Talkie problems with a Games n' music cart

JiFish · Post by **JiFish** » Mon Jul 16, 2007 9:39 pm

I have ScummVM on a Datel Games n' music cart. I've patched ScummVM with the Version 2 DLDI.

Everything seems to work fine except that with talkie enabled, the music (and sometimes the speech too) stutters. I am using the original uncompressed files from the CDs. (simon1.voc, simon2.wav and MONSTER.SOU for Sam & Max.)

Is this a known issue? Is it to do with my cart?

Thanks in advance for any help.

agentq · Post by **agentq** » Mon Jul 16, 2007 10:58 pm

Stuttering could definitely be caused by a slow read rate from the card. In this case, it might be worthwhile to mp3 compress voices. Although that usually makes things slower, if the read rate from your card is slow it might actually help.

JiFish · Post by **JiFish** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 10:32 am

Hi, thanks for your advice.

Unfortunately, compressing the speech made the situation worse. Now both the music and speech skip regularly. Is there a particular setting I should use for the compression?

Is it possible another DLDI driver or MicroSD card could improve the situation?

I feel obliged to point out that if indeed this is (and it looks very likely) a cart issue, I am very disappointed in Datel. I specifically bought this one because it cannot be used for piracy and I want to support efforts to differentiate homebrew tools from piracy tools on consoles. In fact, my homebrew only tool seems to be lower quality than other devices that can be used for illegitimate use.

At this juncture, I have to advise people to NOT buy the Datel Games n' Music system. Which is a damn shame.

alcaholjunkie · Post by **alcaholjunkie** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 8:12 pm

JiFish, if that cart uses microSD cards as you said, then get hold of a SD-C01G Japan card. It's usually under kingston japan, but look for toshiba 1GB microSD as it will most likely be that card. (around £10 UK, oh and kingston and toshiba both release the same japan made microSD card, but kingston ones may also come from china)

(SD-C01G cards have very fast access time, which may improve performance)

JiFish · Post by **JiFish** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:55 pm

Hi alcaholjunkie,

Thanks for the information. I'll definitively give this a go. Do you happen to know how much faster it is than a standard 2GB card? Also, is this this right one?

agentq · Post by **agentq** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 12:26 pm

Datel haven't released a DLDI driver at all. Chishm, the author of the DLDI driver reverse engineered it from the hardware.

He reckons that the hardware itself puts a limit on the speed:
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t ... &start=210

I'm not sure a better MicroSD would help, as even the worst MicroSD card will be capable of the slow speeds that ScummVM DS needs.

JiFish · Post by **JiFish** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 7:19 pm

I tried compressing the speech file again and made a discovery: if I compress the audio enough it actually works! I tested with Simon the Sorcerer 2. In my test case I reduced the size to 17.3 MB (down from 146 MB.) I also switched to the version 1 DLDI. (This fixed some of my other homebrew.)

Now the problem is now the speech quality is far too low. Next step is to see how high quality I can go before the file-size becomes too large. I'll let you guys know when I find the optimum mix.