Audio Stuttering on all cores

[noctis7x7]

What happened?

Just got my brand new RG35xx in transparent purple and first thing i did is to flash koriki CFW on a new sandisk SD card. setup process went well but when i started testing some games i was surprised to find that i have an audio stuttering issue in all games. i tried NES, Gameboy, SNES , megadrive and PS1 games, and the audio stutters are consistent among all those games. is this a known bug ? because i couldnt find others talking about having the same issue.

i tried putting back my stock sd card with stock OS, and the stutters were gone. please help as i really like koriki UI and hope to fix this annoying issue, btw games do run at full speed, only sound is getting stutters.

sorry for my bad english, i hope it is clear, thanks in advance for your support

[rendar82]

Please note I have this exact audio issue as well, it is a very apparent and extreme constant audio drop out/crackling stutter and unfortunately it appears to be occurring on RG35XX devices that were shipped within the last 3-4 weeks...and it's not limited to just Koriki. The stock Anbernic front end has no audio issues at all, however even the stock OnionOS Dual Boot setup that ships with the RG35XX has the exact same audio issue whenever booted into GarlicOS, which goes away when switching to Stock Anbernic Firmware. I have searched everywhere for a solution and have only seen the issue mentioned by 1 user on Reddit, 2 other user across multiple Anbernic and Retro Handheld discord servers, and then this post along with my own experiences/observations.

It would appear that there may be yet another new revision to the RG35XX internals, likely an as of yet undocumented PCB revision where this audio issue exists for a select few newly revised units, but I suspect it will become more and more apparent as more users receive these revised RG35XX models from late August into September. I have been trying every single possible CFW on new Samsung and Sandisk MicroSD cards since I received my RG35XX brand new 2 weeks ago, searching for a solution.

I have re-installled the stock dual boot image containing the Anbernic StockUI and GarlicOS, audio issue present in GarlicOS but are again not present in StockOs.. I installed the single boot GarlicOS only image (tried newest version 1.4.9 as well as multiple previos revisions), issue still present no matter what. Same stuttering/constant intermittent audio issue exists in both Koriki CFW and Batocera CFW, as well as muOS. The only firmwares WITHOUT the audio issue are the Anbernic StockUI and MinUI. Which is extremely limiting and irritating. All others tried (as listed) have audio issues across ALL content....every single Retroarch core/system in addition to standalone emulators and even within the user interface experience itself. It is universal no matter what settings or CFW are implemented.

[acmeplus]

Please note I have this exact audio issue as well, it is a very apparent and extreme constant audio drop out/crackling stutter and unfortunately it appears to be occurring on RG35XX devices that were shipped within the last 3-4 weeks...and it's not limited to just Koriki. The stock Anbernic front end has no audio issues at all, however even the stock OnionOS Dual Boot setup that ships with the RG35XX has the exact same audio issue whenever booted into GarlicOS, which goes away when switching to Stock Anbernic Firmware. I have searched everywhere for a solution and have only seen the issue mentioned by 1 user on Reddit, 2 other user across multiple Anbernic and Retro Handheld discord servers, and then this post along with my own experiences/observations.

There are several possibilities there. One is, as you have pointed out, a new hardware revision with yet another set of changes to the kernel that we need to figure out.

Note that MinUI is only an application running on top of stock, so it does not change kernel or hardware definitions, that's why you get it to work as-is. All the other firmware modify the kernel and other elements, and if there's a hardware definition change that may have an impact.

The first thing I would need is a copy of the original anbernic SDCARD first partition, specifically the uImage and kernel.dtb. Second I would need a backup of the first sectors of that working card. If you have access to linux you can do a sudo dd if=/dev/sdX# of=rg35xx_new_bootloader.img bs=1 count=8388608 where /dev/sdX# should be replaced with the device and number of the usb or sdcard reader address (e.g. /dev/sdh1). Then upload that rg35xx_new_bootloader.img to this ticket.

[rendar82]

The first thing I would need is a copy of the original anbernic SDCARD first partition, specifically the uImage and kernel.dtb. Second I would need a backup of the first sectors of that working card. If you have access to linux you can do a sudo dd if=/dev/sdX# of=rg35xx_new_bootloader.img bs=1 count=8388608 where /dev/sdX# should be replaced with the device and number of the usb or sdcard reader address (e.g. /dev/sdh1). Then upload that rg35xx_new_bootloader.img to this ticket.

I have run the command to generate an IMG file from the SD card. FYI, here is the exact command I entered: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=rg35xx_new_bootloader.img bs=1 count=8388608

I am also attaching a screenshot of the KDE Partition manager display showing all SD partitions and device labels to ensure I entered the right one.

I have added all the contents of the Windows visible FAT32 partition to the attached zip archive, which contains the specific files you requested (uImage and kernel.dtb). I also included the IMG file I generated from the SD card. The contents of the zip and tar.gz files are both the same.

FYI, I have also re-installed 3 different revisions of the stock OS images newly downloaded from Anbernic on various new SD cards, and the audio issues are never present on stock firmware no matter which version (stand-alone or dual-boot with GarlicOS) or which revision, even going back to the very first publicly available firmware. So any other files you might need should be readily available from any of the stock SD images up for download.

Whatever kernel difference that's causing all CFW's to experience this same audio issue isn't something Anbernic changed their kernel to support....all revisions of their stock kernel as well as MinUI and the others which just run alongside stock work perfectly fine regardless of how old the OS version is.

Please feel free to request anything else or to support testing, I would greatly appreciate the ability to use Koriki OS (anything but stock please lol, but Koriki is definitely the primary CFW I would choose), I absolutely love it aside from the out-of-developer control audio issues introduced by Anbernic themselves while changing hardware or kernel compatibility. Considering the dual boot setup with GarlicOS immediately presents this massive, intrusive and obvious constant audio drop out, they apparently didn't test this change very thoroughly even with the software they're providing straight out of the box.

P.S. I have begun to see multiple Reddit posts and others responding now as well as Discord reports asking about this exact same audio issue when using any non-stock firmware. All reports so far seem to be with newly received RG35XX devices, so it appears the number of people with this slightly revised hardware realizing these same audio issues is rising quickly.

Thank you!

RG35XX-SD1-PARTITION-1_(ulimagekernel.dtb&_all-file and boot IMG).zip

RG35XX-SD1-PARTITION-1_(ulimagekernel.dtb&_all-files and boot IMG).tar.gz

[acmeplus]

I'll investigate, from what you are saying it's unlikely it's the bootloader but who knows. Most likely the audio buffers need to be increased for certain models. Been busy lately but will check when I have a minute.

[noctis7x7]

I'll investigate, from what you are saying it's unlikely it's the bootloader but who knows. Most likely the audio buffers need to be increased for certain models. Been busy lately but will check when I have a minute.

Hello, i hope you are doing well, please i wanted to check if any update regarding this issue ? is increasing the audio buffers something that we can do at our level or you will provide a new build ?

thank you for looking into this, this issue is really ruining the handheld experience for me

[SocialDamage]

Any updates on this ?