If you want some real world ideas, just take a look at the Japanese side of things.
For example: PC-88 had OPN, PC-98 had OPNA, X68000 had OPM, FM Towns had OPN2.
All of which really used their chips well.

As for PCs, it's a real shame the OPL4 was thrown aside as a budget chip. Being 100% OPL3 compatible FM, as well as
having a GM compatible sample bank meant that PC devs just didn't care. If you have an OPL4 based card and select FM,
you get OPL3, or you select MIDI and get the GM. Basically nothing used the OPL4 for all it's worth.
However if you look at what MSX indy people have done with it, it's a true beast when used properly.

Actual wavetable idea (that Namco chip, TurboGrafx16/PC Engine, Apple IIGS, some arcade boards) should have found its way to PC, even if it meant only a ROM bank without RAM, it could have still provided some great possibilities with cost between FM chips and proper samplers/ROMplers.

There were some RAMpler chips used in arcade world that could have been useful but I imagine the cost simply was too high especially since most cannot use DRAM that I have seen...

I'm pretty happy with my OPL2/3 chips personally.
Though, wasn't there a real wavetable in the IBM MWave chipset, or something?

Eep386 wrote on 2021-02-18, 19:24:

I'm pretty happy with my OPL2/3 chips personally.

I second this. In capable hands, the YM3812 can deliver some amazing music. And there are countless examples.

The only other sound chip I dig that much is the SID. But I think it was best left to the C=64, because as much as I love its sound, I personally feel it wouldn't jive well alongside VGA graphics and more advanced games.

SuperDeadite wrote on 2021-02-18, 16:47:

If you want some real world ideas, just take a look at the Japanese side of things. For example: PC-88 had OPN, PC-98 had OPNA, […]
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If you want some real world ideas, just take a look at the Japanese side of things.
For example: PC-88 had OPN, PC-98 had OPNA, X68000 had OPM, FM Towns had OPN2.
All of which really used their chips well.

As for PCs, it's a real shame the OPL4 was thrown aside as a budget chip. Being 100% OPL3 compatible FM, as well as
having a GM compatible sample bank meant that PC devs just didn't care. If you have an OPL4 based card and select FM,
you get OPL3, or you select MIDI and get the GM. Basically nothing used the OPL4 for all it's worth.
However if you look at what MSX indy people have done with it, it's a true beast when used properly.

I think CD audio killed FM more than anything else. Maybe if the OPL4 had been available in the late 80's it could have been the "paula" of the IBM compatibles.

I grew up in the early 90's with an SBPro2, but even back then I never really liked the sound of the FM synth. I would be at the homes of friends and be jealous of the simply better-sounding soundtracks and audio being put out by their years-old and cheaper Amigas. It annoyed me that the FM instruments did not sound much like real instruments, and yearned for the future when PC music might become more realistic-sounding.

Of course, at the same time we also had the demoscene, along with (Amiga-invented) MODs and S3Ms, showing us PC users how computer music "could" sound. Some pioneering PC games (e.g. Star Control II) even incorporated MOD music, and are praised for the quality outcome to this day.

Now I have an OPL4 (-ML, i.e. the 704C chip) based sound card amongst my collection, and it's puny 1MB-ROM-of-no-particular-note means it's relegated to the Don't Really Ever Use pile. But boy, would it have been a big deal in 1992!

for starters, it would have been good if the sound canvas option that was baked in most DOS sound drivers of the time would have had actual meaning instead of just being a GM rehash; the (semi-)affordable consumer hardware was already out and publicized well enough in the form of SCB-55 and SCC-1 to support music with proper NRPN and patch usage, but instead many a DOS GM soundtrack wound up sounding rather bland, because developers just leaned into the GM concept instead of treating it as a proper MT-32 successor.

likewise, i believe the problem with OPL2/3 wasn't so much the hardware as how it was used by developers, going through crappy drivers and such, instead of more bespoke compositions. if the SNES vs. MD/genesis comparison is of any indication an early adoption of a SPC700-style standard on the PC could have well resulted in better soundtracks across the board.

I wasn't really taken by 'realistic' sounding instruments, mainly because my first halfway-decent computer sound chip was the YM2612 in a Sega Genesis / Megadrive. It sounded absolutely amazing to me (I just went from an Atari 2600 and a Tandy 1000 to a Genesis, so yeah, quite the vast jump). My first PC sound card was a cheap YMF719-based card, which had a really nasty sounding soft synth (but a pretty good OPL3 core as I'd later find out, apart from it being based on the YMF289). Most of the ROMplers I've used were really rather naff to the ear *cough* QS1000*cough*, though I did like the MT-32's quirky sound quite a bit many years 'after the fact'. (I also tended to like the AWE32, not for its abysmal ROM patches but rather because it made a pretty good .MOD/.S3M player with a certain DOS program.)

To be fair, much of OPL's rather tepid reception can be chalked up to the way MIDI was blandly pumped into it. Many later DOS games used some MIDI presets by George Alistair Sanger, but without any particular care or concern about how they sounded. OPL2/3 were never really designed as general MIDI synthesizers, but rather as distinctive musical instruments of their own.

On the other hand, the Japanese and Korean game developers sure had a pretty good grasp on the OPL chips...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV79XoEh228&t=360s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHBQ3siPoYQ

That being said, if I were the chap designing it, I'd make the Ad Lib use a YM2151 instead of a YM3812. That's just me.