[pyddr-discuss] Juddery arrows

[David Bellows]

I also have the arrow problem so here is my data.  Debian, 2.2.23
kernel, OSS, SB Live!, NVIDIA (with their driver), 1GHz K-7, 256MB Ram.
  All my other games run just fine.  I don't know what other python
based games I might have installed to see if it is related to python (I
do have psyco installed).  I normally run KDE but I also tried it on a 
naked X-session (xinit) both windowed and fullscreen (around 60 fps) and 
the result was the same. Pydance is still playable it's just that the
arrows have that slight hitch to them.  I noticed this once before in an
earlier version and then it went away and now it's back.  Unfortunately
I don't remember what versions those were.

Dave

Joe Wreschnig wrote:

> It's not CPU-bound in the traditional sense, no. Let me guess -- you've
> got an onboard sound card? Probably an Intel i8x0 AC97 variant? I've
> seen this on several systems (across different platforms, and even
> different dancing games), and that's the only thing they've all had in
> common.
> 
> My theory is, that as the games eat 100% CPU time (to process events as
> accurately and as fast as possible), the sound card gets starved since
> the cheap onboard soundcards rely on the CPU to do more data pushing.
> 
> If that's the case, I don't know of a way to fix it, beyond buying a new
> sound card. I also don't know of a way to verify this beyond hacking
> around in the sound drivers, which I really don't want to do. If you're
> using still OSS instead of ALSA, you might want to switch; my experience
> is that ALSA has less of a problem than OSS.
> 
> David Dodge's suggestions are also possible, but I think this is the
> much more common case.