MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Audio Latency

> Okay, so what is the consensus on this issue... is it recommended we set the Audio
> Latency to the lowest setting or the highest setting? It should be set to the lowest
> setting, right? (whether that be "0" or "1").

Technically you'll want as low latency as possible, set it to 1 if that works for you.

But I'm not sure how much of an audible difference there will be, I mean, if you'll be able to actually perceive that the sound is less delayed. That's what the setting does, "quality" in this context does not mean that it will "sound better"!

It's more likely that you will hear skipping and drop-outs with latency set to 1 before you'll be able to perceive "less latency".

Many different factors come into play here, not just mame.ini settings or the sound emulation of the particular game you're running and how CPU heavy it is, but also your sound card driver buffer size (normally not user-configurable) and current sample rate (user-configurable), whatever Windows is doing in the background, whether MAME is allowed to take "exclusive" control of your sound hardware etc etc.

If drop-outs occur with latency set to 1, you can try setting sleep to 0 under "Core performance options" and under "Windows performance options" set priority to 1 or even 2.
Vsync, triplebuffer and the other refresh rate related options probably also have an impact, not just in mame.ini but refresh/sync related video card settings in your GPU driver control panel as well.

S