Several 4-QM digital modulation systems recently proposed in the literature for application to nonlinear channels are studied and their performances are compared through computer simulation. Efficient techniques to estimate performance parameters from the simulated digital signals are developed and used for extensive computations of power spectrum and error probability degradation even in the presence of adjacent channel interference. The results provide an evaluation of the potential of some new techniques to improve performance in nonlinear channels and also an indication of the most efficient among these techniques.