Streets of Rage (SE 240x320) lags when playing certain sound effects

[TwoSpacesSG]

This should be easily noticeable during gameplay. It's worth mentioning that the messed-up music is NOT an emulation issue, unlike the noticeable sound effect lag spikes.

[AShiningRay]

JVM shenanigans. Creating new players can, and most of the time will, cause stutters, which is why most games do it during their loading screens. If this game is doing so during gameplay, there's not much that can be done since players are already being allocated in the ideal way.

[TwoSpacesSG]

It's not uncommon for games to create players during gameplay, Sonic Unleashed on K800i and on W910i does that and I don't recall it lagging when I tried it on FJ+ (in order to test M3G). Ratchet and Clank on the N80 (352x416) does so too. KEmnn has issues with such behavior but typically FJ+ is fine as far as I'm aware, or at least it was the last time I tested.

[AShiningRay]

It was probably fine because previously the MIDI players (assuming this is what it uses for effects) shared all of the heavier stuff, those being the Synthesizer and Receiver. Doing this, while making midi much lighter, had the issue of tying all currently open streams of the same type to the same control state (example: Volume, which is why Sonic 2 Crash had that issue with the incorrect stream being faded out).

As it is now, every new midi player will have a synth and receiver of its own so that they are truly an independent player.

If it uses WAV for effects, it could just be the ADPCM decoder, which also does take a little bit to finish up.

[TwoSpacesSG]

It's WAV sound effects, but the lags don't seem to have any rhyme or reason to me, and they're large enough to disrupt the gameplay.

[AShiningRay]

Then it's probably ADPCM, since normal wav files tend to get loaded up right away (and it's been quite some time since it received any changes, those being made in the beginning of December last year).