Launchbox is definitely a ‘one ring to rule the all’ thing. I've sunk easily 15 hours into this problem and would greatly appreciate any help at this point! changing emulation speed in Dolphin.ini from unlimited 0 to 1, 0.35 and 0.2 but they don't seem to work with RetroarchĪ setup of opengl, xaudio, 40% cpu, audio latency and buffers way up, 30 kHz sound and the right games gives a somehow playable result (still crackling) but it's still very far from what I should get with my system when comparing to others in youtube.

different combinations of all the other Dolphin options menu settings (no effect) dozens of different roms from both ntsc and pal (games like Smash Melee or Fifa 07 give more crackling/stutter at 50% cpu than Timesplitters 2 or TMNT games, for example) audio frequencies of 48/42/36/30/24 kHz (maybe the most effective so far but still not much) increasing all the 3 options of audio latency trying values from 20ms to 300ms in 5ms steps, and the other two options from default all the way to max (some effect) xaudio/openal/daudio (little to no effect, xaudio seems a bit better than openal) I've tested (while raising cpu from 40% upwards): I'm not sure what the problem is (I'm new to Dolphin), but I think it's audio sync. However 30-40% makes most games run slow at least on my setup so it's not a solution, I'd like to stay comfortably above 60%. It's less intense and almost gone if I underclock the cpu option to 30% but gets quickly worse from 50% to 100%. I get very bad sound stutter and crackling, which usually climaxes into a grand finale of 2 second emulation freeze.

Dolphin emulator sound crackling