[garbear]

But some cores start the games with audio and no video. (It's not a new behavior, this problem started together with the shifted lines). These cores are GenesisPlus, Picodrive, both PCE cores and some games in FBAlpha (like Contra, while others work fine).

Thanks for the list of cores, being specific makes things easier for me to test. This is a known issue. I'll document the problem in the release notes.

The problem is due to a change in video dimensions. These cores are possibly showing a low-res BIOS or diagnostic video at startup, and then changing to the game resolution. ATM, RetroPlayer just drops the latter frames. I'm working on it.

As for the audio crackles, they are mostly audible in SNES cores, I'll investigate further and then I'll post a log, but keep in mind that I'm making these tests on a cheap TV Box, so maybe most of these audio artifacts are caused by my weak Z8350 CPU.

This could definitely be a cause. Also post debug logs. I can usually find answers there.

Also, the only shader that seems to work is Bilinear, all the others as far as I can see give me Nearest Neighbor.

Post debug logs. What version of Windows? Graphics vendor? Driver version? Folder structure? DirectX errors? Other causes? These are all visible in the debug log.