I risked it and bought one new Yamaha Audician 32 plus and thought I would add my opinion. It came boxed with drivers. The chip on it reads YMF718 and I understand this contains a real Yamaha OPL3.

The included dos drivers installed without issue. The card supports Sound Blaster up to Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 and works very nicely with all games I have tried so far (Wolf3D, ROTT, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Duke3D, Duke2, Monster Bash, Wacky Wheels, Raptor, Jazz Jackrabbit, Lemmings, Monkey2, DOTT, S&M and Full Throttle).

With the on-board amp turned to zero and connected to my Hi-Fi the sound is very nice for FM music and sound effects. Comparing it my early jumpered Sound Blaster 16 with real opl3 its a lot less noisy. Compared to my AWE64 the opl3 is much more musical and nice to listen to.

I haven’t tested the MPU-401 port yet because my Roland boxes are connected via a mess of wires to DOSBox PC at the moment. But if it works well, for me at least this is a almost perfect dos card. Sure it lacks sb16 compatibility but I looked at the games I like to play and almost none have sb16 support anyway and I am not interested in Wavetable sound.

The SB Pro 8-bit Stereo functionality is easy, as you already found out.
There is also WSS 16-bit Stereo functionality, but it is hard to get it to work reliably. It shares resources with the SB Pro. Then just few games support WSS, and even fewer games have any WSS benefit over the SB Pro mode.

For the best sound make sure to turn off the Ymersion, Bass and Treble settings.

read more here: The Yamaha OPL YMF718-S chipset

Thanks gerwin your setting for the card in that thread worked well.

Soupdragon wrote:

I risked it and bought one new Yamaha Audician 32 plus and thought I would add my opinion. It came boxed with drivers. The chip on it reads YMF718 and I understand this contains a real Yamaha OPL3.

Thanks for the info!

I just ordered 2 from eBay (they come from the UK) as I never had a Yamaha card. Looking for a good buddy to my NEC 385.

gerwin: is it possible to switch ymersion off in dos?

Yurbo wrote:

gerwin: is it possible to switch ymersion off in dos?

There is an .ini file. Just edit it and change that setting 😀

is it possible to turn off the internal amp in dos?

Yurbo wrote:

is it possible to turn off the internal amp in dos?

No there are jumpers.

yeah i noticed two jumpers side by side and moved them both up by 1 pin but didnt notice much difference.. what is the correct positioning to disable the amp?

Yurbo wrote:

yeah i noticed two jumpers side by side and moved them both up by 1 pin but didnt notice much difference.. what is the correct positioning to disable the amp?

The difference is massive and should be clearly noticeable 😀

But I can't remember which one it was. Just plug in speakers and at one position they are quite a bit louder.

The relevant settings are silk screened onto my card.

Don't want to hijack this thread, but, I've been watching this Audician 32 card for a little while. The only thing keeping me from pulling the trigger is...Is it tall enough to house a XR385?

No.

Well alright then. Any other branded or easily searchable specific yamaha cards that would fit the bill? I've stopped using my sb16 and am using just the vortex2 card with the daughtercard right now, but would like a single slot ISA solution, pretty much same requirements the OP has.

Then better consider an alternative chipset instead of the Yamaha YMF71X, or get soldering tools to make the adapter cable.