Emulation Please help! Visual Boy Advance Speed Issues!

Rubedo

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This forum isn't particularly active anymore so I was hoping to maybe grab some attention from when it displays on the front page with the urgent-sounding topic title >_>

Long story short, my friend is having speed issues with Visual Boy Advance on his computer. He doesn't have internet access right now, so I'm asking for him. His computer is old, but it's better than mine and I can run VBA with absolutely no problems at normal speed. This is the first time he's used VBA btw.

By default, it was on 2 frameskip and was running at about 150%, so I tried to lower it down to 1 frameskip and it ran at like 130%, however putting it at 0 frameskip makes it lag down to about 75%. Eventually, I managed to get it to about 85% by putting it on 1 frameskip and 3x video size, but it's still not running at the correct speed. The games tested were Street Fighter Alpha 3, Super Mario Advance, Sonic Advance and Mario Kart Super Circuit, and all of them have the same speed issues. I'm not too knowledgeable with this sort of thing, so I was hoping GBAtemp could help me figure out what to do.

Another thing of note is that his computer was given to him by someone else, and for some reason, it has no audio device. He gets some kind of audio error whenever he opens a game in VBA, but I'm not sure if that could be part of the problem.

It is also of note that he also ran ZSNES and Fusion emulators with 100% perfect speed and quality, but FCE Ultra crashes on boot (though he said he doesn't really care about FCEU anyway).
 

DanTheManMS

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Which rendering method is he using, and on which version of VBA?

The fastest I ever got VBA to run was using v1.7.2 (which is years old, btw) using the DirectDraw video rendering method, with DDraw Triple Buffering checked. Set to 0 frameskip and with the Emulator - Synchronize option enabled, it ran at 100% speed when set to No Throttle. Also mess with the VSync option to see if it does anything, though I don't think it does.

Later versions of VBA removed the DirectDraw function because it's not as graphically accurate, though I find them to use a bit more CPU power as a result. Because of this, on older or weaker computers I'd suggest at least trying v1.7.2 to see if it helps at all. If of course the newer versions can work fine using different settings, then of course use them for better compatibility and features.
 

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