Reply 20 of 34, by appiah4
- Rank
- l33t++
wrote:Honestly, with an AWE32 I don't know why you would bother with OPL3 at all. The extra RAM is really useful — I highly advise you to play around with soundfonts. You might not need an external GM module after all. So why listen to AdLib music when you have a really capable wavetable device? I know some people really love FM synthesis, but there are very few games that make good use of it.
Also, you could always just install a second soundcard that has true OPL3 and MPU implementation without bugs. Any Yamaha card will do for that just fine. You'll have to work with IRQ conflicts and reroute audio output with an extra cable, but that's about it.
The real issue here for me is that a) soundfonts are Windows (9x?) only, b) 30-pin SIMM modules with 4MB or 16MB capacity are about as rare as GUS cards where I live. Mine is equipped with 2MB and the number of soundfonts you can fit onto that is, well, very, very low. I believe the only one that I found bearable was 2MBGMGS.SF2/CT2MGM.SF2 (Creative); there was also a finegm.zip I found somewhere that was a 1st gen soundbank (.SBK) attempting to replicate the GUS sound. Whether GUS is better as a synth than AWE is debatable in itself, and I don't remember appreciating it at all.
Short story long, 2MB in DOS is only useful for enabling MIDI or MT-32 emulation in my experience, and that only works half the time. If you are lucky.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.