Reply 60 of 71, by MobyGamer
- Rank
- Member
So, these games test with perfect CMS sound in a 10 MHz 286 on a real CMS card:
Airball
Bubble Bobble
NY Warriors
Oil's Well
Rastan (although the music stops playing once it plays once through)
...and these have distorted CMS audio on the same hardware:
Budokan (music is fine, but after a while, noise channel starts to creep in)
Jones in the Fast Lane (bad/missed notes)
Prince of Persia (bad/missed notes)
Puzzznic (music is fine, but after a while, noise channel starts to creep in)
Qix (music is fine, noise channel is firing when it shouldn't)
Rambo III (music is fine, but after a while, noise channel starts to creep in)
Times of Lore (lots of noise and missed notes, which is a shame since it's one of the better CMS sountracks)
It's worth reiterating that all of the CMS demo software works 100% on this hardware combination. The simplest explanation is that not all game programmers coded the CMS sound routines correctly. My guess is that they're performing an OUT DX,AX as an optimization when the hardware needs OUT DX,AL, and bus settle time between bytes sent.