MagicEngine

[Colonel Fuzzy]

Magic Engine is a great emulator and runs all my favorite HuCard games perfectly.

I just recently tried Magic Engine out with a few CD games and
I've encountered two problems.

First, when I am playing a CD game and the RedBook audio loops (reloads) or a new track loads up the emulator pauses for a split second.

I tested this with a variety of games and when ever a RedBook audio track loads up there is a split second pause.

Mind you there aren't any other incorrect pauses at any other time while playing a CD game.

When a RedBook audio track loads up on the Turbo Duo or Turbo Grafx CD there isn't a split second pause. The rest of the game is unaffected by the loading of an audio track. Thus the play experience is seemless.

This is especially noticeable while playing Lords of Thunder when the player selects the level, armour and shop items before starting a stage.

Is there a fix for this?

The second problem is that when a redbook audio track loads up there is a slow "fade in" when there isn't suppose to be.

This only occurs in certain games.

Most notably it occurs in Dracula X at the start of a level.

Because of this the very first seconds of the audio track are cut off.

Could someone please tell me if these problems are due to my specific hardware or do the rest of you experience these problems?



Colonel Fuzzy

[Tomasz]

From the experience that I have had, it sounds like your problems may be caused by your cd-rom drive. Basically, the drive might be slow at changing tracks, or it might just be taking an excessive time to spin up after it spins down -- usually this is a problem with modern, fast drives (24x and higher). A solution would be to try to use Nero Drivespeed (http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=nerodrivespeed.html) to slow down the drive, if the drive supports this feature (8x, 4x, or even 2x are more than enough for pc engine games). Another solution would be to make iso images of your games and play them using virtual cd-rom software (Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools). This latter method would eliminate the possibility of delays due to spin up.

Another thing, for slightly better syncronization of audio and video in games make sure that frame_delay in pce.ini is set to 16711 microseconds (by default it is set to 16667, which corresponds to roughly 60 Hz, but the correct NTSC frequency is actually 59.84 Hz and 1/59.84 s = 0.016711 s = 16711 microseconds):

[Colonel Fuzzy]

Thanks for your help.

First I changed the frame delay to 16711 and that seemed to completely eliminate the fade problems. The correct fading at the start of each audio track was present in Dracula X.

I then tried to use Nero DriveSpeed to fix the split second pause when an audio track is loaded but it didn't work.

So I moved on to the third option which I tried out years ago.

It's a real pain to be making bin/cue backups of games you want to play and then mount them with Daemon Tools when you paid good money for the original CDs.

But I went through the whole process with my Drac X original and the end result was that there weren't any pauses when any audio track was loaded. However, Magic Engine doesn't currently have true Digital audio support so the lovely fading feature was non-existant.

As a result the audio tracks wouldn't fade out before the Turbo Grafx audio kicks in. And you get both midi and Redbook audio playing at the same time.

Does anyone know of a way to fix this problem with Daemon Tools or Magic Engine?

If not then perhaps this will be fixed in the next version.

Colonel Fuzzy

[Kaminari]

About the pause: Redbook audio tracks play at 1x, data tracks run at the maximum speed your drive is able to achieve (say 40x). When switching from an audio track to a data track, your drive needs to adjust its speed accordingly -- hence the pause. The PC Engine doesn't display this behaviour simply because its drive is constantly spinning at 1x (redbook and data modes). The issue will probably vanish when Magic Engine supports digital playback.

About the Redbook fade-out and overlap with PSG music: read the last post of this thread. Hope it helps!

[Colonel Fuzzy]

Thanks for clearing up that first part about the reason for the pause.

Does anyone have a CDROM or DVDROM drive that can be made to function exactly like an original PC Engine (can the drive be set to play at a maximum of 1x by using an outside configuration program like Nero DriveSpeed)?

The lowest I was able to do with Nero DriveSpeed was 2x and the pause still occured.

I'm going to see if it's at all possible to limit the speed of my drive to 1x.

About the Fade Ins and Fade Outs, thanks for pointing me to that post.

It was the first post I looked at when I found this forum and came to the conclusion that I needed to use an analog audio cable, not a digital one.

So I hooked one up from the DVDROM to the Audigy 2 and it worked like a charm. The only problem was that the fades were a little off in some games. So I changed the Frame Delay to 16711 and that fixed the fades.
Thank you Tomasz.

My other question was if anyone could get the fading to work when using a CD image (bin/cue) with Daemon Tools.

Because the CD image is on the hard drive, Magic Engine wouldn't be able to access the analog audio stream because the audio tracks are already in a digital form.

So is it at all possible to convert the CD image's audio tracks from a digital to analog form for Magic Engine to manipulate (so the fades are included when playing an entirely digital image from the hard drive)?


Colonel Fuzzy

[Tomasz]

To start, I have a few questions:
Which operating system are you using?
Which brand/model dvd or cd-rom are you using?

Now to answer your question:

[Kaminari]

[Kaminari]

[Colonel Fuzzy]

This reply is to Tomasz.

I am currently using Windows XP Professional with a:

P4 2.8
1 Gig Ram
ATI 9800 Pro

The DVDROM drive that I have is a JLMS XJ-HD166s that will go down to a max speed of 2x but not 1x.

Problems that I'm having:

1. Audio pause upon loading/changing redbook tracks

What you said in your above post about the 1/5 second pause is exactly what I mean. This pause is not there in an actual PC Engine system.

The direct cause of this 1/5 pause is due to an audio track loading.

So if an audio track has to loop then this occurs.

Example: When playing a level in Lords of Thunder hit pause and let the audio track reach close to the end. Then unpause and play. You will then feel the 1/5 pause while moving your character around as the audio track loads back up.

In Lords of Thunder when the screen goes from level selection to armour selection there is a 1/5 pause that can be heard in the middle of sound number 51. Sound number 51 is an FM sound that is played whenever a selection is made (ex: level select or armour select). This is because a new audio track has been loaded. The level selection and armour selection screens have their own audio tracks.

Then when you go from the armour selection screen to the item shop screen there is another 1/5 pause in the middle of sound 51. Again this is because a new audio track is loaded.

Another example of this pause is when an audio track loops over in Dracula X just like in Lords of Thunder. In Dracula x stay in a level for a long time by just standing around and killing monsters and let the audio track cycle over.

Every CD game should pause for 1/5 of a second when a new audio track loads.

This 1/5 pause problem is only apparent while playng CD games.
There isn't any 1/5 pause while playing a bin/cue or other iso image from the hard drive when using Daemon Tools.


2. Fade in problem

Works fine with that setting: 16711.

I could not get it to work with a bin/cue image though.


3. Fade out problem

This problem only occurs if you use digital audio.

Here are some examples of this problem:

After you defeat a boss in Dracula X the CD Audio should fade out to let you hear the little PSG song that plays when Richter gets the red orb.
So there should be no CD audio as soon as you see that red orb appear at the top of the screen and fall down. Then when you get the orb the PSG plays alone.

Another example is Pomping World or Buster Brothers.
When you are in a stage let the time run out and the CD audio is suppose to fade out so a PSG can play. This lets the player know that there isn't any time left.

The analog cable does fix this when playing CDs but I need to get the fades to work when using Daemon Tools with a bin/cue iso image.

The bottom line is that I would like to get the fades to work while playing a bin/cue file on the hard drive using Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%.
Which ever program truely emulates analog CD audio.

Thanks for your help Tomasz.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In reply to Kaminari.

I turned the analog audio on in Daemon Tools and it did give me CD audio but none of the fades would work at all.

Has anyone gotten the fades to work?

Does anyone know of a fix?

Thanks for your help.

Colonel Fuzzy

[Tomasz]

Here is a quick update on what I have found so far:

I've been able to reproduce the fade out problem. I hadn't noticed it before, because my dvd-rom drive was connected to my soundcard via an analog audio cable. I've tested it on 4 different drives on 2 different computers. Fade outs worked properly on the 2 drives that were connected to via analog audio cable and did not work properly on the 2 which were connected using the digital sp/dif cable. To test, I used Ys Books 1 and 2: the problem can be clearly seen when entering Zeptic Village early in the game and when pressing run to skip the opening introduction of the game -- cd audio continues to play when it should be muted.

OK, so I understand the problem... now I tried it with Alcohol 120%. The bad news is that the fade outs did not work. I am assuming that this is because David is actually muting the "CD Audio" input line, to emulate the Turbo Duo behavior that was described by Kaminari. Unfortunately it appears that the "CD Digital" input line is never muted by Magic Engine. Furthermore, I found that Alcohol 120% plays cd audio through wave/direct sound output (refer to your sound mixer, e.g. surround mixer for Creative sound cards). Thus muting the CD input line would have no effect. I was unable to find any options in Alcohol that would change this behavior... All I could do was change volume and turn cd audio on or off.

I will still try Daemon Tools and Clonedrive to see how they behave and I'll report back later with a more detailed post.

[Colonel Fuzzy]

Thanks for your tests and help Tomasz.

Let me know if you can replicate the 1/5 pauses in the Lords of Thunder example I gave above when playing from a CD.


Colonel Fuzzy

[Tomasz]

[Tomasz]

OK, I did some more testing, here are my conclusions:

I tested the following drives:
ASUS DVD-ROM E612 1.2B
JLMS XJ-HD163D GHR8
Sony CDU4811 PY09

The JLMS and Sony drives exhibited the slight stutter pause in LOT and the ASUS drive did not. This result was independent of the speed at which each drive was set to read with drivespeed. However, lowering the speed is still recommended because it paradoxically reduces level load times, since the drives do not have to wait to spin up to full speed.

It seems like the fade out problem cannot be avoided while using iso images/virtual drives. The analog audio option in Daemon Tools just seems to turn CD audio on or off.

So, I guess our only solution to have seemless play is to find a CD reader that works well with TG16 CDs... or wait until Magic Engine 1.0.

[Colonel Fuzzy]

That's exactly the response I wanted. It's just beautiful.

Thanks, Tomasz, for your conclusive experiment with the DVD/CD ROM drives.

I'll have to go out and get an ASUS drive tomorrow.

I'll also update the firmware for this Lite On drive and see if my other CDROM drives cause this problem.


Thanks again.

Colonel Fuzzy

[Tomasz]

Well, I wish you luck with your search for a smooth reading drive.

However, keep in mind that I bought my ASUS drive almost 3 years ago and much has changed since then...
The currently available ASUS drive, the E616P1, is actually just a rebadged Pioneer drive, and I have no idea how they perform with TG16 CDs. The older ASUS drives, E612 and E616, are probably very difficult to find in the marketplace -- you can distinguish between the E616 and E616P1 quite easily: unlike the E616, the E616P1 has no volume control or headphone jack on its front panel. See this Newegg link for an example of the E616P1.