I spent this last Sunday going over my audio code in RetroCopy. Somewhere over the last 2 weeks a small bug had crept into the virtual room audio, at least I thought it was a bug.
Now usually when something goes wrong in RetroCopy I blame myself first, but a lot of the time it ends up being the fault of a driver. In this case it was the onboard Realtek (ALC888) sound card I have. Seems somewhere around my last sound driver update (v2.37) something changed in how they handle resampling.
Now unless the sample rate is set to 48000 in control panel and in RetroCopy I get very bad distortions in the virtual game room of RetroCopy. Fullscreen exhibits no issues. I noticed that playing around with the length of the buffer I use seems to "fix" some of the noise, basically the noise was occurring every 1/10th of a second because that was the size of the sound buffer.
So I adjusted the size of the buffer to a second and it isn't so bad now when resampling. The size of the buffer has zero affect on the latency in RetroCopy so it's irrelevant from a user standpoint how large this buffer is. Either way the end result is if you're on Vista or Windows 7, make sure the sample rate you set in the control panel matches RetroCopy. This will give you the purest sound possible.
The odd thing was whatever driver I was using prior to December was fine with resampling at all frequencies I selected with the exact same code in RetroCopy. So I wasted a Sunday tracking down an issue that wasn't really an issue! Oh well I did clean up a bit of the sound code anyhow.
And just because people haven't had enough of the interface screenshots (*ducks*) here is another one. Thanks to an idea from one of the beta testers I changed how the "Sub games" appear, now they pop up under the game name in the list but indented. Sort of like a folder view in explorer. I like it better.
Work has also begun on the online database aspect and Tommy is chipping away at the SMS games, I believe he is up to the letter J. The member base here is growing very steadily, today we hit 220 people in the RetroArmy, so welcome everyone! I hope I can keep everyone entertained with what's coming in the next versions.