Why does Hellfire making "ticking" noises on my Tungsten T2?

The cause of this problem is one that has vexed us for some time with GTS Racing, which also suffers from the same problem on the PalmOne Tungsten T2.

Both GTS Racing and Hellfire generate their audio "on the fly", a constant stream of sound that is mixed at the same time as the game. However, unlike a PC, Palm and Pocket PCs do not have a sound card to take care of this process, so instead a good chunk of this task falls to the processor.

There is a constant background "noise" of system events which also pass through the processor, requiring only minimal time from it. These range from the battery levels, to updating the time, checking for appointments, all sorts of things. A class of program, which we call a "hack", inserts it's own tendrils into this sequence, usually to look for specific events and, when it spots one it is interested in, to execute it's own code. This code may be anything from writing graffiti onto the screen itself, to triggering a different sort of alarm program, to turning bluetooth on or off.

So how do these two relate? When a hack needs to execute it's own code, this takes a certain amount of processor time, and under "normal" Palm use, this processor time is not really noticeable, and a good many hacks are efficient enough that it has little effect anyway. The problems come when a program is trapping the wrong sort of event (for example the general "broadcast" event, which informs programs what has just been triggered, one which occurs almost constantly), or when it takes more than the usual amount of processing time. The former situation is far more common, and in this case is the cause of the problem!

The hack in question takes enough time away from the processor to interrupt the tidy generation of the audio stream from Hellfire or GTS Racing, and this regular and constant interruption manifests as a clicking in the audio.

On the older Tungsten T, where this problem was first discovered, it was caused by certain folding keyboard drivers, and a few other hacks which made changes to the way graffiti worked. In each case, disabling the hack or driver solved the problem. The Tungsten T2 however, was a different story. It appears as if the T2 itself has something which is constantly grabbing the processors attention, resulting in the same effect - it occurs even on a brand new Tungsten T2. We've spent some time working on how best to solve this problem, all to no avail so far, but rest assured we will keep looking!