I looked for 3 days for an answer... apparently not hard enough. Thank you very much!

@pjft I guess I could try that. It was working fine till yesterday so version 4.3.1 was good for awhile.
What version are you thinking I should try?

I have been thinking about it and what might have happened but I don't know how to fix it is.
I had the videos playing for screen saver and the audio turned off for screen saver only. Let it run that way for a few hours every so often. Sometimes I would hear sound jump in and out. Like a noise from the other room. Then yesterday I noticed I didnt have any sound.
The reason I had it on so often and wasn't playing is I'm a designer working on a theme. Was wondering if this could be the source of the trouble?

I'm going to post here the result of a few lines of commands, hoping that it will help to understand...

lsmod command return me this:
Module Size Used by
bnep 12051 2
hci_uart 20020 1
btbcm 7916 1 hci_uart
bluetooth 365780 22 hci_uart,bnep,btbcm
evdev 12423 2
joydev 9988 0
brcmfmac 292632 0
brcmutil 9863 1 brcmfmac
cfg80211 544609 1 brcmfmac
rfkill 20851 4 bluetooth,cfg80211
xpad 16908 0
ff_memless 5315 1 xpad
snd_soc_hifiberry_dac 3230 2
snd_soc_bcm2835_i2s 7480 2
bcm2835_gpiomem 3940 0
snd_soc_pcm5102a 2310 1
snd_soc_core 180471 3 snd_soc_bcm2835_i2s,snd_soc_hifiberry_dac,snd_soc_pcm5102a
snd_compress 10384 1 snd_soc_core
snd_pcm_dmaengine 5894 1 snd_soc_core
snd_pcm 98501 5 snd_pcm_dmaengine,snd_soc_bcm2835_i2s,snd_soc_core,snd_soc_hifib erry_dac
snd_timer 23968 2 snd_pcm
snd 70032 6 snd_compress,snd_timer,snd_soc_core,snd_pcm
uio_pdrv_genirq 3923 0
fixed 3285 0
uio 10204 1 uio_pdrv_genirq
uinput 9125 0
fuse 99603 1
ipv6 408900 34

amixer cset numid=3 0 return me amixer: Cannot find the given element from control default

cat /proc/asound/cards return me :
0 [sndrpihifiberry]: HifiberryDac - snd_rpi_hifiberry_dac
snd_rpi_hifiberry_dac

Im beginning to think its an issue with either retroarch or raspian itself on how its reading streamed data from a disk. It seems to happen when trying to read music or a video. Not only am i getting pauses and stops in pix games, but also sega cd games. hmmm

@kirk glad to help. Keep your other settings that you did too. All 3 keeps this as universal to tv's as possible.

Sorry for the late reply...

I tried very briefly to get things working without success and finally took the easy way installing Xubuntu with which I don't have any sound problem.

@Dorbs84 you use the audio in the vga adapter. You need to open up /boot/config.txt and remove the hashtag from this line:

#hdmi_drive=2

So it looks like this:

hdmi_drive=2

@tyreal90 never mind I restarted my pi and it works again, thanks anyway, I thought I broke something. XD

Apologies, I meant mame2003. Thanks for the info, after reading your post I had another idea, and I've found the best way to fix the sound:

In the tab menu, switch on test mode (the place where you set free play, adjust difficulty etc for the game). In that menu there is a volume control option for the game itself. It's down at the minimum volume by default, crank it up and the sound is fine.

Other Midway arcade games such as Mortal Kombat have the same issue and I see they all use the same sound chip. I haven't checked but I expect the same method will work.

Darn, new i would forget something. Mario kart 64 using the mupen64plus-gles2rice-highres.

I found the solution in: Audio issue with latest version of RetroPie.

For those who want to know, the solution was to add this to the config.txt file in /boot:

dtparam=audio=on

Sorry for wasting any time!

@retronerd then lr-fbalpha should be good to go

Note for future reference when requesting support, in the read me first link I gave it asks for a lot more detail and does say

RetroPie Version Used (3.6, 3.8.1, 4.01 etc.. - do not write latest):

@edmaul69 Thanks mate, I will give it a go 😀👏👍

@herb_fargus said in Colecovision sound stutters:

@barbudreadmon I also hear the bluemsx is capable of emulating colecovision ;) just needs some controller hooks.

This would be a more viable option. Fba needs it's on romset for Colecovision.

With bluemsx you could just use the No-Intro set.

@edmaul69 Yes, tried the game mode. Thanks!

Update
I'm glad you got it working!

@VladoPortos said in USB Audio dongle have no sound in emulators.:

I personally thinks maybe its something with retroarch, I'm trying now specify correct HW in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg under audio_device = , but so far no luck :(

I agree, it sounds like it's just the RetroArch emulators without sound. I also think it might be a setting in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg

RetroPie comes with a backup of their custom all retroarch.cfg with default settings. It is located here:
/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg.rp-dist

You could test with default settings by backing up your original retroarch.cfg and then copy retroarch.cfg.rp-dist to retroarch.cfg.

@dankcushions

Thank you. :-)