First post, by Ace
I had originally used this computer as a test box for any new sound card I get because it's one of the few motherboards I have with ISA slots, but I got an IBM Personal Computer 300GL in which resides 1 ISA slot, so I'll now use that computer as a text box for any new sound card I get.
But that's not the computer I wanted to talk about. This test box, originally a computer running Windows 98 SE back in 2000, has now been set up for something I originally did not want to do: emulation for a future arcade cabinet. Now, I'm not a big fan of emulation, so I'd like to avoid it as much as possible, HOWEVER, I have stumbled upon some of the earliest versions of MAME for MS-DOS. What's so special about them? How about being able to use TRUE OPL2 or OPL3 FM Synthesis rather than MAME's then poor emulation of the YM3812 and YMF262? For me, the one thing that truly kills emulators is how they ALWAYS mess up the sound in some way, but with these older versions of MAME, I've decided to set up an emulator box to be used exclusively for games that have a YM3812 or YMF262 on the original arcade board.
Now for the specs of said computer:
-Intel Pentium III 1GHz overclocked to 1.13GHz(FSB was overclocked to the maximum 150MHz supported by the motherboard)
-384MB of RAM(also overclocked due to the faster FSB)
-nVidia GeForce FX 5600 AGP graphics card(again, overclocked due to the faster FSB)
-20GB hard drive(it's overkill for what I want to do with it, but it's the only hard drive I have that's either not in use or not dead)
-Gigabyte motherboard with VIA Apollo Pro VT 82C693A chipset
-SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 CT1600 ISA sound card
-OS is MS-DOS v6.22
-Runs 2 different versions of MAME for MS-DOS: MAME v0.36 and VSyncMAME v0.57
I'll get some pictures later since it's fairly late here(past midnight as I'm typing this). However, I will leave you with a sample of what these old versions of MAME are capable of. Here's 15 minutes of Open your Eyes from Zero Wing, a game with a YM3812 on the original board, recorded off my SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 using its YMF262: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHkZbOLRJO4
Later, I will also show you how the SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 handles Raiden, a game which uses a YM3812 alongside an OKI6295 ADPCM sound chip(the emulated OKI6295 sounds phenomenal on the SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 with its heavy low-pass filtering).