/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10775970
>OPL3 version, of course.
Are these adlib farts really sounding that differently on other compatible cards?

>>10775970
I really favor the 2.0 with OPL2, but that's because it has been with me for so long going from one system to another. It is the one in the middle row on the left. Supposedly the difference between OPL2 and OPL3 is just the filtering, but I do like the sound of 2 more as it could just be a placebo effect with my fond memories. How is the AWE32 better than the AWE64 (gold)?

>>10775970
Gravis Ultrasound is the gold standard of PC sound cards, when the game supports it at least. Wavetable Synthesis fucking blows FM synthesis out of the water, and it has it's own powerful 68000 on-board chip which means PC slowdowns don't affect your sound speed. Plus it's cheaper. The GUS would've been literally perfect if every game supported it, and bafflingly not all did. Too bad because its FM synth emulator sounds quite bad.

The truly premium sound gizmo back then though was the Roland Sound Canvas. It's really expensive, but it sounded really great, and I think it had better compatibility than GUS? The GUS is a close second though.

>>10776009
>>10776034
Some AWE32 models, as well as the AWE64, use Creative's CQM FM synth, which sounds a lot harsher than Yamaha's OPL3. I wanna say some SB16 models had that as well.

>>10775970
The Sound Blaster Live! of course. The ultimate "just works" solution for any retro PC. Nobody cares about your DOS beeps and boops sounding exactly the way they did in 1988, grandpa.

>>10775970
Sound Blaster AE-9.

>>10775970
for me it's the software roland emulator

>>10776186
Munt32 and VirtualMidiSynth with a SC-55 soundfont.

>>10776061
>Wavetable Synthesis fucking blows FM synthesis out of the water
Bullshit, they're two different technologies. FM can create any sound you like, it's just quite complicated to do so sometimes. With wavetable synthesis you simply load up a recording of some instrument and go. But you lack the flexibility of FM and real time control over its many parameters.

>>10776208
>sc-55 soundfont
why not use sound canvas va instead?

>>10776562
Why not just buy some Sound Canvas instead for about the same amount of money, but it goes up in value forever? Software will eventually go stale or cost more money down the road.

>>10776578
yeah, i didn't exactly pay for it. soo... but a real unit would be sick too i guess.

>>10776562
The soundfont is good enough for me honestly. That official Roland thingie seems like bloat with lots of telemetry. I don't trust pajeetcracks anymore.
>roland cloud
kek

Last time I checked, Roland's software costs as much as buying a vintage Sound Canvas on ebay. So why not just get the real thing?

>>10776614
fair enough. the eq options are nice however.

>>10776621
>>10776585

>>10776621
I think we have a lot of shit holers on /vr/ who pirate everything, in many places you can't just find a Nintendo or whatever.

>>10776630
the only shithole here is your brain. just because someone doesn't feel like cramming their desk with a hardware unit when there's an elegant official software solution you think they're a third worlder or some shit like that? fuck off

>>10775970
Wasn't the whole point of SoundBlaster AWE32/64 soundfonts that you can load to make it sound like whatever you wanted?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgHI0Os5YCs

>>10776393
Actually wavetable synthesis is more flexible than FM synth. Wavetable synth is not PCM playback, it turns samples into wave data and modulates it out like FM synth modulates its waveforms. It's so flexible that you could even emulate FM synth with it, although GUS' FM synth emulation isn't the greatest sounding at all. Either way, FM synth is more primitive than wavetable synth, and the point of wavetable synth is generating PCM quality sounds with very little memory.

>>10777034
Wavetable synthesizers don't have nearly the same modulation capabilities compared to FM, assuming a decent FM synthesizer. You're just wrong. There are exceptions like the Fizmo but they are very rare and hardly worth bringing up when comparing the two types of synthesis in general.

You simply can't control as many parameters in real time with wavetable or typical rompler synths as you can with FM. FM emulation is in a poor state because you just can't DO it properly with a wavetable card.

Sound Blaster Pro wins, overall.

>>10777124
FM synth is less flexible because there's only so many noise variations you could make with FM. Yes you could technically do more since you're programming all the wave forms by yourself, but it will never sound nearly as good as actual recorded samples unless your name is Jesper Kyd. OPL3 could use PCM samples, but that wastes memory because they couldn't be modulated. GUS is the best of both worlds, you could add and modulate new samples quite extensively.

>>10777124
lmao you think wavetable can't do fm? are you fucking stupid? It's miles apart. You can recreate whatever you want. You're in a poor state.

>>10777182
>there's only so many noise variations you could make with FM
We're talking many trillions of possible combinations of settings with FM. And certain FM patches do sound excellent, as good as recorded samples.

>>10777315
No a wavetable synthesizer can't do FM. You can record a sound from an FM synth and then use that as the basis of a patch. But with Fm synthesizers you have many parameters available which you lack with wavetable synthesis which can continuously vary the sound in ways a sample-based machine simply can not.

I have a knob box for real time control of my TX-81z, a "mere" 4 op FM synth, which provides me with 72 real time controllable parameters, each of which has up to 127 different values. And eight algorithms to choose from. All can be controlled with MIDI CC. If you sit there and adjust the values, especially if you have an oscilloscope and can see for example a sample you wish to reproduce, you can get the fundamentals, and the harmonics, to match, and then realistically reproduce a sound.

There's a good book out there all about this method. It's basically an extremely complicated virtual analog synthesis. Once you understand what's going on, you'll realize it's far more powerful than wavetable. It's also why FM emulation has been in such a shit state excepting some more recent CPU intensive software. Wavetable is good, it's essentially the basis of ROMplers. Depending on how the synthesizer's signal chain is handled you can do a huge amount with it. But it's nothing like FM.

>>10775970
The one that plays 3DO games

>>10777407
>We're talking many trillions of possible combinations of settings with FM
Wait until you find out that samples are made of an indefinite number of bit combinations.
>And certain FM patches do sound excellent, as good as recorded samples.
Never heard one, and it would be very hard to program if there's any.

>>10776186
>>10776208
>>10776562
>>10776578
>>10776621


Advances are slowly being made on this front...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=99447

>>10776562

SCVA pretty much perfectly emulates SC-88 and above. SC-55/mkii will take some time to perfect, as demonstrated above.

>>10776162
SB Live! had a horrible reputation even in its day. It couldn't resample worth shit, most games sounded like crap, even Windows games had a lot of sound popping and playing in the wrong frequencies. Not to mention it came with the most godawful software ever.

>>10777831
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY
It already sounds pretty usable right now, It's way ahead of the MU-50 emulation in mame

>>10777831
Based as fuck. Leave it to Nuked to give us proper SC-55 emulation.

>>10777842
Skill issue. When not in the hands of a retard it's a very good and widely-compatible sound card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-HiLp5p820

At least the original revision and a couple of others based on it. There were a bunch of shity, downcosted versions for poorfags that came later. Probably why you had issues.

>>10777842
>made the mistake of installing the SBLive drivers the "official" way with the included driver disc
>restart Windows, don't turn down the volume
>CTMELODY.WAV plays

>>10776154
Thanks anon, I had no idea. just watched a few comparison vids on YT. The AWE64 sounds truly awful in some cases.

>>10776154
>I wanna say some SB16 models had that as well.
Apparently later, post-95 models have it. I think the main reason was Creative cheapening out and not wanting to pay Yamaha for genuine OPL3s.

>>10778717
>>10778750
Yeah. I suppose by that time, DOS was in its sunset years, and Creative figured lel who cares if the FM sounds shit on those shitty old games, look at what these cards can do with wavetable on new games!

>>10778770
Right about when games were commonly coming on CDs with pre-recorded soundtracks that don't need a midi device. So old games sound like shit and new games don't need it. Nice.

>>10778787
That as well. I suppose they at least thought to try to keep compatibility, which they technically did even as late as the SB Live! with its software emulation, bad as it sounds (I think the Audigy cards have some support still, but by that point it was very much not a primary concern).

>>10776154
Yeah, I did start to move away from the Sound Blaster brand as it has become a luxury brand at the time with prices to match. For a while Diamond Monster Sound was a decent alternative, but I think they went under and I had to go back to Creative.

I dual boot 98/XP on my machines so for me it's the Audigy 2

>>10777842
Problem is it did all its internal processing at 48 KHz which meant there was always going to be resampling assuming 44.1 KHz audio files, which are the rule.

>>10777831
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY
Hopefully someone does a vsti port of it

I remember my Aureal A3D having pretty good sound quality and the games that supported its 3D effect were a nice bonus. These days we also have Alchemy Universal for EAX games. I'm glad we don't need accelerator cards to enjoy 3D audio anymore, but with those two things you can improve older games by quite a lot.

>>10775970
what were the additional memory slots used for?

What games really benefited from these cards? I got into PC gaming when CDs were standard, and old games I'd find in collections would use FM Synth, or "Soundblaster" in the option. The period of time when you'd make use of them must have been pretty short, because 80s IBM PC games don't have sound beyond beeps and bloops.

>>10776562
SC-55 mode in Sound Canvas VA emulates an SC-88 emulating an SC-55. It has some inaccuracies just like the real SC-88 did when in that mode.

>>10775970
I still have one of these in my closet, along with my Gameblaster. I can't bring myself to part ways with them.

Adding a little reverb and/or chorus to regular Adlib emulation was a game-changer, for sure.

>>10781274
So you could load larger soundfonts

>>10777623
What a CREATIVE reply.