dreamblaster wrote:

it is usb mini port (same as opl3lpt)
I find it more robust than micro.

I suppose it is also easier to solder, for people building their own kit?

Scali wrote:

dreamblaster wrote:

it is usb mini port (same as opl3lpt)
I find it more robust than micro.

I suppose it is also easier to solder, for people building their own kit?

yes, that's true for opl2lpt and the upcoming tndlpt kit
(but opl3lpt will be a fully factory soldered board)

Scali wrote:

dreamblaster wrote:

it is usb mini port (same as opl3lpt)
I find it more robust than micro.

I suppose it is also easier to solder, for people building their own kit?

Micro and mini can have different mounting variants and the through-hole mini in OPL2LPT was a major PITA to solder, for me at least. Actually, the only part I had any problems with.
Also, from my past repair experience I wouldn't call usb-mini more robust. It is less "tight" fitting than micro. Depends on the particular manufacturer, possibly, but I think there are other reasons besides compactness for mini being discontinued.
But I'm not asking for micro, as I actually have more mini than micro cables lying around 😀

I think is better to use a micro USB port than a mini... The fact that people use a lot of micro USB cables with Android smartphones and new tech objects... In my opinion, mini USB seems old fashionned.

NilsWorld wrote:

I think is better to use a micro USB port than a mini... The fact that people use a lot of micro USB cables with Android smartphones and new tech objects... In my opinion, mini USB seems old fashionned.

Yeah, I guess I am not worried being old-fashioned, when making an opl-3 soundcard...
It is too late anyway, the batch is ordered with USB mini connectors.
There are cheap adapter solutions, if you insist on using micro-usb... 🤣
http://www.ebay.de/itm/2Pcs-Converter-Adapter … YR/253380169736

NilsWorld wrote:

In my opinion, mini USB seems old fashionned.

It's way more durable than micro USB, and since this for for power only anyway, why care at all? "old-fashioned" really is no argument here. No one is seriously using the same cable for OPL3LPT that he/she also uses to charge their modern smartphone.

derSammler wrote:

NilsWorld wrote:

In my opinion, mini USB seems old fashionned.

It's way more durable than micro USB, and since this for for power only anyway, why care at all?

My personal experience says otherwise. I have several USB-mini cables or devices with poor contact, but didn't encounter this problem yet with micro cables, except one cheap chinese adapter made completely of plastic.
It is sure durable enough for nearly all usb-powered tech made during last 10 years, including Raspberry Pi etc.

derSammler wrote:

No one is seriously using the same cable for OPL3LPT that he/she also uses to charge their modern smartphone.

Why not?

Again, my POV is that USB-micro is overall better, but I can live with mini as I still have a bunch of mini cables left from PS3 era.

noop wrote:

Why not?

Because you are not using the cable to *charge* the OPL3LPT. You need it all the time to power it, so you need a dedicated one. That should be obvious, shouldn't it?

derSammler wrote:

noop wrote:

Why not?

Because you are not using the cable to *charge* the OPL3LPT. You need it all the time to power it, so you need a dedicated one. That should be obvious, shouldn't it?

Because I'm playing old DOS games and charging my phone 24/7? Actually no, while I charge my phone/tablet I usually sleep, and I use OPL2LPT say, few hours per week.
For most people it is one less cable to care about.

Does anyone have any idea how to kill the Adlib-compatible functionality of an ISA Sound Blaster 16 card? (Specifically one of the many variants that has the CT1978 or equivalent BS.) I'm thinking that pairing an OPL2LPT or OPL3LPT with one of the CT2940s that has CQM would be a much easier way to achieve true OPL along with the best SNR on a SB 16 card...but I sense the hardware conflicts coming from miles away.

I have a few spare Vibra cards and I could try de-soldering the CQM chip to see if that does the trick, but I suspect that it would cause issues with the main 2504/2501/etc chips.

aquishix wrote:

Does anyone have any idea how to kill the Adlib-compatible functionality of an ISA Sound Blaster 16 card? (Specifically one of the many variants has has the CT1747 or equivalent BS.) I'm thinking that pairing an OPL2LPT or OPL3LPT with one of the CT2940s that has CQM would be a much easier way to achieve true OPL along with the best SNR on a SB 16 card...but I sense the hardware conflicts coming from miles away.

I have a few spare Vibra cards and I could try de-soldering the CQM chip to see if that does the trick, but I suspect that it would cause issues with the main 2504/2501/etc chips.

If you run the existing TSR for OPL2LPT, or apply Adlib patcher, it will replace Adlib for your SB16. No conflicts. Games where you select SBPro/SB16 for FM music will still go through SB16.
You can even test without OPL2LPT/OPL3LPT. Run TSR or patcher with any supported game, select Adlib audio and FM sound of your SB16 will disappear.

noop wrote:

Games where you select SBPro/SB16 for FM music will still go through SB16.

But this is precisely my concern. There are many DOS games that don't have an explicit Adlib option for the music, but offer a "Sound Blaster" option which really means calling upon the FM synthesis feature(s) on the Sound Blaster card. I want to man-in-the-middle that.

aquishix wrote:

noop wrote:

Games where you select SBPro/SB16 for FM music will still go through SB16.

But this is precisely my concern. There are many DOS games that don't have an explicit Adlib option for the music, but offer a "Sound Blaster" option which really means calling upon the FM synthesis

1) Why don’t you try? Games that dont’t offer SBPro/SB16 for FM audio access SB FM functionality exactly like Adlib.
2) Software for OPL3LPT will remap SB OPL3 ports as well. Expect no conflicts.

noop wrote:

aquishix wrote:

noop wrote:

Games where you select SBPro/SB16 for FM music will still go through SB16.

But this is precisely my concern. There are many DOS games that don't have an explicit Adlib option for the music, but offer a "Sound Blaster" option which really means calling upon the FM synthesis

1) Why don’t you try? Games that dont’t offer SBPro/SB16 for FM audio access SB FM functionality exactly like Adlib.
2) Software for OPL3LPT will remap SB OPL3 ports as well. Expect no conflicts.

I apologize if I'm not making myself clear enough, but it seems like we're not on the same page.

Consider a game that does NOT have an "Adlib" option on the sound setup menus, yet uses the Adlib/FM/OPL functionality of a Sound Blaster card when selecting "Sound Blaster" on the sound setup menu.

I would want to be able to play such a game and have the Adlib/FM/OPL go through the OPLXLPT, with the rest of the Sound Blaster functionality going through the Sound Blaster card as normal. You specifically said that this would not ordinarily happen in your first reply to me.

I'm probably going to purchase an OPL2LPT just because it seems like a great piece of hardware to have in one's vintage/retro collection, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can about it before I make the purchase. I'll make that purchase sooner rather than later, and alter my shopping habits, re: SB16 cards, if I know that I can accomplish what I want to accomplish with it.

aquishix wrote:

..

UGH. Sorry, but you did not understand me at all.
you dont need OPL2LPT to use its utilities. Just download and check. Presence of OPL2LPT/OPL3LPT is not necessary. Utilities still work. You will see for yourself that FM audio disappeared.
2) As a creator of a very similar utility I assure you that there is no need to manually disable FM functionality in your SB.
3) OPL2LPT utility will not override OPL3 ports because it is not designed to do so. OPL3LPT utilities will, but OPL3LPT is not out yet.

Author of the OPL2LPT software here. The OPL2LPT TSR currently strictly emulates an Adlib card. It intercepts the Adlib port range and transfers the commands over the parallel port. So the TSR works with any real-mode game that would work with a real Adlib card.
If you want to test compatiblity with any particular game, you can just load the TSR, even without the hardware, and run the game. If the music disappears, it works 😀

Now, about Sound Blaster functionality. Sound Blaster cards support the Adlib port range for compatibility, but additionally expose the OPL2 somewhere in the 220h range. In my experience, nearly all DOS software uses the Adlib ports rather than the Sound Blaster ports for OPL music, though they may name it "Sound Blaster" rather than "Adlib". DOS games that use the OPL2 but don't support Adlib are quite rare (most notably exceptions are games that use Creative's SBFMDRV driver, such as early versions of Jill of the Jungle.).

The TSR currently doesn't intercept any of the Sound Blaster ports. The reason is that no software would try to use these without first doing a Sound Blaster detection check. And faking such a check in the TSR would lead to horrible compatibility problems, as software would assume the full Sound Blaster functionality is available...
I guess there's a use case if your computer already has Sound Blaster compatible audio but you don't like its FM audio. I might implement this if people seem interested in this scenario.

BTW all of this is completely handled in software. There's no chance of hardware conflicts. It's essentially a very primitive form of virtualization, which is why a 386 CPU is required and why it only works with real-mode software.

pdw wrote:

The TSR currently doesn't intercept any of the Sound Blaster ports. The reason is that no software would try to use these without first doing a Sound Blaster detection check. And faking such a check in the TSR would lead to horrible compatibility problems, as software would assume the full Sound Blaster functionality is available...

Actually, I'm not so sure about this. Is is quite possible that a generic OPL3 driver would try to detect OPL3 on 220h exactly like it would detect it on 388h.
But, probably, a majority of games that support OPL3 are not real mode.
If you intercept 220-223 range, without messing with DSP, nothing bad will happen anyway. In the worst case game will not detect music device.

I doubt it's common. The Miles drivers for example avoid probing 220h, the code has a comment saying that could hang systems with an original Sound Blaster card.

pdw wrote:

I guess there's a use case if your computer already has Sound Blaster compatible audio but you don't like its FM audio. I might implement this if people seem interested in this scenario.

And that is precisely my use case. Great Hierophant's seminal article on Sound Blaster 16 cards (posted on his Nerdly Pleasures blog:)

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2012/07/s … ibulations.html)

advises use of the CT2940 or CT2980 to achieve the best SNRs of the SB16 era. But take a look at all of the CT2940s for sale on eBay and you'll see that every single one of them has the stupid CT1978 CQM chip instead of one of the various OPL chips. There was 1 that was made available on eBay a few weeks ago in Ukraine and I snatched it immediately. 😉 I've scoured through dozens if not hundreds of sales pages for CT2980s looking for one with an OPL chip, but never found one. Even tried looking through the CT2890s, thinking he may have mis-typed the model #. (blasterbeam suggested this too on the NP blog, but never received a reply.)

So, it's just very difficult to get those best CT2940s and pairing either a CT2940 (that has the CT1978 chip) or another high-SNR SB16 with an OPLXLPT would be a fantastic solution for the purists among us, myself included. I would love to have the freedom, for instance, of abandoning the SB16s entirely and using AWE64 Gold cards instead, or even some other card like a high-SNR ESS card. The fake OPL junk is the only thing stopping me from using such cards. I have an AWE64 Gold card sitting there unused now because of how much I've learned about all this.

I know I'm not alone in these concerns; it's just a matter of getting people to recognize my proposed solution and chime in on the topic. =)