Munt / MT-32 emulation

Gez said:

You speak about retro look, but people aren't necessarily in it for the look, they may want the retro gameplay instead. Also, the retro-look can be different things to different people. It's not necessarily heavy pixelation; it might instead be the general aesthetic of the game -- colorful and cartoony, painterly in a way, rather than the modern games that strive for photorealism in browns and grays.

So we are back at the old question, how retro it has to be to be considered retro.

My Two Cents:

I care about the design and the gameplay, not the technical means to render them. This goes for both screen resolution and sound quality. Changing these doesn't alter any of the essence what makes these old games still so appealing. To me it makes no sense to subject myself to eye- and ear- straining playback methods when it can be done better. (Also, I still can distinctly remember that MAP28's music had lots and lots of missing parts when being played back with OPL on my old SB. I only started to appreciate this song after hearing a proper wavetable reproduction of it.)

xttl said:

Yeah, I was talking more about a "what if" scenario where every integrated and discrete PC sound device would still have a real OPL3 in there and MS & others would support programming it on a register level by a standardized driver or something. :-)

Even then, nobody would use it anymore. The main reason that back in the day MIDI with OPL was used were file size considerations. So even if some developer decided against digital waveform music they'd most likely use other alternatives, like MODs.

OPL was a crutch in 1993, only being used due to lack of alternatives, so it was inevitable that it'd bite the dust sooner rather than later.

xttl said:

IIRC (haven't used it in ages!) DOSBox' OPL emulator is not 100% accurate, especially when you activate OPL3 support in Doom (hint: set DMXOPTION=-opl3). So, there's still room for improvements by fraggle.

AFAIK OPL3 support didn't sound very different on real OPL3's either: for one there is NOWHERE a separate set of timbres just for OPL3 (so 4-op mode is out of the question). The only gains are extra voices (some instruments are supposed to be "double voice", so having extra channels will help with that) and Stereo sound. Nothing more.

On some (broken/nongenuine) OPL3's though (mostly on SB clones) it did indeed sound different...and wrong. I mean so wrong that you'd get stereo sound and 3D depth and TOTALLY different timbres even if you selected AdLib!

Graf Zahl said:

So we are back at the old question, how retro it has to be to be considered retro.[/b] (etc, etc)

[b]OPL was a crutch in 1993, only being used due to lack of alternatives, so it was inevitable that it'd bite the dust sooner rather than later.

I don't think you should bother trying to understand "retro." Some people just like the sound of it. Same with SID, Pokey, YM2612, and SCC. Chip music isn't everybody's taste, but it honestly bothers me that people will actively dismiss it as junk, as opposed to merely admitting that it's not their sort of thing.

The distaste for OPL music is similar to my distaste for rap music. I don't like rap very much, but I don't call it crap. I just say I don't like it.

Maes said:

AFAIK OPL3 support didn't sound very different on real OPL3's either: for one there is NOWHERE a separate set of timbres just for OPL3 (so 4-op mode is out of the question). The only gains are extra voices (some instruments are supposed to be "double voice", so having extra channels will help with that) and Stereo sound. Nothing more.

On some (broken/nongenuine) OPL3's though (mostly on SB clones) it did indeed sound different...and wrong. I mean so wrong that you'd get stereo sound and 3D depth and TOTALLY different timbres even if you selected AdLib!

True, but last I tried to run Doom for extended periods of time in OPL3 mode in DOSBox it was truly broken. This might have been back when 0.72 was the newest official release... Anyway, I was just trying to do some recording of Doom music. I eventually used an old SB Pro clone of mine with a real OPL3 chip instead. It's on the board as a separate chip and not integrated inside another, bigger chip and it has the Yamaha and OPL logos on top of it so I'm pretty sure it's the real thing (even this clone card has much better analog output quality than the original Creative cards btw., except maybe for some AWE32 and AWE64 cards!).

Well, maybe I should try it again and compare one of these days.

WildWeasel said:

I don't think you should bother trying to understand "retro." Some people just like the sound of it. Same with SID, Pokey, YM2612, and SCC. Chip music isn't everybody's taste, but it honestly bothers me that people will actively dismiss it as junk, as opposed to merely admitting that it's not their sort of thing.

Then be bothered. OPL sounds like crap to me. And by that I mean ear-screechingly painfully awful. That goes at least for the common OPL emulators in circulation. I can't stand any of their output without getting headaches. Real cards 16 years back were definitely better - provided they were programmed properly which was a rarity in itself.

Oh, and most of the other stuff you listed (especially SID) are miles better than the best OPL stuff I ever heard.

WildWeasel said:

The distaste for OPL music is similar to my distaste for rap music. I don't like rap very much, but I don't call it crap. I just say I don't like it.

http://www.amazon.com/Double-X-Bonfire/dp/B000ICLTPA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1274892426&sr=8-2 (look for track 7 :P)

Gez said:
It's supposed to be fun, not to make sense.

By sense, I am referring to the practical benefits provided by the features. Applying dynamic lighting and smoothing to rough graphics designed in a software environment is not as effective or satisfying as when it's applied to hi-res resources made with those effects in mind, hence, for example, the need to replace the graphics.

You speak about retro look, but

No buts, I was saying that it is not surprising for someone who likes low res and pixelated stuff to like old-school synthetic sounds. You responded as if I were negating something when what I said was that the option of liking the old-technology aspect of retro, and not just a style or concept, is viable.

The liking for the rendering and sounds of old tech simply comes from using old games. People are playing old games on old hardware or on emulators, pretty much as the games were in the past. Since they do this, some of them naturally make variants of them with the help of today's technology.

Graf Zahl said:
(Also, I still can distinctly remember that MAP28's music had lots and lots of missing parts when being played back with OPL on my old SB. I only started to appreciate this song after hearing a proper wavetable reproduction of it.)

The sound in that track is relatively low, but the parts are there.

Even then, nobody would use it anymore.

Considering people actively request OPL emulation for old games, especially DOOM, that does not seem true.

Graf Zahl said:

Then be bothered. OPL sounds like crap to me. And by that I mean ear-screechingly painfully awful.

It's probably not set up properly, or perhaps you have extremely sensitive ears. But either way, it's not "crap", it's just not your thing. Same goes for your reloading/modern-games debate over at the ZDoom forums, in which you also refuse to back down your side of the argument for seemingly no reason other than because you seem to enjoy arguing.

WildWeasel said:

seemingly no reason other than because you seem to enjoy arguing.

He's not the only one with such a behavior in this here thread. :p

xttl said:

True, but last I tried to run Doom for extended periods of time in OPL3 mode in DOSBox it was truly broken. This might have been back when 0.72 was the newest official release.

DOSBox got new OPL emulator code in 0.73, and further improvements have been made in 0.74 which came out recently. Apparently it's a fair bit better than the old OPL code in <0.72, give it a go maybe?

I don't really think any software emulator of OPL3 is perfect. However, after going to all the trouble of building a DOS machine with an SB16, I think I prefer the emulated sound anyway because of the clarity that my Audigy gives over the muffled-sounding old pre-amps in the SB16.

Of course, nothing beats Roland. I use OGGs of LogicDeLuxe's Stereo OPL3 recordings when I play Doom. Getting an ISA Sound Canvas would be nice, however they're hard to find. I should get an eBay Saved Search to email me when it finds one. I wonder if there was ever a PCI version?

Super Jamie said:

Of course, nothing beats Roland. I use OGGs of LogicDeLuxe's Stereo OPL3 recordings when I play Doom. Getting an ISA Sound Canvas would be nice, however they're hard to find. I should get an eBay Saved Search to email me when it finds one. I wonder if there was ever a PCI version?

I don't know for sure, but I can say I've never heard of Roland selling a PCI Sound Canvas card. The external synths are handier anyway because you can connect them to any modern PC with a relatively cheap USB MIDI interface and use them with DOSBox or Doom ports for example. My cheap USB MIDI interface has some timing problems, though, when the CPU load in the system it's connected to becomes too high (to a degree this is normal but it's way too sensitive IMO) and for that reason I usually use the MIDI ports on my FireWire audio interface instead. Still, I've heard not all USB MIDI stuff is that broken.

You must mix externally (or just connect the synth's output to your SB16 and suffer much reduced fidelity), yes, but IIRC the SCC-I cards can't mix internally either. I might be wrong though, because I've only used external synths myself.

Those external synth modules aren't even necessarily always more expensive than the equivalent cards: the LAPC-I (CM-32L + genuine Roland MPU on a card) regularly goes for absolutely insane prices on eBay.

One option would be a daughtercard for the WaveBlaster interface in your SB16 (but it will use the SB16's crappy analog output), but I don't know how much people generally pay for the Roland SCB cards. Yamaha stuff isn't too bad though, and Yamaha daughtercards (DB50XG, etc.) can be had for pretty cheap.

Btw. if you buy a WB card or you buy an external synth and use it with your SB16's gameport MIDI I/O then be aware that some SB16 cards have a bug in their MIDI implementation that will cause it to lose MIDI messages in many games. These games happen to include Doom and everything that uses the Doom engine! This affects both the WB connector and the gameport.

Wah, wah, OPL makes my ears bleed and 320x200 makes me blind.

Super Jamie said:
I don't really think any software emulator of OPL3 is perfect.

I did some testing by swapping the speaker cable between PCs and found that Doom in DOSBox 0.73 on a newer system sounded the same as the SB16 in my DOS system. (Of course, this wasn't a proper ABX test since I knew which sound card the speakers were plugged into at any time. I'm sure if there were differences I'd notice them with headphones or more sophisticated speakers, but for the purpose of playing the game it probably doesn't matter much, it's close enough for me.)

I should get an eBay Saved Search to email me when it finds one. I wonder if there was ever a PCI version?

I say go for one of the external modules. You can always plug it into the MIDI port on your SB16 when you want music of awesomeness there, and get a USB-MIDI adapter for anything more recent. (This is what I'm doing right now. Except I have a generic USB-MIDI interface that seems to eat SysEx messages -- it works fine in Linux though, so there's something weird going on with the Windows drivers...)