Imperfect SNES sound emulation?

[grognak]

I’ve recently set up my B+ for RetroPie, as it’s just been lying around collecting dust since I got it for Christmas. I’ve got it mostly perfect by following the Super Nintendo Pi guide, except for one thing. No matter what emulator I use for SNES, certain parts of the sound, mainly sound effects and percussion, is imperfect. I would accept this as a bug in the emulators that they’re still working on fixing, except I see videos on Youtube of people saying that they’ve got the “perfect emulation station” and such with a Raspberry Pi and seem happy with their results, which leads me to believe that there’s a way to fix this that I don’t know of. Is there a way? If not, is the sound emulation better on the Pi 2?

List of examples if people want to test:

– The menu sfx in Goof Troop is kind of like a “bweng” sound when played on PC emulators and on actual hardware, but is closer to a “dok” sound one the Pi

– The barrel sounds in DKC are louder and not as soft when played on a Pi

– The SFX for the creaking ship in the first level of DKC2 don’t sound right at all, and have extreme echoing

– The bassline in the overworld of DKC 2 is more noticeable, almost louder than the other instruments

– The percussion track in the Onett theme in Earthbound is louder

– One of the battle themes in Earthbound has an instrument that plays the same notes as the ukelele track, but is more chip tuned (possibly the bass track?). It’s the same volume as the ukelele track, possibly a bit louder, I couldn’t hear it when played on a PC emulator. (The battle theme is the one played when you battle the Police in Onett. I think it’s called “Battle with a Weird Opponent”)

Extra information:
Pi B+, Overclocked to “Pi2”, A/V Output through HDMI. (I also did something about availble RAM or VRAM or something, boosting it from 64mb to 512mb, although I don’t remember what it was called)

[dankcushions]

[quote]Pi B+, Overclocked to “Pi2″, A/V Output through HDMI. (I also did something about availble RAM or VRAM or something, boosting it from 64mb to 512mb, although I don’t remember what it was called)[/quote]

pi2 overclock setting is for the pi2, not the B+. i would get rid of this overclock and either use one of the other settings (they’re all for the Pi 1), or just none at all whilst you’re troubleshooting.

also, the VRAM split shouldn’t be 512MB – that’s all the memory! it should be 128MB or 256MB – i’m assuming it ignored your setting, otherwise i’m not sure how it would function!

i’m not sure if these are in any way related to your issue, but were first things that jumped out. instability definitely causes sound issues, but it’s normally a sort of distortion/skipping, rather than changing it.

[kevinfitch83]

This makes me feel better. I was wondering if I was imagining those sound issues in DKC 2.

[grognak]

[quote=105634]
pi2 overclock setting is for the pi2, not the B+. i would get rid of this overclock and either use one of the other settings (they’re all for the Pi 1), or just none at all whilst you’re troubleshooting.

also, the VRAM split shouldn’t be 512MB – that’s all the memory! it should be 128MB or 256MB – i’m assuming it ignored your setting, otherwise i’m not sure how it would function!
[/quote]

I was just going with what it said on the Super Nintendo Pi website, but I’ll change the settings and report back later.

[grognak]

I put my overclock settings down to high and Memory Split down to 256. No speed changes, but the order issues are persisting.

Forgot to mention that I’ve used both PocketSNES and PiSNES. I tried catsfc too, before and after I fixed up those overclock and memory split issues, and the sound played at a higher pitch, and after putting the settings down some games had audio stuttering.

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