VICE SOUND on RISC OS
=====================


On RISC OS, Vice offers two sound devices, VIDC (asynchronous) and VIDC Sync
(your guess), and two sound models, 8bit and 16bit. The asynchronous device
allows reducing latency (-> buffer size) considerably without risking dropouts
and is therefore ideal for playing games with SFX, that's why it's the default
for the ``real'' emulators (not the VSID player). Unfortunately, Vice wasn't
written with asynchronous sound in mind and therefore it's kind of a hack that
doesn't work well with SID music (doesn't work at all with reSID!), i.e. you
should select the synchronous sound device if you want music to sound good,
that's why the synchronous device is the default device in VSID; in that case
you need a rather large sound buffer size to minimize dropouts, though (say
0.35 seconds minimum, with all the problems this causes like delayed sound etc;
besides Vice doesn't react too well to sudden speed changes in synchronous
mode).
If we had really fast CPUs on RISC OS, I'd just advice using the synchronous
device and a buffer size of 0.1 seconds, but that doesn't work well ATM. Choose
whichever device best fits your needs, using the asynchronous one for playing
games (do not use reSID in that case!) to get the sound when you press the button
and the synchronous one if you want to listen to music.

8bit sound was the old system using logarithmic samples, but it was superceded
in RISC OS 3.5 (to be precise the hooks for 16bit sound were introduced in RO3.5,
but not every machine had the necessary hardware too). 16bit sound is available
on the newer machines (type ``*help SoundSystem'' at the CLI to find out whether
your machine supports it). Since version 1.7 Vice (or rather the DigitalRenderer
module included) has also been able to use 16bit mode and you're advised to use
it if your machine has the necessary hardware. It's off by default, however,
because it's not standard on all RISC OS machines and I want Vice to run out
of the box on as many machines as possible. You can choose 8bit/16bit sound
from the sound configuration window.



Recommended SIDs:
-----------------

(in alphabetical order and with lots of omissions; I marked my personal
favourites with an exclamation mark. Look for these SIDs in the High Voltage
SID Collection (HVSC) and use them in VSID)

Rob Hubbard:
	Commando
!	Delta	(tracks 1 & 12 -- 1 takes a while to take off, but then...)
!	International Karate
	Kentilla
	Knucklebusters
	Lightforce
	Monty on the Run
!	Zoids

Martin Galway:
	Green Beret
!	Parallax
	Rambo First Blood Part II
!	Yie Ar Kung Fu

Jeroen Tel / Maniacs of Noise:
	Cybernoid
	Cybernoid II
!	Kinetix
!	Robocop 3

Ben Daglish & Anthony Lees:
	Last Ninja I

Matt Gray:
	Last Ninja II
