then? It seems like such a minor setback and LLE is near perfect for most games including SMG and ZTP. Clearly the HLE plugin is a mess and requires too much work, while all that really needs to be done with LLE is fixing the speed issues and some sound issues that are caused by LLE JIT.

"PCSX2 does not use HLE for the SPU."

So it uses LLE? I wasn't aware of PCSX2 using low level emulation for anything, primarily because speed is quite good. I thought Dolphin was the only last/current gen emulator with LLE audio.

Nah, the SPU on the PS2 is pretty brainless. The EE/MIPS does all of the hard work afaik. Whereas, the DSP in the GC/Wii is pretty much a co-processor. That is one of the reasons why PCSX2 is fast - it is not emulating another co-processor for the audio. The VU's on the other hand...

Yeh, I'll get back into LLE JIT one day. It's about halfway down the to-do list now. The LLE interpreter has a huge idle skipper which is hard to implement in a JIT. That's where a large % of the speed difference is. Further reverse engineering work on the DSP to improve the sound is pretty tedious and difficult too.

I see, well DSP LLE is already better than HLE despite it being slower. Hopefully one day HLE can be laid to rest since it has so many issues. Even my new i7 is no match for the LLE plugin right now lol.

Btw, the sound issues I was referring to are due to the buggy JIT for LLE, in the interpreter these games sound fine.

The LLE plugin should be pie given the only major issue afaik is fixing the slowdowns. :P

Okay I take that back, the sound issues are not due to JIT. It seems there was a regression somewhere that messed up sound for some games since I could of sworn audio for these games was working fine with LLE in the past. Might want to review pierre's recent LLE commits.

I'll do some testing and see if it was those commits, I don't remember these games having sound issues with LLE in the past.