Sound Settings

Here you can select, if (and how) UAE will provide sound emulation.

Sound Emulation

Disabled causes UAE not to emulate sound.

Disabled, but emulated tries to emulate most of the sound hardware, but doesn't actually output sound.

Emulated should sound just as good as 100% accurate and will be much faster for some programs.

Emulated, 100% accurate will emulate all of the sound hardware; and some programs (i.e. AIBB) won't run with other settings.

Frequency, Sample Type and Stereo

This options allow you to adjust the settings for the sound-sampling. The higher Frequency and/or Sample Type, the higher will be the sound quality, but the slower will be the emulation. The same applies for Stereo.

NOTE: High quality sound requires a lot of computing power, so try with different settings if your machine is not fast enough.

Sound Output Method

The sound emulation uses two different systems to actually output the sound. One uses DirectSound, and the other one (WaveOut) uses MMSystem (MultiMediaSystem), which is part of Windows since 3.x.

WaveOut has two different output methods.

• Looping writes the sounddata into the buffer only once and then begins to play.
• DblBuff waits for the completion of the soundoutput.

DirectSound has the same methods, but uses DirectSound. This should help compatibility with more soundcards. DirectSoundNotification controls the "position" of the sound. The output methods are about the same as with WaveOut:

• Looping writes the sounddata into the buffer only once and then begins to play.
• DblBuff waits for the completion of the soundoutput.

Background Information:

The Amiga's third custom chip, Paula took care of audio generation and I/O. There were four voices of sound, output as two (stereo) channels. Nine octaves were available with both amplitude (e.g. speech playback) and frequency modulation.
Amplitude modulation was the normal way of generating sound, with the DMA chip reading amplitude data from memory and the I/O chip translating the digital data to an analog voltage level. Frequency modulation always took place "on top of" amplitude modulation, modulating the frequency with which the DMA chip would read new amplitude data. One voice's amplitude data was usurped to modulate the frequency of another voice. Frequency modulation was not needed to play normal tones, and usually had little to do with the perceived pitch of the actual sound played, at least as experienced by a human listener.