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invictius

My sb16 midis in the dos days sounded like GUS, am I mis-remembering?

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I had a sound blaster 16 back in the dos days, am pretty sure it was an original because it was ISA. The instrument in the doom 2 intro midi sounded more "shrieky"/horror-like (think: Psycho shower scene music instrument). However when I try opl2 and 3 with chocolate doom, it sounds nowhere near as good, more crappy quite simply. However I used the GUS option and it sounds pretty much how I remember it. It's kind of like... OPL2 and 3 seems to have very crappy and "basic" types of instruments, a sound blaster live or soundfont sounds most "realistic" with the sb16 I used to have laying somewhere in the middle. How could I have been hearing GUS-like midis on a sb16 card back in the day? I remember setting the port and irq to 220 and 5 so it must have been a sb16, I just don't understand how that isn't what I'm hearing nowadays under opl3.

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If you had a Sound Blaster and it didn't sound like OPL, then it was a Sound Blaster with wavetable synthesis.

Are you really sure it was an SB16 and not, say, this one?

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Gez said:

If you had a Sound Blaster and it didn't sound like OPL, then it was a Sound Blaster with wavetable synthesis.

Are you really sure it was an SB16 and not, say, this one?


100% sure. I remember bugging my dad to buy me an awe32 because midi instruments sounded so much more realistic (This was before I discovered mp3 and midis went by the wayside). Maybe I'm remembering setting the port for sfx and had midi set to general midi or something?

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Why would you beg your dad for a card with realistic instruments if what you heard was already GUS-sounding? Setting your card to General MIDI would have given you silence (if you had a SB16) unless you had an external MIDI device set up. Or if it was an AWE32.

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Something I didn't realize until many years later, is that the sound of FM/OPL music most people remember from the "good old days" was actually heavily "colored" by the -then ubiquitous- "multimedia speakers", with their bass boost/reflex, treble boost, EQs, 3D spatializers etc.

Listening to the very same sequence of OPL commands/sounds through a more neutral setup or an emulator, is, to say the least, underwhelming. Emulators also have the disadvantage of not being able to exactly match the actual DDS sampling rate of 49716 Hz used by the OPL chips, and that distorts the output, ever so slightly.

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MusicallyInspired said:

Why would you beg your dad for a card with realistic instruments if what you heard was already GUS-sounding? Setting your card to General MIDI would have given you silence (if you had a SB16) unless you had an external MIDI device set up. Or if it was an AWE32.


GUS patches don't sound realistic to me. I just know that I went to someone who sold stuff out of his shed, who played a midi with an awe32 (could possibly have been an awe64) and the instruments sounded much more realistic. Not as good as any soundfont mind you, but better than OPL3 and whatever I had at the time. Here's a clue, whatever it was had an instrument sounding like a high pitch female dog back on NIN's head like a hole (cross between a dog barking and a typical female anime character). Also, D_EVIL definitely did not have the marching footsteps effect. I think it was a gunshot but not entirely sure.

What is my sb live likely to sound like under dos, with sb16 emulation? Also I'm assuming that not using emulation will have the midi sounding exactly as it does in windows with no soundfont loaded? I just want to save a lot of time and hassle by not installing it myself... every time I need to transfer a file to a 98/dos box (different system to what's running the live but still same restriction) I have to burn a cd because I can't find anything to transfer files with and 98 wants drivers for usb sticks.

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The AWE32 wavetable sounds the same if not a little worse than the GUS, though. Unless, possible, you add expansion memory to it. The AWE64 was probably better, though. Not a better all around card, mind you, being PCI (I think the AWE32 CT3900 is the perfect Sound Blaster card. And I have two!).

The SB Live's SB16 emulation sounds fairly authentic. At least from what I remember. It was a long time ago and I was younger. Although, I heard years later that it wasn't perfect from others who had used it.

Maes said:

Emulators also have the disadvantage of not being able to exactly match the actual DDS sampling rate of 49716 Hz used by the OPL chips, and that distorts the output, ever so slightly.


Not true. DOSBox can run OPL and its entire audio mixer at 49716 Hz just fine if you set it manually. I do this myself. I did a recording directly from my AWE32's OPL from my 486 computer and compared it to a raw audio stream I captured from DOSBox. The results are pretty well identical. I heard no difference. I didn't do any sort of waveform analysis, but to the ears it's the same.

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MusicallyInspired said:

The AWE32 wavetable sounds the same if not a little worse than the GUS, though. Unless, possible, you add expansion memory to it. The AWE64 was probably better, though. Not a better all around card, mind you, being PCI (I think the AWE32 CT3900 is the perfect Sound Blaster card. And I have two!).

The SB Live's SB16 emulation sounds fairly authentic. At least from what I remember. It was a long time ago and I was younger. Although, I heard years later that it wasn't perfect from others who had used it.

Not true. DOSBox can run OPL and its entire audio mixer at 49716 Hz just fine if you set it manually. I do this myself. I did a recording directly from my AWE32's OPL from my 486 computer and compared it to a raw audio stream I captured from DOSBox. The results are pretty well identical. I heard no difference. I didn't do any sort of waveform analysis, but to the ears it's the same.


Maybe it did have a daughterboard, but wouldn't that have meant that the port address would have been in the 600-range? I don't recall setting a port other than 220 or 330. Or it could have been when I got a pci ensoniq audio card, I guess I'll never know for sure because I was upgrading that quickly in the late 90's, I'd just sell the old hardware, which was junk at the time, e.g 386dx-40 in 1998. Went from an 8086 laptop to a k6-300 within 18 months)

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MusicallyInspired said:

Not true. DOSBox can run OPL and its entire audio mixer at 49716 Hz just fine if you set it manually.


The mixer might well be able to synthesize at the correct frequency -you can even set that precise frequency e.g. in ZDoom's internal OPL module. That, in itself, is no biggie. The problem is that no soundcard currently on the market will actually be able to output at that precise frequency.

What will happen is that the system-wide mixer will convert all differing sampling rates produced by different applications to one common frequency -usually the CD (44.1 kHz) or DAT (48 kHz) ones, or integer multiples thereof, depending on how the driver and hardware is set to operate. And that's where all the distortion will happen.

The problem, from a DSP point of view, is that 49716 Hz is an "odious" frequency to properly resample to either 44.1 or 48 kHz: their LCM sampling rates are about 60 and 200 MHz respectively (YIKES!), which of course is entirely out of the question to perform via software. In practice, you'll get a crude decimation/sample skipping/holding "resampling" of your non-standard sampling rate, again depending on what the driver and hardware are capable of (not much, usually).

MusicallyInspired said:

I did a recording directly from my AWE32's OPL from my 486 computer and compared it to a raw audio stream I captured from DOSBox. The results are pretty well identical. I heard no difference. I didn't do any sort of waveform analysis, but to the ears it's the same.


Same problem -both the audio stream you can capture from DOSBOX and the recording you will make from an external source will have already been butchered to a different sampling frequency. Even if you do manage to directly capture DOSBOX's pure FM synthesis output as a 49716 Hz WAV file somehow -which I doubt, since there's also other stuff to mix-, you won't actually be able to properly play it back and compare it "by ear". And while you might not be able to hear a difference, for good or bad there are plently of "golden ears" out there who (claim that they) can :-/

FWIW, on the AWE32 it was well-known that while you could record the onboard FM chip directly through the mixer, being able to do it only at different sampling rates (44.1, 48 kHz etc.) resulted in unavoidable -and quite obvious- distortions.

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Maes said:

The mixer might well be able to synthesize at the correct frequency -you can even set that precise frequency e.g. in ZDoom's internal OPL module. That, in itself, is no biggie. The problem is that no soundcard currently on the market will actually be able to output at that precise frequency.

What will happen is that the system-wide mixer will convert all differing sampling rates produced by different applications to one common frequency -usually the CD (44.1 kHz) or DAT (48 kHz) ones, or integer multiples thereof, depending on how the driver and hardware is set to operate. And that's where all the distortion will happen.

The problem, from a DSP point of view, is that 49716 Hz is an "odious" frequency to properly resample to either 44.1 or 48 kHz: their LCM sampling rates are about 60 and 200 MHz respectively (YIKES!), which of course is entirely out of the question to perform via software. In practice, you'll get a crude decimation/sample skipping/holding "resampling" of your non-standard sampling rate, again depending on what the driver and hardware are capable of (not much, usually).


Why not find a set of crappy early-90's speakers with super-bass and other gimmicks and test on a real sound card? That'll tell whether we're mis-remembering. I know someone with a ktx subwoofer that's gone SNES-yellow with age, but it's the only component the guy has working :(

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invictius said:

Why not find a set of crappy early-90's speakers with super-bass and other gimmicks and test on a real sound card? That'll tell whether we're mis-remembering. I know someone with a ktx subwoofer that's gone SNES-yellow with age, but it's the only component the guy has working :(


That actually I can do, but there are also other factors as well: many people back in the day didn't have real Sound Blasters, but "100% compatible clones" (yeah, right...). In practice such clones worked only in Sound Blaster 1.0 mode (8-bit up to 22 kHz sampling rate, in Pro 1.0 mode if you were lucky, with stereo sound), even though many had an OPL2/OPL3 chip...or rather, a clone of an OPL2/OPL3 chip, plus some onboard preprocessing, like faux stereo, faux 3D, bass boosting etc. which were not always easy to turn off. Those sounded...hmm...interesting, to say the least ;-)

A little known trick is that with a proper MIDI driver, you could actually use the OPL3 chip as General MIDI device with Doom, and thus use a completely different set of timbres.

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Hard to argue with that. I stand corrected. You're right, of course. The conditions of the environment in which I was evaluating it were skewed from the get-go. So there is a reason to have real hardware still!

The AWE32 had a cool feature where you could add set levels of reverb and chorus for the OPL output via driver settings. That was cool.

Our first "Sound Blaster compatible" card was a Voyetra. I fondly remember loving the sound of the distorted guitars, but many other instruments were much worse. Flatter and more static timbres without any dynamics. Still, it was a wonder when we first got it. I do remember finally hearing a true OPL chip and dreaming of owning a proper SB16. So glad I can get these things now that I'm an adult. ;)

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Well, I finally managed to cobble together a win98 box to put my sb live in. Under dos in 98 (No idea why the set blaster command wasn't edited in during driver setup) it sounds mostly how I remember it - gunshots instead of footsteps in map 31, not too much percussion at the title, etc. I'm using general midi, so how does this not sound like opl, nor like wavetable?

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I don't think any of the Live! Sound Blasters has FM/OPL chips or any sort of compatibility with the original ISA cards, for that matter. You are probably listening to whatever Windows-based GM driver is installed.

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Maes said:

I don't think any of the Live! Sound Blasters has FM/OPL chips or any sort of compatibility with the original ISA cards, for that matter. You are probably listening to whatever Windows-based GM driver is installed.


It sounds completely different to the midi that doom95 uses. Windows is set to use the midi bank A obviously without a soundfont loaded. Also sounds completely different to xp using that same blank bank.

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The SBlive's wavetable should sound better than the GUS. The "OPL" is just emulation. Don't use General MIDI if you want OPL. I ask again, why would you beg your dad for an AWE32 when you had something that sounded better and was in fact a newer card?

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MusicallyInspired said:

The SBlive's wavetable should sound better than the GUS. The "OPL" is just emulation. Don't use General MIDI if you want OPL. I ask again, why would you beg your dad for an AWE32 when you had something that sounded better and was in fact a newer card?


What is Zdoom's GUS like, when you have the patches? The two sound very much alike and I'm going to do some recording to show you after.

The awe32 had more realistic instruments than whatever I originally had when playing back midis. I could have simply had wavetable the whole time and not changed the default midi device, I'm pretty sure I didn't know you could even change midi devices (of that windows had a software synthesizer) back in '99. I'd only been into computers for a couple of years and started with a c64 in '97 so I'm pleading ignorance on this issue.

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BTW, on the few PCI cards that still had FM chips (usualy CMedia or Yamaha chipsets), FM sound was usually emulated, timbres were far off an original Adlib, and when used under Windows as MIDI devices they also sounded horrible.

The SB Live! cards (those with a real E-MU10k1 chip at least) had a range of options regarding MIDI Wavetable patches (besides, they used the host's RAM for storing them, and were infamous for hogging the PCI bus because of that), so you probably remember a particular one.

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nukeykt said:

Can you upload photo of your sound card?


I'm not sure which one you mean. I don't have the one that I compared to an awe32 all those years ago.

https://soundcloud.com/user795642685

The GUS emulation is closest to what I heard and was used to back in the 90's, sort of a cross between that and the live that I've recorded in sb16 emulation mode.

I refuse to believe that people thought OPL was good, none of my games ever sounded as rubbishy as the example I have here.

Wave is the ms built in wavetable synth - superior quality in terms of instrument accuracy but for the title music, the cymbals are just way too loud.

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What you uploaded doesn't sound like OPL FM synthesis at all. More like a mix of wavetable percussions and a form of simplified sample-based instruments (kinda like the sound chips used in cell phones to produce melodic ringtones).

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Maes said:

What you uploaded doesn't sound like OPL FM synthesis at all. More like a mix of wavetable percussions and a form of simplified sample-based instruments (kinda like the sound chips used in cell phones to produce melodic ringtones).


It sounds the same in chocolate doom regardless of opl mode, gzdoom (which is what the actual recording was from) and vanilla in dosbox, using either adlib or soundblaster. What could I be doing wrong?

This guy is getting the same OPL sound also

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invictius said:

I refuse to believe that people thought OPL was good, none of my games ever sounded as rubbishy as the example I have here.

OPL was good when music was made specifically for it.

Spoiler


It's rubbish when the music was composed for real MIDI.

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invictius said:

This guy is getting the same OPL sound also


I'm not sure I understood what you meant here, but the guy is getting the OPL sound exactly as it should be. What you posted out of your soundcard sounded totally different.

If, as you said, OPL emulation mode makes no difference for you, then you must also set the relative OPL/MIDI volumes in ZDoom (no idea is those exist in Chocolate Doom also).

In any case, as I said, if you really have a SB Live!, that card has no OPL chip or direct "classic" Sound Blaster compatibility whatsoever. From your posts so far it's also unclear if by DOS you mean actual DOS (as in, you boot the Win98 computer in DOS mode), a DOS window opened from within Windows 98, or DOSBox. If you get any sort of music in actual DOS modes, then that must be from a MIDI passthrough/compatibility layer.

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Maes said:

I'm not sure I understood what you meant here, but the guy is getting the OPL sound exactly as it should be. What you posted out of your soundcard sounded totally different.

If, as you said, OPL emulation mode makes no difference for you, then you must also set the relative OPL/MIDI volumes in ZDoom (no idea is those exist in Chocolate Doom also).

In any case, as I said, if you really have a SB Live!, that card has no OPL chip or direct "classic" Sound Blaster compatibility whatsoever. From your posts so far it's also unclear if by DOS you mean actual DOS (as in, you boot the Win98 computer in DOS mode), a DOS window opened from within Windows 98, or DOSBox. If you get any sort of music in actual DOS modes, then that must be from a MIDI passthrough/compatibility layer.


What I meant was the track I recorded titled OPL sounded the same as in the youtube vid I posted. Are you referring to another track that I posted?

Dos window, up until I referred to OPL sounding the same in dosbox. Just trying to get the live working in true dos at the moment. I ordered a pci sound card with opl3 chip off of ebay but it's my understanding that pci sound cards don't work under dos without a lot of fancy tricks.

EDIT: On true dos, the live sounds identical to the youtube clip and my OPL titled recording, when I set it to general midi there's nothing but piano notes.

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invictius said:

What I meant was the track I recorded titled OPL sounded the same as in the youtube vid I posted. Are you referring to another track that I posted?


NM, now I noticed that you had a bunch of DOOM 2's TITLEMUS recordings. OK, the OPL sounds like OPL, the rest sound like different wavetable/sample based synth.

invictius said:

Just trying to get the live working in true dos at the moment.


Then you must obtain some very hard-to-find DOS drivers for it. N.B.: those drivers will only give you SoundBlaster 16 digital sound, and MIDI sound through wavetable synthesis, kinda like the DOS drivers for the Ensoniq AudioPCI ES137x sound cards. FM synthesis is emulated via CQM (Quadrature Modulation/sample-based approximation), if available at all.

invictius said:

On true dos, the live sounds identical to the youtube clip and my OPL titled recording, when I set it to general midi there's nothing but piano notes.


Can you get sound out of a game or program than has ONLY Adlib sound available? A good test would be trying early PC games with only Adlib/Soundblaster but no MIDI options, or scene demos specifically supporting only the Adlib, or tracker programs/modules with Adlib channels.

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Maes said:

Then you must obtain some very hard-to-find DOS drivers for it. N.B.: those drivers will only give you SoundBlaster 16 digital sound, and MIDI sound through wavetable synthesis, kinda like the DOS drivers for the Ensoniq AudioPCI ES137x sound cards. FM synthesis is emulated via CQM (Quadrature Modulation/sample-based approximation), if available at all.


I installed dos 7.1 and it asked me if I wanted to install sound drivers, and for which card. It runs the sb16 emulation driver on startup.

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Oh so you still have the Live!Ware 3.0 CDs from Creative with all the drivers? If so, you would do the Internet a service by uploading the ISO somewhere, as they are very hard to come by.

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Maes said:

Oh you still have the LiveWire Creative CDs with all the drivers? If so, you would do the Internet a service by uploading the ISO somewhere, as they are very hard to come by.


They're bundled with the dos 7.1 installation. Does the livewire cd come with exes such as sbeinit.com, sbeload, and such? I can just direct people to download the dos 7.1 iso.

Maes said:

Can you get sound out of a game or program than has ONLY Adlib sound available? A good test would be trying early PC games with only Adlib/Soundblaster but no MIDI options, or scene demos specifically supporting only the Adlib, or tracker programs/modules with Adlib channels.


This has no options for sound card settings at all:



This is also an early one without choices for such, it sounds the same no matter what I run it on:



How does the sb16 track I uploaded sound compared to what you remember back in the day?

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