FM got a bad reputation with the public thanks to low end multimedia chips. What people don't realize is that they've been listening to FM synthesis in studio recorded music for years. It was used by virtually every pop group in the mid to late 80's. It started to fall out of favor in the 90's as …

http://www.beatmode.com/fm7/ Whole bunch of demos of what a professional FM synth sounds like can be found at the bottom of the page.

In my experience over the years, FM synthesis is a vastly inferior music hardware technology compared to the MT-32 and Sound Canvas that were available back then. The only exception to this (in my opinion) is Japanese games. Most consoles and arcade machines used FM synthesis chips, and somehow the …

Just wondering if the OPL emulation is actual frequency modulation. Because technicly, Yamaha doesn't use FM, they use phase modulation. (but still call it FM for some reason) Might be to prevent confusion with Casio's phase distortion synthesis, but for whatever reason, this has been the case since …

More than just sample! It depends on "engine" of the synthersizer very much. The MS soft Synth have the Sound Canvas Sample but still sounds some different to a real Sound Canvas ... "cheesy"!!! I don't believe having SC sample as a DLS would give any impressive result. No "GS compatible" synth I …

Hi canadacow, Will you make an emulator of the Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 module? According to Quest Studios , the Microsoft Soft Synth sounds a bit "cheesy" and isn't completely faithful to the SC-55. Could it be possible to make such emulator? Regards. In my experiance the virtual soundcanvas …

If you could have designed a soundcard back in the day, what would it have been like? For me.... 8 6 operator FM channels (6 operator FM sounds good, check out the DX7) 8 channel DAC. Simple global reverb for DAC and FM channels (independant)

OTOH on the different emulation tactics: Canadacow is doing high-level emulation. Vlad sounds like he wants to do low-level emulation. Considering that the MT32 is a MIDI device and is controlled entirely through sysex commands, I really don't see what the difference would be. As long as it …

Ultimately, I find it a very odd phenomenon that all corporations seem to act in a similiar greedy manner in similiar situations. Somehow, despite the fact that the corporation is made of individuals, common sense ideas that apply to individuals no longer seem to apply to the corporations as a …

Just thought I should mention that MT-32 MIDI won't sound right unless played on an actual MT-32. Even with MT-32 sounds it rarely works right because most games that supported the MT-32 uploaded new sounds. (the MT-32's was fully editable)

I'm wondering, how difficult would GUS and Roland MT32 emulation be? I know that the technical details of the GUS are well known at least. (of course, that would have to wait untill everything else was working) It'd be great to be able to play those old Origin games with the MT-32 soundtrack or Zone …