Weird Sound & Heat Issue on 2015 Macbook Air

If you're having problems with Snes9x, or think you've found a bug, this is the place to be.
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Silo444
Snes9x White Belt
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Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2016 10:24 am

Weird Sound & Heat Issue on 2015 Macbook Air

Post by Silo444 »

I'm having an unusual problem with SNES9X on my 2015 Macbook Air. The first time I tried it every game I played looked and sounded great. However, after about 10 minutes I noticed the fan was running loud and my laptop was getting very hot. My battery went from full charge to nearly dead in less than an hour. I then began to experiment with the settings and discovered that after changing "Frame Skip" from "Auto" to "0" I could play without the fan coming on at all and my Macbook stayed completely cool with very little drain on the battery, even after many hours of play.

Unfortunately, when "Frame Skip" is set to anything but "Auto" my audio crackles and skips. I've spent hours trying every possible combination of video and audio settings. I even adjusted the Input Rate 10 Hz at a time looking for the sweet spot, but that wasn't effective either. Every setting more or less just altered the sound of the crackling rather than resolving it.

What does the "Auto" setting on "Frame Skip" do that causes my laptop to run so hard? It doesn't seem like syncing the sound up with the video should be that demanding. It's frustrating to see the video run perfectly while my system stays cool once I switch to "0". I'm replaying several JRPGs I enjoyed in my youth for nostalgia, so the music is an important part of the experience for me. At this point I have to choose between overheating or crackling audio. Has anyone had a similar experience? Is there a solution I might have missed? I'd greatly appreciate any advice.

2015 13" MacBook Air Intel Core i7 2.2 GHz, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB, OS X El Capitan 10.11.5
Snes9x version 1.53 (113)
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