Re: [GD-Windows] Latency of wavOutWrite vs. DSound

[Corrinne Y. <cor...@sp...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hook" <bri...@py...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2001 7:53 PM
Subject: [GD-Windows] Latency of wavOutWrite vs. DSound


> I'm working on a small title that needs to run across as wide a range of
> Win32 platforms as possible.  I know that the non-DX audio capabilities
> such as wavOutWrite have higher latencies than using DirectSound, but
> has anyone quantified the difference?  Is it high enough to be
> aggravating in a game that isn't an action game?

-- Old DSound (using it only as a way to write out to a simple sound output
buffer) is available on a lot of systems, and if not, can be provided free
with your application. I had done code on some games that were pretty old
that did not use any D3D (and didn't use OpenGL) and only used DSound.

-- Using simple old DSound doesn't lock you out of too many legacy Win32
platforms. And when I didn't use DSound back then, I used those famous 3rd
party audio libs, which didn't cost too much to license either. (in exchange
for sound board compatibility, and decent audio performance, and a more
practical API interface)

-- And when I didn't use the 3rd party audio libs, I programmed the
interrupts directly for a handful of audio chips. It wasn't that bad as
audio cards were trying to converge towards the Adlib / Soundblaster
cloneing process anyway. I don't suspect interrupt programming is too bad
now (though hadn't done it for a while) since most of those bargain non
Creative chips probably just emulate old Adlib or old Soundblaster
interfaces on some level.