VileRancour wrote:Some mighty fine 4-op instrument work in here. And +1 for listening to Judas Priest when doing musicdisks. 😁
My only OPL3-bearing card is in an IBM XT, so no chance for me to run this on real hardware - any plans to get this onto Soundcloud? although I guess RAD could work for listening at the office..
Might the LOTUS III soundtrack have also been an influence? Some of those tunes could fit in there -- or maybe it's just the background animation that made me think of it, heh.
Thanks! I'm going to record it off of real hardware with a fairly nice audio interface and put it onto Bandcamp. Lotus III-- yeah that background effect does look a bit like the sci fi zones, doesn't it? It uses a lot of the same 3d technique as a psuedo-3d road.
Lotus: Lotus II I think is my favorite of that series. Shame they never did a DOS version of that Lotus Trilogy. I can't say Lotus III is a direct influence, but I did grow up listening to all those MODs in that style-- that mash of 80s electronic styles from synthpop to industrial to house and italo-disco. These days I listen mostly to the really scene-y stuff, but back then I played a bunch of those less-technical tunes that used Soundtracker sounds (like DNS.MOD, still one of my faves). Ironically, I listened to all of that on the PC as I didn't have a modem for the Amiga (or even a modplayer)!
root42 wrote:Awesome. Will try it out one of these days on my 386.Let's see if it's up to the task. Will record it for reference.
I'd love to know how it runs. I was only really able to test with slower machines in DOSBox, which I don't think takes things like memory bandwidth bottlenecks into consideration. Be sure to hit '2' for framedrop mode. I can't help but think the code could be much tighter-- it has *some* handwritten assembly, it's using 32-bit blits, but it's also just mode13h double-buffered which I know is flushing some performance down the drain. 'course one thing I love about having the buffer in system memory is I can do sprites with bitops. I bet it's going to be really pokey on non-VLB though. TBH, this is the first time I've done a good amount of asm code for DOS-- when I was younger I only did BASIC and Pascal.
OPLx wrote:I think it would be a good idea. I had had a slightly different idea (but in the same vein) a few months back while tinkering around with the YMF825. The idea is still to be a General MIDI player, but use custom patches that emulate or simulate effects on the OPL3 instruments (kind of like instrument macros, RAD2's riffs, or the like). Probably won't ever have the time to implement it though.
I'd do it if I thought people would use it! It might even just be worth it to hear classic DOS game music with nicer FM patches. It could ship with a ton of converted DOS game and arcade game MIDI.