First post, by Error 0x7CF
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I've gotten quite curious about ESS's ESFM. It seems to be pretty common knowledge that it has a superset of OPL3 features, though sounds slightly different, but what in particular can it do better besides having more voices?
Operator waveforms: It has the waveforms OPL3 adds over 2, I think, but does it add additional ones over that? Do its base waveforms vary from the Yamaha ones in any meaningful way?
Operator combinations: It has 72 operator cells and 20 voices. It can obviously be configured into any way the OPL2/3 can, but what other ways? Can it be configured as 16 4-op + 4 2-op? That adds to 72, and that's a lot of 4-op FM voices.
Do any games have music specifically composed for ESFM? Is there any tracker that supports it?
I can't seem to find this information on any datasheet I can find, and it seems to me that from the little I've been able to read up that it'd be quite capable. Obviously it sounds a little different from an OPL3, but it seems horribly underused as anything but an okay OPL3 clone and a pretty good MIDI playback device under Win9x.
Old precedes antique.