Ghostbusters frame rate and sound issues

[Vuud]

I just bought the Ghostbusters table and there is an annoying stuttering going on during play, also a lot of the sound effects are crackling, this is the only table that I've had these issues with.

[Lord Squeak]

TPA is coded to run at 60fps, so when the ectoplasm simulation of ghostbusters makes the game run slow (because its slimy), there is stutter and yes, it also affects the audio.
A simple exorcism by changing the affinity of the game while its running , does for some reason help in cases. (actually a thing, so give it a try).

[baddog993]

Originally posted by Vuud:

I just bought the Ghostbusters table and there is an annoying stuttering going on during play, also a lot of the sound effects are crackling, this is the only table that I've had these issues with.

Here is the affinity fix.

Start up pinball arcade. Alt + Enter to get into a windowed mode so you can access the desktop. Click alt control delete to bring up task manager. Look for pinball arcade under process. Right click on pinball and look for more details. Click on details.

Right click on pinball arcade again and look for affinity. Once in their I have 4 cores showing. I disabled the last one in that list. After this it should work fine.

[sonni]

Come on, use the search, Luke. This issue already has enough threads.

But then again, looks like no amount is going to help Farsight get to the bottom of it. I'm very much interested to know what kind of setup they are using for developing and testing, if they still can't reproduce and/or notice it.

[AcadDude]

Originally posted by baddog993:

Originally posted by Vuud:

I just bought the Ghostbusters table and there is an annoying stuttering going on during play, also a lot of the sound effects are crackling, this is the only table that I've had these issues with.

Here is the affinity fix.

Start up pinball arcade. Alt + Enter to get into a windowed mode so you can access the desktop. Click alt control delete to bring up task manager. Look for pinball arcade under process. Right click on pinball and look for more details. Click on details.

Right click on pinball arcade again and look for affinity. Once in their I have 4 cores showing. I disabled the last one in that list. After this it should work fine.

So what is you don't have quad core? 2 core machines don't have a fix then?

[sonni]

Originally posted by AcadDude:

So what is you don't have quad core? 2 core machines don't have a fix then?

Aye, 2 cores are not enough. 3 is needed.

[Lord Squeak]

Well after applying the "fix" , you can change back, and it still works.
it's a spoopy thing!

[Matt Beeching]

Ghostbusters is a great table aside from the audio and performance issues (certainly one of my favourites). Unfortunately all of the sound files have clipping which sounds dreadful and really spoils the presentation.

I'm unsure where the blame lies, perhaps Stern exported their audio assets incorrectly? There doesn't appear to be an issue with the original cabinet so something has clearly gone wrong in the conversion process.

[baddog993]

The fix is for a 2 core machine. I have a i3 5005u laptop it has only 2 cores. However in affinity it will show as 4 cores.

Originally posted by AcadDude:

Originally posted by baddog993:

Here is the affinity fix.

Start up pinball arcade. Alt + Enter to get into a windowed mode so you can access the desktop. Click alt control delete to bring up task manager. Look for pinball arcade under process. Right click on pinball and look for more details. Click on details.

Right click on pinball arcade again and look for affinity. Once in their I have 4 cores showing. I disabled the last one in that list. After this it should work fine.

So what is you don't have quad core? 2 core machines don't have a fix then?

[The Fifth Horseman]

Right and wrong. Hyper-threaded CPUs can handle two execution threads per core. That's why your affinity shows 4 "cores". A CPU with hyper-threading will tend to perform slightly better in multithreaded tasks than a CPU with no hyper-threading and otherwise identical specs.

[Lord Squeak]

Originally posted by Matt Beeching:

Ghostbusters is a great table aside from the audio and performance issues (certainly one of my favourites). Unfortunately all of the sound files have clipping which sounds dreadful and really spoils the presentation.

I'm unsure where the blame lies, perhaps Stern exported their audio assets incorrectly? There doesn't appear to be an issue with the original cabinet so something has clearly gone wrong in the conversion process.

Nah the clipping audio should just be performance related.

[Matt Beeching]

Originally posted by Lord Squeak:

Nah the clipping audio should just be performance related.

I strongly believe this is a separate audio issue, I've created some short isolated samples for review and discussion:

Table Start Theme (Elmer Bernstein - Arrival At The Library): https://instaud.io/2zw6
The background music is audibly distorted. Here's an alternative version with a high pass filter which makes the static clearer: https://instaud.io/2zw7

Slimer Mechanical Noise: https://instaud.io/2zvJ
This feature adds a strange pulsing sound effect to the mix, almost like Morse code.
When combined with the other audio issues it just sounds like there's even more glitches.

Welcome To The Ghostbusters Kid / Okay Who Brought The Dog?: https://instaud.io/2zwt
There are similar issues with all the vocal samples which are either too loud for their container or hard clipped in the mid-high frequencies, possibly to reduce file size. The end result does not sound good.

Stern's original code is around 985mb compared to TPA's 159mb which also includes all the visual assets. The audio has been severely compromised in the process.

[Lord Squeak]

It does sound like performance related. I think the audio quality just sucks in general, so that's nothing to take note of.
hmmm, how to describe this.....

imagine the audio being played not as one continous waveform, but as a bunch of small timed clips. like it's pasting together snippets for the final mix out, what I'm hearing on those clips is a slight delay between those tiny clips. causing the audio to just a little drawn out. like timestretching, but only slightly.
I've had a similar issue with a soundblaster card and buffersize used by it. so the effect sounds similar to that. only not as bad. (in that case changing buffersize changed how it sounded and a fix was released)
I heard the same on my ghostbusters when it ran slow, and it was a little bit worse. fixing the game to run at 60fps solid made audio sound ok again.

I think fixing the stuttering should fix your audio. (ish.. quality isn't that great to begin with)
Try to change the affinity as Baddog mentioned at the top of the thread, and see if that helps.

[Bruno]

Originally posted by baddog993:

Originally posted by Vuud:

I just bought the Ghostbusters table and there is an annoying stuttering going on during play, also a lot of the sound effects are crackling, this is the only table that I've had these issues with.

Here is the affinity fix.

Start up pinball arcade. Alt + Enter to get into a windowed mode so you can access the desktop. Click alt control delete to bring up task manager. Look for pinball arcade under process. Right click on pinball and look for more details. Click on details.

Right click on pinball arcade again and look for affinity. Once in their I have 4 cores showing. I disabled the last one in that list. After this it should work fine.

Having to do that everytime we want to play that table is troublesome, and alt tabing this game cause me some other issues. Is Farsight still supporting this game? Can we expect a fix for this problem? I don't think it's on my end, I have a computer that can run pretty much every game on ultra settings on 1080p (well, except maybe PUBG... and the ghostbusters table ).

[Matt Beeching]

Originally posted by Lord Squeak:

It does sound like performance related. I think the audio quality just sucks in general, so that's nothing to take note of.
hmmm, how to describe this.....

imagine the audio being played not as one continous waveform, but as a bunch of small timed clips. like it's pasting together snippets for the final mix out, what I'm hearing on those clips is a slight delay between those tiny clips. causing the audio to just a little drawn out. like timestretching, but only slightly.
I've had a similar issue with a soundblaster card and buffersize used by it. so the effect sounds similar to that. only not as bad. (in that case changing buffersize changed how it sounded and a fix was released)
I heard the same on my ghostbusters when it ran slow, and it was a little bit worse. fixing the game to run at 60fps solid made audio sound ok again.

I think fixing the stuttering should fix your audio. (ish.. quality isn't that great to begin with)
Try to change the affinity as Baddog mentioned at the top of the thread, and see if that helps.

Yeah I'm familiar with the time stretched audio you've described, those situations make the table sound even worse. I've tested this with locked frame rates (60 and 67fps) and stand by my results, adjustments to the buffer size do not make any difference (iFi iDAC2), I suppose the last thing I could try is using 44.1 or a multiple thereof as that uses a separate oscillator clock.

That being said, the flaws are exactly the same on TPA / SPA and they're not exclusive to the PC platform, Switch, PS4 and XBox all exhibit this squelchy overblown audio. Farsight's own promotional video is no different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVUjb5_Vnsc

Slimer is likely operating as intended and the sound does correlate with his movement. It's just unfortunate that the associated sound loop manifests itself as an unpleasant popping sound as it's so short and has no natural roll-off.

Unless there's a way to unpack and analyse the raw samples independently from the game engine it's very difficult to test this with due diligence.

[baddog993]

Originally posted by Bruno:

Originally posted by baddog993:

Here is the affinity fix.

Start up pinball arcade. Alt + Enter to get into a windowed mode so you can access the desktop. Click alt control delete to bring up task manager. Look for pinball arcade under process. Right click on pinball and look for more details. Click on details.

Right click on pinball arcade again and look for affinity. Once in their I have 4 cores showing. I disabled the last one in that list. After this it should work fine.

Having to do that everytime we want to play that table is troublesome, and alt tabing this game cause me some other issues. Is Farsight still supporting this game? Can we expect a fix for this problem? I don't think it's on my end, I have a computer that can run pretty much every game on ultra settings on 1080p (well, except maybe PUBG... and the ghostbusters table :csd2meh:).

Yeah its not ideal. I am fairly certain they are aware of the issue they just have not fixed it yet. This is just a temporary fix. If you look online their is probably an automated way so when that game starts up the last core in the cpu list is disabled.