Here is how I relate to the whole OPL3 vs Rest debate: Fuck OPL3. Seriously. Aside from a couple chiptune music tracks that take advantage of specific bugs in producing sound, the differences are minor between different implementations (except the ones that are outright godawful of course, but FM shaming will come later) and claiming superiority based on those minor differences is absurd. Here is why: OPL3 cards themselves, which are held on a high pedestal and presented as what everything else should try to be, are mostly of wildly varying sound outputs. Some have brick wall filters (SB16), some have proper lowpass filters (SBPro), ome have no filtering and a metallic sound more often attributed to CQM (most ALS007 cards). Some have proper output filtering and a good bass response (YMF71x cards for example, which incidentally do not implement a filter unlike Sound Blaster cards..), some have incredibly shitty output filtering and a very thin bass response (Some OPTi cards I have but that is the manufacturer's fault not chipset makers). There is no one single true OPL3 sound (and even if there was, I would argue it is the YMF71x cards' sound and not the SBPro sound as is generally argued on the internet). The truth is, it's all over the place!
And honestly, and subjectively speaking, some FM implementations sound so much better to me in games. My favorite FM implementation is CrystalFM, particularly as found in CS4236 and CS4237 - this has an incredibly warm and organic sounding FM implementation that makes OPL3's synthetic sound appear almost a generation older in my view. You would be hard pressed to find anyone tell ESFM apart from proper OPL3 in a blind test if at all. Testament to that is the discovery that ALS100 cards that were FM-shamed for having "shitty OPL3" up until a few months ago have been elevated to a desirable status now that someone discovered they actually have genuine OPL3 clones on board. Excuse me but where are all these people who shat on ALS FM these past few years? I have been adamantly claiming that ForteMedia FM was near-perfect and incredibly compatible for a PCI card for years but that card was ostracized for having a shitty OPL3 clone because at some point some dude on the internet dissed it in a blog page for not being genuine OPL3. He probably never even properly compared it.
Anyway. At the end of the day, use what sounds best to you.
