I received a Yamaha OPL3 PCI card this week.

Apparently these babies are quite uncommon. So far I can't get Linux to work with the OPL3 Chip at all, and WinXP plays with it somewhat but it's the same yucky midi I remember hearing on Soundblasters back in the day.

Now a question: are there any programs out there for modern OSs (WinXP, Linux preferred) that work with this chip?
I know there has to be some sort of compiled code out there that can use this thing without any problems. So far, The programs I found were looking for ISA cards and not this OPL3 PCI card. I've yet to hear the awesome sounds I heard back in the 90s coming out of my speakers. No dice from Adplug either. Apparently, directly accessing hardware these days is bad!

(this is probably a bad place to ask this but I know half of you are computer nerds (lookin at you, leileilol) so at least someone will bite.)

The only program I could possibly use is http://stano.korex.sk/index.php ADLIB TRACKER II, as it requires no sound drivers and accesses the chip directly. Perhaps I should prepare a bootdisk with MS-DOS and try it that way?

EDIT: THERE

An Yamaha. I do believe, sir, that Yamaha does not begin with a vowel sound.

Danarchy said:

An Yamaha. I do believe, sir, that Yamaha does not begin with a vowel sound.

The Alpha-Bits do not lie. I saw the Marshmallow Ys.

;)

Csonicgo said:

The Alpha-Bits do not lie. I saw the Marshmallow Ys.

;)

You fail at grammar.

From what I understand, according to this page, OPL3 cards are supported through the use of the opl3-sa2 driver in ALSA. I also think my old laptop had an OPL3-based card in it as well, and I know the sound worked in that one just fine. What Linux distro are you using? I tend to compile my kernel and ALSA from source rather than rely on my distro's kernel/ALSA, though I wouldn't recommend that for all distros (I run Slackware). You can find out your kernel version with "uname -r" and your version of ALSA with "cat /proc/asound/version".

You may also want to have a gander at the file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/ALSA-Configuration.txt, assuming the Linux kernel sources are installed to /usr/src/linux. You can use this in conjunction with a call to "lspci -v" and a quick "cat /proc/asound/pcm | less" to see if there are any specific things you can do with the driver in terms of options passed to modprobe at load time.

I had to do this to get an Intel HDA card somewhat working in my new laptop. The sound would still come from my speakers when the headphones were plugged in, and the volume controls were all messed up. In the end, I had to force it to think that it was a Mac Pro to get it all working until they fix this issue.

If you have any success getting native midi to work in Linux, please write up your experiences. I've tried several times and finally just given up.

fraggle said:

If you have any success getting native midi to work in Linux, please write up your experiences. I've tried several times and finally just given up.

I'll ask some Ubuntu nerds for a script that will work on that particular distro. Linux needs native midi BADLY- it's the only thing missing from me ditching windows completely.


( I know I could hook up my DX7 and have MIDI but...it just ain't the same! :-( )

fraggle said:

If you have any success getting native midi to work in Linux, please write up your experiences. I've tried several times and finally just given up.

It's not related to Linux, but I've used native MIDI in OpenBSD before and that works just fine. It won't help you in Linux I know, but generally I see little reason to use Linux anyway (the releases of the kernel often carry whole new random bugs, regressions happen, poor documentation, etc).

MikeRS said:

enerally I see little reason to use Linux anyway (the releases of the kernel often carry whole new random bugs, regressions happen, poor documentation, etc).

What's BSD?
http://hiro-tan.org/~ekoontz/IsDying/BSD%20is%20dying.html

( I kid, I kid. :P )

Yeah, I will propose a small midi synthesizer similar to Timidity but uses OPL3 Emulation or the OPL3 chip in ALSA to some nerds on Usenet, or perhaps write the creators of Adplug/Adlib Tracker II/Mame about it. It can't be THAT hard, the pieces are already there, the trick is putting them together to monitor MIDI commands.

Dude, just use Timidity++ and eawpats.

wavetable sucks

Neat, I had an onboard OPL3 in my old p166 machine. That boards fried now though :(

Adlib Tracker is probably your best choice. There's also FM Kingtracker

exp(x) said:

Dude, just use Timidity++ and eawpats.

uhm no
wavetable sucks

Csonicgo said:

uhm no
wavetable sucks

Whatever, snob.

Hmm ...I have a PCI Yamaha WaveForce which, among other things, has hardware OPL3 functionality in its YMF7xx chipset.

About using it...well, duh, under Windows XP you don't even have to look for special drivers or software: it is automagically detected and some stock drivers are installed for you, but you get almost none of the advanced hardware voice mixing functionality.

The only "good" thing (if you are into this sort of stuff) is that the OPL3 is used for MIDI output, but the the FM timbres used are stock, which sucks a lot, and I don't know if there's any way to change them (I remember you could use PAS16 timbres on a SB16 and get way better MIDI performance under Windows 3.1, but that's not going to help much now).

To get an idea of how bad it sounds....well, listen to 32X Doom's "soundtrack": you will get a very vivid idea. Note that using an ISA SB16 with OPL3 as a MIDI device with source ports under Windows sounds equally bad, but that's just because of sub-par drivers which are a shame to the OPL3 chip.

Now, I don't know how/if that particular OPL3 chip is addressable/usable from third party applications, e.g. as an Adlib/SBPro compatible device. Direct hardware access is precluded for known reasons, and use as a MIDI device is limited by the stock drivers.

The bad thing is that if you install some final Yamaha drivers, you do gain semi-hardware Wavetable synthesis, but the OPL3 just "disappears" from Windows, and you can't use it for MIDI anymore. I don't know if it's still usable through some undocumented driver feature, though.

Sorry for the double posting, but it makes long bits of info easier to swallow:

First, an update: from what I could grasp, it seems the card is, among others, "Soundblaster/Adlib compatible" at a hardware level, so in general everything made to bang on the AdLib hardware (the very least) directly, should work with this one too. Ofc, you must use an OS that doesn't mind programs banging on the hardware directly...(MS DOS, hint hint). However I haven't tried this myself, so I wouldn't swear it's actually 100% directly hardware compatible.

For your original question about software that can use the OPL2/OPL3 sort of "directly" under Windows/Linux, at least: YES, there is such a program. It's called AdPlug and can, among others, play exotic AdLib formats through e.g. WinAmp with or without using original OPL hardware.

The very least, it has built-in drivers for Adlib compatibles (that includes AdLib, classic Soundblaster models, PAS16 and other more or less "compatibles", in which the OPL2/OPL3 chips were always hardwired at 0x388-0x389 base I/O addresses, and were "always on". I am not sure if the Yamaha Waveforce falls into that category, or it has the OPL3 functionality at some other base address/behind some other hardware. In that case, it would likely require its own driver :-(