From: christer@cs.umu.se (Christer Ericson)
Subject: Re: Stereo sound problem (?) on mac games
Organization: Dep. of Info.Proc, Umea Univ., Sweden
Lines: 35

In <1993Apr19.183437.28365@gallant.apple.com> Steve Bollinger <buzz@apple.com> writes:
>[...]
>Use the sound manager and work fine on all machines.
>[...]
>The more of the story is to developers: DON'T CHEAT!
>Really, I am absolutely, positively not allowed to do what I am about to
>do,
>but I'm going say it anyway.
>Stop cheating on sound!
>Really soon, you will be sorry, as even those without external speakers
>will be disappointed with your sound on future hardware. The grace period
>is about to end.
>The Sound Manager is understandable now, and works pretty well and will
>work
>even better soon, so use it.

Don't be silly.

Using the Sound Manager on a Quadra is very well, but using SM on
any of the low-end machines doesn't simply work for a decent action
game since it just steals too much time from the CPU. This is
a fact. By writing directly to the hardware on an SE, it is
possible to have 4 simultaneous channels of sampled sound (11kHz) for
a cost of approx. 8000 cycles. Exactly how would you do that using
the SM, pray tell?

The correct thing to do is to use the SM on the machines that can
carry that extra load using the SM means, and to write directly
to the sound hardware on the machines that can't. It's not the
politically correct thing, but from the developers' point of
view it is.


Christer Ericson --- Internet: christer@cs.umu.se --- tel: +46-90-166794
Department of Computer Science, University of Umea, S-90187 UMEA, SWEDEN