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Creative Music System (CMS)¶

The Creative Music System (also referred to as CMS or C/MS) was released in August 1987 by Creative Technology, the company’s first sound card. It used two Philips SAA1099 chips for square-wave synthesis — a much simpler sound than the AdLib card’s FM synthesis, and it did not sell well. The card was rebranded as Game Blaster a year later, without making any changes to the hardware.

Despite the flop, Creative kept the CMS chips on the original Sound Blaster 1.0 for backward compatibility (and optionally on the Sound Blaster 2.0), which is why CMS settings live in DOSBox Staging’s shared [sblaster] configuration section alongside the Sound Blaster’s own.

DOS games typically split their audio into two streams handled by different hardware: synthesised music and digital sound (pre-recorded samples for speech and sound effects). CMS handled only the music side, and only a small number of games (mostly from Sierra) ever supported it — this page is mostly relevant only if you’re configuring one of those titles. For most DOS games, see AdLib and Sound Blaster instead.

Game Blaster emulation¶

As the CMS is also present on the Sound Blaster 1.0, and optionally on the Sound Blaster 2.0, CMS support in some early games might only work with either the Game Blaster or one of the Sound Blaster models, but not both. The reason for this is that the Game Blaster card had an extra chip which some games used to auto-detect the card.

Use the following setting to emulate a Game Blaster card:

[sblaster]
sbtype = gb

Mixer channel¶

The CMS synthesizers outputs to the CMS mixer channel.

Configuration settings¶

The CMS and Game Blaster settings are configured in the [sblaster] section. The related Sound Blaster digital-audio settings are covered on the Sound Blaster page.

cms¶

Enable CMS emulation.

Possible values:

  • auto default – Auto-enable CMS emulation for Sound Blaster 1 and Game Blaster.
  • on – Enable CMS emulation on Sound Blaster 1 and 2.
  • off – Disable CMS emulation (except when the Game Blaster is selected).
cms_filter¶

Filter for the Creative Music System (CMS) / Game Blaster output:

  • on default – Filter the CMS output. This applies a 1st order low-pass filter at 6 kHz (lpf 1 6000).
  • off – Don’t filter the CMS output.
  • <custom> – Custom filter definition; see Custom filter settings for details.