What is your goal? To prevent two OPL chips playing at the same time (sharing the same address) ?

If you remove OPL3 from a card, the card should be otherwise usable. But then there is no one to drive the OPL3 DAC so it might output garbage, so it would be best to remove OPL3 DAC too. Okay, then there would be the buffer op-amps nobody is driving, but it depends on the connection if they just float nice and quiet or do they amplify random noise. So perhaps it would be best to just disconnect some other components to prevent OPL3 audio to pass to output, than to remove OPL3 chip.

Removing the OPL3 chip would not prevent the sound card for responding to OPL3 IO addresses, so there would still be an IO conflict as two cards share the address, both driving the bus when reading from OPL3 status register. There may be other ways to prevent this.

So please what is your goal?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If I were to cut the OPL3 from an original Microsoft Windows Sound System card, would the card still be usable? Would it then sit better with something like an SB Pro? If it worked, it seems like it could be a pretty nice combo.

Why not just go for one of the many Aztech cards out there that have a real OPL3 along with SB Pro and WSS compatibility?

So you are considering the SB Pro again, after using the OPL3-SAX for a while. Any particular reason?
Maybe lifting (disconnecting) 1 or 2 pins or a resistor somewhere is enough to disable the WSS OPL without side-effects.
You do have double the noise using two vintage soundcard outputs
Later SB-Pro+WSS combo cards share the same resources between SB-Pro and WSS, don't know if that works with the suggested 2 card setup.

We found out before there is no practical I/O conflict with multiple OPL's listening at the same address.

I haven't given up on OPL3SAx. It still seems to be a pretty decent card for me (except for the crappy software). But, I have multiple systems and was just curious about what else is possible.

I've heard that perhaps the original WSS cards have better compatibility than some of the clones.

I've also heard conflicting opinions on whether or not having two OPL3s at the same address is a problem or not. Another user was convinced in certain situations it can be.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I haven't given up on OPL3SAx. It still seems to be a pretty decent card for me (except for the crappy software). But, I have multiple systems and was just curious about what else is possible.

Good to hear that. It has been a while since I ran the system with the OPL3SAx. Instead I use the SB CT2940+Roland MPU-401AT and lately the Acer Magic S23 cards (Crystal CS4232+OPL3+Waveblaster header). The latter supports WSS. There is a Resource.exe file that allows one to adjust the PnP preferences on CS423X cards equipped with EEPROM, which allows you to practically choose the desired resources, whilst still allowing a change of address with a single DOS command (override PnP).

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I've heard that perhaps the original WSS cards have better compatibility than some of the clones.

The CS4232 WSS seems to get affected when it is used as a SB-Pro, and there are still DMA transfers pending at program exit. I found a routine to acknowledge any pending SB-Pro DMA transfers, and that helps alot. Still I found the game Tyrian very stubborn, It does not work on the CS4232 with WSS at IRQ=7 and DMA=1 and OPL3, but works at a clean boot with WSS at IRQ=5 and DMA=0 and General Midi. Miles sound system games and MPXplay work fine with WSS at any setting now, even when the Miles WSS driver was not originally included.

It seems to be common practice to mute WSS enterily when closing a DOS program, and unmute it at startup of DOS program. This makes the card completely silent when idle. Yet MPXplay 1.60 forgets to unmute whilst Miles drivers do not mute. I fixed both recently.

The Allegro WSS driver is poor, and I did not manage to get it working as it is.
Which other WSS problem cases need attention?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I've also heard conflicting opinions on whether or not having two OPL3s at the same address is a problem or not. Another user was convinced in certain situations it can be.

I don't know about that. Except that I found that one cannot use an AWE64 and prevent some games from using the same AWE64 for FM music through its inferior CQM FM at the Sound Blaster IO address (default 220h). Desoldering is not an option there, as it is all in the same chip. The original Windows Sound System card should not have that problem, as it does not use IO 220h.