Matthew McNaughton <mcnaught at cs.ualberta.ca> is widely believed to have written:

[snip good analysis]
There is a simpler way. When the plugins are compiled externally it is
nice and simple to just _leave out_ the sound plugin. The image code
then skips over the whole problem. I guess the only thing that needs to
be done is to make sure VMMaker can get the right info to prevent the
sound plugin from being built on a machine that cannot support it.

Actually, that would work perectly well even if for some reason you want
all the plugins internal, but surely nobody is that daft :-)

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Differently clued.  -- Dave Clark