Sudden unexplained slowdown?

[poopymon]

I'm running ZSnes on Windows XP 32bit, and have been enjoying re-living Super Metroid immensely. However, today when I went to start playing, everything seems to be running at at least half the speed it was before. I haven't changed any settings, and nothing else on my system has changed in the slightest -- just all of a sudden, out of nowhere everything is super-slow. It's like back in the old days if you toggled the "turbo" button on your 386 while playing a game, but without the option of turning it back on. I thought I may have somehow bumped some settings in the config, but everything looks the same. I even tried changing the emulator speed (to "2x") but that made things unplayably fast.

Any ideas what might be causing this? Am I missing something blatantly obvious?

Any suggestions welcome .. Thanks.

[odditude]

what's "slow down" bound to? (config -> speed)

if it's not that, have you rebooted your computer since having the issue? updated any drivers, installed any new programs, etc?

[kode54]

Try adding the /usepmtimer switch to your boot.ini options.

[poopymon]

odditude: "slow down" wasn't bound to anything ("---") I tried just then binding it to "+" and seeing if bumping it up during gameplay would make a difference, but its either "way too fast" when I press it, or "way too slow" when left as normal. My system hasn't changed in the slightest since the emulator was last running perfectly a few days ago, no change to any drivers and no new programs installed. I did begin launching ZSnes from a shortcut, which I wasn't previously doing, but even reverting from doing that makes no difference at all.

kode54: Where abouts is the boot.ini located? I couldn't see it in any of the ZSnes directories, and I did a quick scan through all the docs to make sure I wasn't missing something blindingly obvious.

Thanks for the replies, guys..

[odditude]

boot.ini is in the root of the system drive, usually C: (it is a Windows system file that defines boot options).

[poopymon]

Ah, I thought perhaps you meant something more specific to ZSnes. I tried adding /usepmtimer to boot.ini, restarted, and it didn't make any difference. I even tried a completely separate install of ZSnes, and it too runs well below the 'normal' full speed I was experiencing a couple of days ago. It just seems very odd that it would all of a sudden change like that, without anything else on the system even being touched!

Total head-scratcher. Thanks for the suggestions though!

[odditude]

what is the refresh rate of your display set to?

[poopymon]

60Hz, I think?

But wow hang on -- I tried enabling VSync in the video options, and that combined with setting the emulator speed to 2x seems to make it playable! It is slightly faster than normal (say 115% or so) but thats a massive improvement to the ~20% speeds I was getting at 1x.

Still have no idea why it suddenly stopped working normally, as I've said nothing on my system changed in the slightest, and I didn't change anything in the ZSnes config from when it was previously working fine, but this workaround will definitely do for the time being.

Thanks, I wouldn't have thought of the vsync thing if you hadn't mentioned my refresh rate. Cheers!