VisualBoy Advance - XP much quicker than Ubuntu, why?

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 on my AAO (ZG5) and I have been trying out VisualBoy Advance. I also have XP installed on an external USB disk.

For some reason VBA runs very well on XP but is nowhere near as fast on Ubuntu. Under Ubuntu, the graphics and sound are choppy and there are frequent clicks mixed into the sound track. Under XP it runs more or less perfectly.

I have checked through the settings and even when they are as similar as I can make them (not all the options seem to be present in both versions), it runs far better under XP.

Since my normal OS is Ubuntu and since I don't want to keep having to boot from a USB HDD each time I play with VBA I would like to find out why Ubuntu runs VBA so poorly. Does anyone know why this might be and what I might do about it? Is XP just better at this sort of thing (it never has been for anything else I have tried so this would be a first )?

 

There is another topic on GBA emulators, but I would recommend Mednafen for you. It's a swiss knife for retro 2D emulation.
As for more effective video rendering under Ubuntu you should read up on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne to get write-combining working (2.6.30+ kernel req.) and possibly disable pulseaudio to get rid of the audio stuttering. The fixes will make a world of difference for movie playback (no more tearing) and 2D/3D gaming - within reason of course, the aspire one is no powerhouse.

 

OK I'm answering my own post here but perhaps this will be useful to someone else.

While I don't really know the cause of the slowness in Ubuntu, it is down to the Ubuntu package in the repos. The Ubuntu repo version is 1.8 and is effectively unusable on my AAO. However, getting version 1.7.1 direct from the VBA home page seems to have sorted the problem - it runs fine.

There are other issues with this version, in that there is no menu bar so all options need to be set in the config file or on the command line, but that doesn't seem to be too big a problem as the only option I needed to add was --rtc to get the clock going. Shift+Fn works for saving snapshots which is useful.

The only real downside so far is that pressing ^C doesn't kill the process so I have to find the PID and do kill -HUP <PID> which is a bit of a shag. [Edit] It turns out that just pressing <esc> exits so all is well.

If I find any more useful information I shall edit this post.

 

FYI, I got mednafen with sound running on Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Netbook Remix) via pasuspender;

pasuspender -- mednafen -sounddevice default -sounddriver alsa


On other operating systems I also got it working in the past using padsp command.