stuttering issues on the s3 mini?

[zelda's ocarina]

Hi friends, I'm here before you today, to ask you guys a question.

I tried the demo version and...

...why is it that in my device, which I already stated in the thread title to be a samsung s3 mini, stutters while playing any DS game? Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Re: Coded, Tales of Innocense. All of them stutter with occassional audio stutters. Shouldn't it be capable of running these kinds of games? It has a Cortex A9, two cores, 1gb of RAM, and 1ghz. It has the recommended specs to run the game, but why am I having these issues? I remember on my other phone, which, unfortunately is broken now, runs games on the emulator smoothly with the default settings + Scale 2x rendering. I'm okay with it if it slows down in some scenes, but no, it stutters like crazy anywhere you are in the game. My phone can run psp games using the ppsspp app smoothly with moderate slow downs in some scenes. But in here, anything stutters in game mixed with minor lag spikes.

I hope you could help me guys. I'm prepared to buy it, if only it didn't lag and stutter.

[Exophase]

Try raising the audio latency setting (and if you're using audio over Bluetooth, this can make the latency a lot worse). And make sure frameskip is set to auto with a threshold of at least 4.

[zelda's ocarina]

I'm going to try, but I don't think that'll work.

Has anyone on here ever tested the app on an s3 mini? If someone did, does it stutter even with the default settings? I must know, cause this stuttering problem didn't happen to my older phone.

[Exophase]

The device is pretty low end by today's standards, but I don't think you'd find every game stutters (meaning it can't maintain realtime speed even after skipping 4/5 frames) due to a lack of performance alone. Audio buffers that are too small to cover the audio latency is a much better explanation for this, which is why the latency settings are there.

[zelda's ocarina]

Tried every possible latency setting, didn't work. My trial is almost up. Guess I need a new strong phone for this app.

[Exophase]

Trial doesn't work that way. Just means you can play 30 minutes after starting the emulator. If you start it again you get another 30m.

Even Xperia Play, which is much weaker than your phone, can play plenty of games w/o stuttering if frame skip is high enough. You don't need a new strong phone for decent performance. I don't know what the issue is with your phone but it's not strictly because of a lack of CPU performance, unless you've only tried games that happen to be very consistently heavily demanding. There could be something running in the background stealing CPU time, or something interfering with audio somehow.

Try turning on fast forward and see if speed goes up. If it does it's definitely not a matter of your phone being too weak.

[zelda's ocarina]

My problem is the game won't play smoothly. Every time I move my character it stutters. It's like, it runs fine while I'm not moving, but when I do, it lags and stutters. It must be because of the frameskip. But when I do turn it off or Auto 1 it's laggy and the audio is choppy.

This s3 mini must be low end cause the phone I was last using plays any DS game even the heavy 3D ones like Kingdom Hearts and Tales of Innocence smoothly without lags, stutters, and choppy audio. Think that phone was a 1.5 Ghz Snapdragon Quadcore. Butterfly HTC i think it's name was. I'm not a phone or tech expert so I don't know the difference between that phone and my current s3 mini performance wise when running games on Drastic.

You have other settings I can try? I really want this to work so that I can play Tales of Innocence and 358/2 Days.

[Exophase]

If the performance is good when you're not doing anything but then you get a big performance spike when you touch the screen it sounds like your phone is stealing a lot CPU time on touch screen events. Lordus says there have been some reports about this on other NovaThor devices (that's what your phone uses), in addition to being a problem with old single core devices. I don't know if there's really anything that can be done to improve this. Maybe there are options in a custom ROM that alleviate it.

One possible alternative is to use an external gamepad, that would avoid touch screen events. Maybe not something you want to do long term, but a useful test if you have one (it's possible to use a PS3 or PS4 controller, but it requires root.. pre-Lollipop phones have easy root exploits)

[zelda's ocarina]

I don't know how to root and the how to do that rom thing. =(

[TkSilver]

Then you will have to use a bluetooth controller made for android. Check your local gamestop and see if they still have a red samurai v2 controller best controller for the money. (Less then half most android bluetooth controllers and better quality then most too)

Or you can just google rooting a S3 mini and since samsung is a very popular brand find 100's of step by step