MiSTer FPGA Forum

I say kinda as its a problem and not a problem.

Ive noticed that if using HDMI from mister to my TV the sound on the core is messy in places, Zelda Oracle of Seasons overworld music, plays badly, stops playing then starts again. Hard to explain but its not right.

Now i put a DAC on the mister using the mini toslink adapter as i had one spare. The sound through this is perfect. 100% better.

Plus other cores sound better through the DAC.

Thinking this may be a clash of old tech vs new??

You need to distinguish between problems with the internal audio generation in the core and the output.

The core itself doesn't know anything of the output device, it will even calculate the whole audio if you have no output device connected at all.

Things like "stops playing then starts again" sounds liks it's a calculation problem inside the core,
but if it's gone with another output device, maybe your TV has a problem with the sound coming over HDMI?

I have the same issues with this core and the GBA core (but no other cores). even the bios "bing" sound has sort of a reverb-like stutter as does all audio in any games.
The issue occurs throughout all of my testing across both mid-to-high end Samsung & Vizio TVs as well as on full size and portable HDMI monitors with audio. In all cases I'm using HDMI output and each tv/monitor test was done with a different HDMI cable that was appropriate to that setup.

EDIT: SOLVED IT!!!
Apparently GB/GBC core and GBA core can't correctly sync audio when the MiSTer.ini file has 'vsync_adjust' set to any non-zero value.
I thought about just setting a core specific option of 'vsync_adjust=0' for these two cores at the end of the ini file but I decided to set the main setting back to '0' for now so I can more thoroughly test other cores to see if it really is only these two that have issues or if there are more...

Hmmmm hadn’t thought about the tv being possibly the issue, it is quite old by modern standards so perhaps it is the problem.

DAC works fine so I’ll just use that!!

The video sync could be an issue. For example, over on the ao486 side, a popular demoscene demo, Second Reality, the audio and video desync, which becomes apparent very quickly, when vsync [ao486 specific setting] is set to 60hz instead of variable (the demo is intended for 70hz refresh). Discussion for that issue is here: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1643