Something I noticed about SM 3.9 and 4

You have to have stepmania at fullscreen or the arrow scroll will be messed up. It's like the arrows are trying to play catch up every second or something. They seem to skip frames or jump up while scrolling. It's kinda like a jerking up motion while scrolling. I've tryed this with various themes on 3.9 and the default on 4 and such. Is there a way to have stepmania windowed without this problem? Or do I need to turn off/on a setting to fix this? It's just weird that as long as I'm using fullscreen on stepmania I don't have this problem. But anytime it's windowed I do. It did this on my old CRT and now on my new widescreen monitor too.

Try turning down your Display Resolution or Texture Resolution.

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(hint: other people do not have any problem playing StepMania in windowed mode.)

You probably need a better computer. Give us your machine specs and operating system.

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Wow what did I get a -1 just for this thread? I'm just honestly trying to figure out what's wrong.

And I'm running a Core i5 2.66Ghz Quad Core 8MB L3 Cache, 2GB DDR3 1066mhz memory, but only a 256MB GDDR3 X700 ATI Radieon.

I would think even the video card is more than enough for stepmania too.

In this case, I assume you're running Windows Vista/7.

Among other things I'm not thinking of, you should try:
1) Updating video drivers
2) Toggle Vsync in video drivers and/or StepMania
3) Toggle between OpenGL and D3D in [VideoRenderers] in the Preferences.ini
4) Turning off bgvideos if this is only happening / happening more noticeably on simfiles with videos (in which case you would probably need more RAM or a better video card - your CPU should be fine, though I don't know how good quad-core i5's are compared to a similarly priced dual-core i5.)

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Or even better, convert all your BGVideos to 320x240 native resolution (anything higher causes StepMania to get finnicky, even In The Groove 1 and 2 BGVideos are 320x240).

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Lol you said ass.

Actually, those videos were almost definitely only that size to ensure wider compatibility with low-end PC's. All my desktops in the past 5+ years (and my laptops in the past 3) have had no trouble running videos of at least 640x480 resolution in StepMania.

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I meant the ARCADE machine videos. When 320x256 causes my system to have serious LAG and 320x240 plays very smoothly, StepMania is clearly not liking the non 320x240 video files (but my computers are all 6+ years old, definitely not high end machines and I have a VERY low end laptop and it has absolutely no problem with BGVideos of 320x240. Basically I turn the framerate display on in StepMania, then adjust the settings to the highest point where I can still achieve 60fps, with these settings if a file has a music video of 320x240 there is no drop in framerate, if the video is anything else (even SMALLER) there is going to be a drop in framerate. This tells me that StepMania can play 320x240 without trying to adjust the video file, it's possible that some builds of StepMania may be fine with 640x480 as well, just sayin' that some video sizes will cause StepMania to try much harder to play them.

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I've actually owned a Solo 2000 machine years ago. It even had the "DX" model pad too. And I still own many of the ps1 and ps2 games for usa/japan and all the xbox/360 ones and a japan fat ps2. That machine was $1,500 too so I hardly call myself a cheap ass. I know a lot of people on this site are like this too.

And I just still find it weird that putting this at full screen fixes the problem. I guess it's just a problem with stepmania then. And I had no idea stepmania only plays 320x240 videos well. Just wow on that dear God.

This is probably too easy of a solution, but:

Did you exit other running programs like web browsers, chat clients, torrents? All of those use quite a bit of CPU/ram, especially when added together.

edit: re: 320x256 videos, those are not 4:3, and 3.9 would thus have to stretch it on-the-fly. Comparing 320x240 videos with 320x256 videos is useless for measuring stepmania performance. I wouldn't put money on it, but I'd think 320x224 videos might actually perform worse than 320x240.

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