Greetings!
I recently salvaged some parts from a dead PC. Among them was a "Genius Soundmaker 5.1 Value" (with the CMI8738 chip), so when I was testing these parts to see if they're still usable I was searching for drivers to said card. Lo and behold I came across this thread describing the chip being able to do OPL playback natively. Long story short I set up a rig and got it working with the resources provided here. I've decided to record the audio output of the chip and audio recordings of NUKED opl emulation for comparison and a bit of fun and share them here for for your listening pleasure (or displeasure) 🤣
Sadly, the recordings did not turn out as I'd have liked (some audio hickups, probably due to recording all if this on the same machine) but they're still good enough to compare between IMO.
My test rig:
Biostar GF7025-M2 TE socket AM2 board with an AMD Athlon 64 4400+
Windows XP
the CMI8738 card
a Creative AudioPCI 128 CT4750 soundcard
speaker output -> line in on the creative card
Audacity for recording, all recordings were normalized before exporting
DOSBox Megabuild 6 for OPL passthrough to the CMI8738
DOSBox ECE r4019 for recording NUKED emulator
I've also recorded the General midi from the Creative card just for the heck of it, I like the way midi sounds on this card a lot =)
NOW! On to the good stuff. You can download the recordings (.flac format) here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3ULEFDPIkZ … dDAzcVdJVEFIV1U
recordings include:
Cybersphere (shareware) info screen music
Duke3D setup.exe test song & ingame main menu song
Doom 2 e1m1
Tyrian2000 setup.exe track 18 (level 1 song)
Enjoy! 😀