Thanks MKF - always appreciative of the feedback! Since there are no emulation groupies or massive amounts of money rolling in from this effort, the kind words are all that sustain me
Not ready for a new build, but 2.7a is checked in with the first of the improvements for sound. The improvement here is on the Intellivision side (not the sound rendering side... which is the side that produces the "zingers"). I've increased the sound quality 2 levels - so we now have:
BEST (12)
EXCELLENT (14) - this is the new default for DSi
GOOD (16) - this was the OLD "best"
AVERAGE (20) - this is the new default for the DS-LITE/PHAT
FAIR (24) - this was the OLD default for the DS-LITE/PHAT
DISABLED (this probably isn't useful anymore... Intellivision without sound is like crackers without cheese. Why bother?)
I did not change the config version so if you previously had "BEST" selected, you'll have the NEW "BEST" selected automatically. Be aware, the new BEST is a bit CPU consuming and although everything on the DSi runs with it... games like Space Spartans get very frantic with multiple channels of sound, voice and action on screen and it's possible your frame rate will dip below 60FPS if you set it to BEST. That's why I've gone conservative and defaulted the DSi to "EXCELLENT".
This really makes the audio sound great EXCEPT when we get those occasional 'zingers' which is the next thing I'm working on. If you play Beauty and the Beast or Masters of the Universe on EXCELLENT you will hear all the glory that is the Intellivision. To be honest, I had a hard time even with headphones telling the difference between BEST and EXCELLENT and when I went even more aggressive than BEST (say, a sound divisor of 10 or 8), I couldn't tell any difference (but the CPU utilization goes way up). So from the emulation side - this is as good as the sound gets.
Now my attention goes to the output side on the DS. I did a lot of research last night and put out some forum messages hoping for a bit of direction on how to solve the output side.