The HSC tracker includes a number of nice 2-Op tunes, several of which approximate reverb, filter, and phase effects to an impressive degree (but not RSS, which was added after-the-fact 😀 ):

NEOINTRO
WVBOMBE
WVOLDTIT HORRIBLE synth lead (1'05" ->), but otherwise nice... 😵

leileilol wrote:

CyberSphere must be heard.

Funny you should mention that game, since my newest episode of Anicent DOS Games happens to be a video review of Cybersphere. ;)

Cybersphere not only uses the OPL3 synthesizer chip for music, but also for its sound effects too. In fact, the entire game is nothing but OPL3 sound and music. (Which means it should theoretically work natively with any sound card that is equipped with an OPL3 chip functioning on the default port address, not just Sound Blaster cards.)

And I do have to agree, Cybersphere has some extremely good and catchy synth music. Even the simple echoing tune during the sector select screen, which you normally would only listen to for about 5 seconds, is awesome, and kinda reminds me of the tune in Startropics on the NES when you find a secret room. :)

A funny thing to try is to set the oplmode wrong in DOSBox when playing Cybersphere, such as by setting it to OPL2 mode... Most of the game sounds like a complete mess when you do that, though curiously, a couple things still sound right.

Here's a link to the Cybersphere ADG episode on my website: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/ep0006.html

Oh, and since both Cybersphere and Cybersphere Plus are freeware now, anyone who wants to play them can get the full versions from: http://www.classicdosgames.com/genre/paddle.html

Funny thing I had never heard of Cybersphere (or Cybersphere Plus) before. The games' release dates (1996-1997) would have been within the era of when I was writing 'Game Channel Features' for Compuserve.

Anyhow, what an excellent paddleball game! Amazing the small size of them, a lot of 'bang for the buck' for the filesize 😀

I still don't understand why Laser Squad FM music can be very impressive. If I recall correctly, you can create your own waveform using FM synthesis - one can do it with DX7. But can you program custom waveform in OPL2/OPL3? is it what they did with the game? And does Yamaha OPL chip actually have more potential than I thought?

MiG-29 Fulcrum (Domark's DOS game, not the Novalogic one) also has very impressive FM music (note the tom-tom). And of course, I haven't mentioned Dune, whose OPL music sounds much much better than its MT-32 counterpart.

How the hell did those people do that with OPL? 😳

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

How the hell did those people do that with OPL? :shocked:

The OPL2 was actually pretty customizable. Each of its 9 channels could be assigned two sine-waves, which could also be set to special modes to aproximate triangle and sawtooth waves (though not so much square waves), and each of these sine waves could have several other settings assigned, including the typical attack, decay, sustain and release timings in 4 bits each (16 different values) and other settings. There was also a special percussion mode, which uses 3 channels to produce 5 different kinds of percussion effects, and a special Composite mode which was actually rarely used and is the source of it not being 100% compatible with the OPL3.

The OPL3 doubled the channels available, finally added square waves and stereo sound.

All things considered, making music on these chipsets is its own kind of art, since programming the oscillators to do exactly what you want them to is part of the challenge.

I'm pretty sure Inertia Player can play back MODs through an AdLib card. Your sample rate would be pretty low though, I reckon about 11kHz, not much higher than doing the same through the PC Honker.

This method doesn't seem to work in DOSBox though. It plays back, but it's very distorted.

Gemini000 wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

How the hell did those people do that with OPL? 😳

The OPL2 was actually pretty customizable. Each of its 9 channels could be assigned two sine-waves, which could also be set to special modes to aproximate triangle and sawtooth waves (though not so much square waves), and each of these sine waves could have several other settings assigned, including the typical attack, decay, sustain and release timings in 4 bits each (16 different values) and other settings. There was also a special percussion mode, which uses 3 channels to produce 5 different kinds of percussion effects, and a special Composite mode which was actually rarely used and is the source of it not being 100% compatible with the OPL3.

The OPL3 doubled the channels available, finally added square waves and stereo sound.

I see. So the OPL chips do have a lot of potentials. You can create your own sound banks, just like the DX7.

I tried to play Dune MIDI files through various devices, from Roland VSC to Yamaha S-YXG50 to various Timidity soundfonts, and of course none of them sounds right. 🤣

Gemini000 wrote:

All things considered, making music on these chipsets is its own kind of art, since programming the oscillators to do exactly what you want them to is part of the challenge.

No wonder most games uses the built-in sound banks. Too bad, because I actually like FM sounds when pushed to its potential.

just look at some megadrive/genesis games, opl2 is very nice in capable hands

I tried to do Spiral by Vangelis on OPL3 once:

http://www.box.com/s/774961cbc3598402e292

It's far from finished but shows that it can be done. Awesome stereo spiraling effect included 😀

keropi wrote:

just look at some gegadrive/genesis games, opl2 is very nice in capable hands

You beat me to it! I was going to suggest that 😀. But the Mega Drive uses the OPN2, not the OPL2.

Vibrants did some amazing music on the good ol' OPL2/3!
They have a ton of music on their website http://www.vibrants.dk/ .
They also worked on a fun little platformer (and tough!) for DOS called Lollypop. Needless to say, the music is fantastic, be it FM synth or MT-32.

I found this song on Youtube a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWuDp6z3nHo. Simply amazing! As far as I know it was done in Adlib Tracker 2, but unfortunately the composer doesn't seem to have released a file so we can play it on our own cards.

MrKsoft wrote:

I found this song on Youtube a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWuDp6z3nHo. Simply amazing! As far as I know it was done in Adlib Tracker 2, but unfortunately the composer doesn't seem to have released a file so we can play it on our own cards.

That's OPL FM sound? 😳

The brass and the orchestra hit sounds too good to believe.... Why didn't we heard more sound like that in old Adlib/Soundblaster games? The composer is using custom waves, isn't he? They certainly sound much much better than the standard OPL sound banks. What kept Adlib from making those sounds standard sound banks, so games would sound better than they did?

Related to my question above: what defines the standard FM sound bank in OPL chips? Are the FM wave parameters for the standard instruments being "hard-coded" in the sound card hardware? Is it possible to "replace" the standard sound bank instruments with better-sounding instruments, by modifying the "default" FM wave parameters? That way, it would work almost like sound font: you just "replace" the instruments, and you don't need to modify the game to hear better FM sounds.

It's software-driven. Ever used Voyetra? Adlib isn't MIDI. It doesn't have ANY instruments!

leileilol wrote:

It's software-driven. Ever used Voyetra? Adlib isn't MIDI. It doesn't have ANY instruments!

I remember using Voyetra MIDI Sequencer Plus Pro (SPPRO.COM) that came with my SBPro, and there is no option to create your own instrument - you can only choose from pre-defined sound bank, so I thought that was the way game musicians create their music.

Why does many Adlib/Soundblaster game music sound the same, then? There is only a handful of games that stands out, like Dune or MiG-23 Fulcrum. If it's not hardwired, then it must be the standard Sound Blaster/Adlib programming API.

Why does many Adlib/Soundblaster game music sound the same, then? There is only a handful of games that stands out, like Dune or MiG-23 Fulcrum. If it's not hardwired, then it must be the standard Sound Blaster/Adlib programming API.

There is no "standard API", you are not limited in any way as mostly the chip is used directly by writing its registers through its IO address. But some games might use some existing sound device drivers and libraries, which can play midi files and the sound libraries come with default set of OPL register settings for midi instruments. The games that use the same sound libraries might sound the same because they have the same OPL register parameters for same instruments.

Now the trick with playing sounds on OPL chip is not about figuring out register settings for a given instrument and just turning the notes on and off (like most games or midi playing stuff does), most OPL trackers and programmers vary the parameters on the fly as they wish to have more control over the sound. While this sounds better, it also increases the CPU time spent on just playing the music.

To get a grasp on how the chip works, try to find OPL2/OPL3 programming manual (Vladimir Arnosts webpage?) or take a look at OPL2/OPL3 emulator source code (MAME?) how it works.

My favourite is a song called The Alibi by Laxity, originally composed for C64 SID but later converted to Adlib. That is on youtube as well.

IIRC Yamaha DX7 had six-operator sounds of 16 channels. OPL2 has 9 channels of two-operator sounds. OPL3 has 18 two-operator channels, of which 12 channels can be combined into 6 channels of four-operator sounds. I do not know of OPL3-specific music that would take use of its 18 channels, four-operator sounds, four extra waveforms or stereo output. Many games might use the OPL3 almost like a dual OPL2 to get stereo or panning for sounds.

Edit: I almost forgot, the trick to play samples through OPL chips is to for example start a sine wave, wait for it to reach peak, stop the sine wave to stay at peak, and then vary the volume based on sample value. But the quality is poor and comparable to samples played through the internal speaker; there are only 6 bits of volume for 64 levels and the worse part is that the volume levels are logarithmic, not linear, so unless some neat tricks are used to get around those limitations, it works but it is not impressive. Except for the fact that it can be done and how.

Good Adlib music takes a lot of work, time, talent and understanding of the abilities and limitations of FM synthesis. It is not particularly intuitive for most musically inclined people and it does not sound like any instrument in nature. It cannot be easily controlled by a physical keyboard like a midi device. It has no predefined instruments except for the five percussion instruments.

Most PC game composers in the US had several synthesizers and other real instruments. Translating them to midi for an MT-32 or a GM module was straightforward. Electronic music seemed to be a stronghold of Europe. Many games mentioned in this thread, like Dune, MiG-29 Fulcrum, Laser Squad, are all from European designers. I also think Lemmings has pretty impressive FM, and that was made by Scots.

Of course, there have to be some good FM music in games that originated in the U.S. Jill of the Jungle is a good example.

It cannot be easily controlled by a physical keyboard like a midi device. It has no predefined instruments except for the five percussion instruments.

It does not even have the percussion instruments, you have to program their parameters separately as well to make reasonable sounds. Just some parts of the operation is different when in percussive mode, like double volume, or addition of noise from a noise generator to sound.

A lot of games play midi files internally, it does not matter where those midi events come from, midi file or external keyboard, in any case those events need to be converted to chip register writes. But true, simple note on/note off commands might sound dull, but not everything. In fact Monkey Island title theme played on OPL2/Adlib is nothing but midi note on/off commands with one programmed instrument per midi channel.

Well, once General MIDI came into the gaming scene, the simplest thing to do was to make your MIDI music, then use a programming library to play back those MIDI files over OPL2/OPL3 using special sound banks designed to work with those chipsets to their maximum potential, usually precluding the possibility of playing sound effects at the same time. (Part of the reason why many games with Adlib support only support it for the music and not the sound effects too.)

If you suspect a particular game uses MIDI for its music but it also has Adlib support, you can usually scrounge around its data files with a hex editor and find 11,908 bytes which make up the contents of an OP2 sound bank file. Combined with the raw music data and an appropriate music player such as MUS Player, you can then play back the music, outside of the game itself, on an OPL2/3 chipset! :D

Obviously though, the best OPL2/3 music is made specifically for the chipset, and as such, doesn't really translate well to MIDI. Same goes for vice versa. :P