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MrD

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Joined: Jan 1970

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Sep 29, 2020, 08:37 AM
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Tech questions about Jazz 1 audio engine

Hi I'm writing my own MSDOS sound stuff (SB driver, mod player / mixer, etc.) and I've got some questions about the nuts and bolts of Jazz' audio engine when it comes to Sound Blaster digitised audio.

In Jazz 1's setup screen, it has four SB options:
- Sound Blaster (Mono),
- Sound Blaster 16 (Stereo),
- Sound Blaster Clone (Stereo),
- Sound Blaster Pro (Stereo)

What's the difference between these drivers, technically speaking, in terms of their output?

I know that of the SB1(.5)/SB2/SBPro/SB16 series, only the SBPro and SB16 are capable of stereo output (~22kHz and ~44kHz respectively). Does JJ output at 44kHz with a SB16?

I'm surprised the Sound Blaster Clone is listed as stereo (as my first thought based on the name would've been a fail-safe clone driver would've been a legacy SB1 single-cycle mode driver), so I assume their Clone is just a super-safe variation of the Pro driver (or it might just be exactly the same, and just added as an option to satisfy anyone who has a Sound Galaxy, etc that's Pro compatible? But that wouldn't make sense as the help text for SBPro says it's for compatibles.)

In the Playback Quality page, there's four options:
- Ultra High Quality (Pentium)
- Very High Quality (486-50)
- High Quality (486-33)
- Medium Quality (386-33)

Given that the stereo is set by the driver, do these options just change the mixing+playback rate? (If so, to what?) Or do they also render the song mono internally to save on a few memory write accesses?