The first video's recording. The preceding song that affects MELSMAD.MID is another Games Factory midi file LEV1AND3.MID (from Zeb), and here's how a LEV1AND3'd MELSMAD sounds in PCem's nukedopl3

leileilol wrote on 2026-01-08, 14:42:

The first video's recording. The preceding song that affects MELSMAD.MID is another Games Factory midi file LEV1AND3.MID (from Zeb), and here's how a LEV1AND3'd MELSMAD sounds in PCem's nukedopl3

I'm so grateful for your help, it is so incredibly close. As i'm running macOS, i've looked for other ways than PCem, but I've heard how it sounded from other games after seeing a few examples on YouTube and that makes me want to finish my PC build quicker and install it this way. There's also an old Win98 PC waiting for me and I would love to get another sound card than the one that's installed in it.

Also, "NiGHTS edition" made me chuckle since I know now that the person who made that fan game just selected whatever was on hand back then haha! Thank you!!

NiGHTSaturn wrote on 2026-01-08, 14:56:

I'm so grateful for your help, it is so incredibly close.

It's the same, the difference in the timbre is due to the low fidelity of the recording in the youtube recording versus the pure digital output of Nuked-OPL3. You will be able to replicate it with any genuine OPL3 sound card. So the answer is it was probably just a bog standard SB16 with an OPL3 chip.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-08, 21:44:

NiGHTSaturn wrote on 2026-01-08, 14:56:

I'm so grateful for your help, it is so incredibly close.

It's the same, the difference in the timbre is due to the low fidelity of the recording in the youtube recording versus the pure digital output of Nuked-OPL3. You will be able to replicate it with any genuine OPL3 sound card. So the answer is it was probably just a bog standard SB16 with an OPL3 chip.

I can tell you that it's not exactly the same from NukedOPL3, but very close. I remember how my card used to sound. The low fidelity of that recording was just the settings I used back then which was probably stock for compression of wav. But yes, a SoundBlaster 16 with OPL3 is what i'm looking for, but most cards I see are either focused for DOS games or too modern. I need examples that would work on Win95 to XP.

The low fidelity could be from the filters of the card as many cards had them. SB16's early models sounded bad for them (with default driver/TSR settings) and the later ViBRA cards sounded cleaner (though then would dump OPL3 for CQM, as well as being marketed as a Sound Blaster 16 - however CQM sounded buzzier than OPL3 and would have polyphony issues)

SB16 isn't the only OPL3 card around either. OEM computers also could have WSS-based cards that had OPL3 chips with them, such as Aztech cards.

leileilol wrote on 2026-01-10, 18:54:

The low fidelity could be from the filters of the card as many cards had them. SB16's early models sounded bad for them (with default driver/TSR settings) and the later ViBRA cards sounded cleaner (though then would dump OPL3 for CQM, as well as being marketed as a Sound Blaster 16 - however CQM sounded buzzier than OPL3 and would have polyphony issues)

SB16 isn't the only OPL3 card around either. OEM computers also could have WSS-based cards that had OPL3 chips with them, such as Aztech cards.

Time to do a fun hunt for a few of these. Thanks again for all the clues and your help.