Mednafen and PulseAudio failing to work together

[zlg]

After a recent update (within the last week), I've been getting some audio issues from mednafen. It seems like it's not getting a connection to the PA server and is repeatedly trying to access it. During this time, the game will run at super fast speed and the audio is garbled. Some games eventually straighten out and the sound shows up in pavucontrol like it's supposed to. For most other games, I'm stuck with super fast emulation, *no* control for it in pavucontrol, and garbled sound.

I've tried various fixes, such as setting sound.driver, sound.device, and sound.period_time to varying values. I managed to get audio through SDL working mostly okay, but it crackled and none of the usual fixes worked to resolve the problem.

Has anyone else gotten mednafen to play nice with PulseAudio 9? I'd hate to have to go back to FCE Ultra, snes9x, epsxe, etc. Mednafen's a great emulator but it's always struggled with getting sound right. It's hard to figure out which program is to blame here. Mednafen doesn't spit out any errors and just chugs along super fast, while my audio is completely tied up during this time (mpd can't play, Skype won't make noise, etc).

[Ant P.]

Last time I used Mednafen the sound worked okay, but I've got a hardware-mixer sound card so it may have been going through ALSA. Try leaving the config at default and setting SDL_AUDIODRIVER instead.

(Have you considered Retroarch instead? It has everything Mednafen does, and three Pulseaudio drivers)

[zlg]

Retroarch seems only available on an overlay. That said, it looks interesting and I might check it out some time.

I changed sound.driver to 'sdl' and sound.device to 'default', and it all seems to be working okay. It's rather odd what exactly was going on...