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Ariander

Which do midi playback device do you prefer?

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For some reason, I prefer the OPL synth emulator. It gives a more classic feel and sometimes enhances the musics.

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Depends on the track and the alternatives offered by the hardware/OS. Sometimes the OPL sounds better, sometimes the Soundmax or MS synth sound better, and sometimes they sound about the same.

With vanilla Doom on an olskool b0x with an AWE64, I play it sometimes with wavetable, and sometimes with FM sound. They both have their perks.

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I mostly use Timidity++ with EAWPats - but for a few tracks I prefer the standard DLS that comes with Windows. There's a reason I implemented an option in ZDoom that allows me to select the playback device per track... ;)

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I use Timidity++ with the Silverspring soundfont. The snare is kind of wimpy sounding but other than that it blows away any other option for midi playback.

Doom's OPL instruments are terrible anyway. The synth instruments used for Wolfenstein, Blake Stone, and Duke Nukem II (the same sounds shared between all of them) are much better sounding and I've been thinking of making a GENMIDI lump to imitate the sound of the old Apogee IMF soundtracks.

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I've recently upgraded my PC and I can't fit my Soundblaster Live into it, so no fancy synth for me anymore :( I should install Timidity because the MS synth sounds terrible.

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I use FMOD on GZDoom at the moment. I have no idea how to get Timidity to work, seeing as when you download it its a million random files, but I'd like to see what its like.

Personally I like the way my old computer did the sound, TNT's classic MAP04 track was mindblowing with however that computer did the sound, and has been crap in comparison on any computer since. I'm pretty sure it also made Doom 2's MAP31 theme sound like people marching at the beginning, that was awesome

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The generic XP/Vista midi and Timidity with eawpats. OPL emulation is horrible in Doom.

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I use either the emulated OPL synth or this thing plugged into Windows in place of the Microsoft synth. I used to use an XG softsynth but I broke it and am too lazy to fix it. That weird one I posted has nice guitars and strings compared with most FM synths.

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Hahaha, another sound thread!

There are so many options. The best recordings I've heard so far are the FLACs which LogicDeLuxe recorded from his actual Roland Sound Canvas hardware synth. He's also got some professional MIDI card with dual OPL3 which sounds pretty damn impressive (source).

For gameplay, I'm most happy with ZDoom's OPL synth (what is the code for that from anyway?). DOSBox is also good, though it's pretty rare that I'll play Vanilla or even DOS Boom. Despite the fact that it's possible to bit-accurately emulate the OPL3 chip the final sound is always different due to alot of factors which have been covered in other threads. There are at least 5 separately-written OPL emulation codebases out there, all of which produce different sounding output.

For Linux MIDI under PrBoom, Chocolate and Eternity I'm currently using Timidity with eawpats, though I'm always looking for something different and better. The 8M GM GS Enhanced soundfont bank is about the only other SF I'd consider using, though it really depends on what song you're listening to. Some I'd even prefer to hear through wavetable synth, E1M8 on eawpats is amazing!

I'm in the process of putting together a DOS machine (or maybe just getting an ISA motherboard for my P4 CPU) to get my old OPL3 SB16 and SB32 PnP going to see how it really sounded in the hardware I had back in the 90s.

Aliotroph? said:

I use either the emulated OPL synth or this thing plugged into Windows in place of the Microsoft synth.

What does this do? Is it anything like fmmidi? (and why are Japanese people the only ones writing realtime synth emulators?)

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Yeah, it's like fmmidi but it has an 8-operator synth. Some of the instruments use five. It can be programmed with a text file but that would be difficult unless you can read Japanese (assuming the docs even say anything about that). It has a module.exe you can use with MIDI programs or drivers like MDI Yoke. That's what I did. If I click a MIDI file they play in Winamp using that thing. They also play for games like ZDoom and Daggerfall. If you want to see what it sounds like you can downgrab it and drag a MIDI file onto the player.exe.

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I've always liked the way the Doom and Doom 2 tracks sound on the OPL3 in my Sound Blaster Pro. As mentioned here and in those other threads, it sounds different than any emulator or even the sound cards my friends had in the mid-1990s. (Mine was the only genuine Creative card though, the rest may have used some clone chip that didn't quite sound right.) I was using DOSBox earlier tonight and thought it sounded pretty close...

But even though I prefer the SBPro, I probably use Timidity+eawpats more often.

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Depends what SB Pro it was. The v1.0 card had dual OPL2 (9-channel 8-bit stereo) and the v2.0 had single OPL3 (18-channel 16-bit stereo).

How does Gravis Ultra Sound stack up?

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Funny thing about the OPL3 debate is that Doom didn't even benefit from it directly, as it had no OPL3-specific timbre banks. You could force using it with the -opl3 parameter, but in general that just resulted in stereo sound, or dual-voices for certain instruments.

There was an IBM sound card that used a (non user-programmable?) OPL3 along with a built-in bank of preset FM timbres, kinda like a halfway solution between a wavetable and a pure FM synthesis card.

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I suspect the cheaper cards sounded different because the analogue circuits to output the sound to the speakers were cheaper. The chips themselves never vary much.

I just realized that htsfms thing has different tone files you can use. They mostly seem to be there to maintain compatibility with previous versions. The newest one has much quieter drums for some reason.

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Aliotroph? said:

I suspect the cheaper cards sounded different because the analogue circuits to output the sound to the speakers were cheaper. The chips themselves never vary much.


Amen to that. Some had quite heavy analog or even digital post-processing applied, like "3D super depth" or "extra super-duper bass boost", or even forced stereo on OPL2 (!).

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Super Jamie said:
Depends what SB Pro it was. The v1.0 card had dual OPL2 (9-channel 8-bit stereo) and the v2.0 had single OPL3 (18-channel 16-bit stereo).

It's a Pro v2 with a real OPL3. On the other hand I never could get the DMXOPTION=-opl3 (or whatever*) parameter to work in the game, and musplay will only work in stereo about half the time. (This makes it hard to capture the music, as the OPL3 only has full-left, center and full-right stereo panning and some of the songs don't have parts panned widely enough to appear in stereo until a minute or so in. I guess the dual-OPL2s on the v1 could give the appearance of stereo by sending identical notes to the two synths with different velocities.)

(* I can't remember the exact name of the environment variable but I've tried all combinations on the real card and also have had it working in DOSBox.)

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Yeah, it's -opl3. It's worked for me, although I've used in on two Sound Blaster 16 cards (one was the cheaper "value" version) and a Sound Blaster 32 (using OPL3). I find the music to be rather flat without it, even if it's not a very elaborate form of stereo. Call me spoiled :p

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