pouët.net

Hi all,

What is the best sound system for 4kb intros?

Cheers,

people keep saying waveout is smaller than directsound, but i'm not sure, ds was always smaller in my code.

well for me waveout was always smaller than directsound (~10-20 bytes) after compression. but the packing ratio will vary from intro to intro anyway since the rest of the code/data will influence it. so better try out both versions.

I would worry more about the synth code / sequence format itself.

I have the same experience as gopher, waveout about 20 bytes smaller than dsound after compression.
The actual sound output code should probably only be a couple of lines anyway and doesn't affect the rest of the synth (hopefully, anyway), so it's easy enough to just write 2 versions of it with a #define and see which one is smaller in the end.

Use midi for coolness.

interesting .. I play sound .. on the precalced side .. but let's say .. it depends on .. whatever .. d-.-b ..

Valve.

benefits of DirectSound is that you can get the time for your intro from there (sample position). If you use waveout, you'll need additional functions like QueryPerformanceCounter or timeGetTime, which need to be imported.

with waveout you can use waveOutGetPosition which also gives you the time according to the current song position and it takes only another 4 byte hash for the import.
and so far even including this function along with the neccessary waveOutOpen, waveOutPrepareHeader and waveOutWrite was always smaller than dsound (at least for me). but admittedly its not that much saving anyway, so choose whatever you're comfortable with.

Yes, but importing a function and calling it is 4 bytes each, whilst calling a member of an interface is just 4 bytes... I also get dsound code smaller than waveout.