Gamebuino forum

That is good suggestions and useful.

So has anyone else tried this yet ?

I want to know if someone else has the same problem as clement

Hi!

I tried it some time ago and experienced the same lag problems when I start shooting. I tried it on both of my GBs using the 'original' SD card. I'll try another SD card to see if that makes and difference.

Beside the lag it looks very nice. Somewhat hard to see anything when it is raining, but that is what is supposed to happen.

Very disappointed about the lag problem and can not think of a way to avoid it. I suspect the seek time of the 128 Mb card is way more than that of more modern SD cards. If so, storing the sector doesn't help because it is a matter of the SD card not returning to idle fast enough.

Unfortunately the lag problem means that simultaneous sampled music & SFX is impossible on a real Gamebuino. This was a major goal in the development work and since it seems it is not possible, I've lost interest in the project.

I removed the demo from the games page.

I will keep the files in the github repo but no further updates are likely to happen.

As far as I can tell, most Gamebuino games stream nothing off the SD card. They have their sound effects stored in program memory, I suppose.

On the other hand, Operation Fox streams the music and the sound effects off the SD card. This is causing problems when sound effects are played, because the SD card has massive delays when seeking the sound effect data and switching back to the music data.

Sooo, why can't you keep the sound effects stored in memory (like other Gamebuino games) and only stream the music off the SD card? The program can always fetch the music data no matter what, but if a sound effect is supposed to be playing, it ignores the music data and plays the sound effect data out of memory instead. Maybe the sound effects would have to be smaller in size and lower quality, but it maybe you could still have streaming music and sound effects together...

Just a thought. Maybe I don't really understand the issues...

Catsfolly

Hi Jonnection,

I have a good news, I tried this game in 3 SD cads on my Gamebuino.
My first attempt was with the original SD card of Gamebuino (128MB scandisk) that it was very slow and not playable.
So I got another SD card (1GB Scandisk), I formated it and put the game and I played. The game was playable, much more fast that the firt, but it still had a small lag.
After, I tried with other SD card(2GB without brand), so it had a similar result with the second SD card. So I had an idea, I tried to change the unit allocation size (Cluster size). Both two SD cards, 1GB and 2GB, was with 16k cluster size, then I changed to 32k and I saw a good improvement, but it had a little lag. So I changed the cluster size to 64k and the game worked perfect without any lag in both SD cads(1GB and 2GB).
After that, I tried to format the Gamebuino original SD card, but unfortunately the maximum cluster size is 16k. Despite this, the game got a similar performance at my first attempt with the SD 1GB (playable with small lag).


"...using large A.U.S(Allocation Unit Size) significantly reduces the free space utilization due to not using the last allocation unit completely. And as a side effect, the number of files to store on the disk is reduced due to same problem, last a.u not being used fully. But, here's the trade-off, using A.U.S, significantly again, improves the disk reading performance. The O.S can read more data at one read. Imagine, O.S makes couple of disk reads to completely read a GB sized file!..

Using small A.U.S improves the free space utilization but reduces the disk read performance. Think using large A.U.S in reverse, same category problems and improvements, but in reverse..."
Link: http://superuser.com/questions/417402/is-it-best-to-reformat-the-hard-drive-to-exfat-using-512kb-chunk-or-smaller-or

Conclusion:
The problem is not with Gamebuino, the problem is the original Gamebuino SD card. So I will use another SD card (1GB or 2GB).
If anybody has a SD card that it can be formated with a 64k cluster size. They can play your game without lags!
It is a major evolution for Gamebuino games, because it breaks the limitation of space. =D

@Jonnection: I hope you continue this game, because it is very good!

Sorry about my english.

nownew wrote:Hi Jonnection,

I have a good news, I tried this game in 3 SD cads on my Gamebuino...

Amazing ! Well done ! Thank you very much for the detective work.

I will now look at how the buffer size vs SD cluster size affects the lag.

Hi Jonnection,

I just tried the demo and I get the same as others stated, the game freezes when I shoot, otherwise everything else works perfectly.
Would the EP1.dat work? Where do I get it? From the master zip?

If so, I will be giving a try shortly.

edit: Just tried, same stuff on my SDcard, if I remove the card in game, it works fine without any sound, otherwise it stutters when I shoot.