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Slightly tangential: I've been wishing for years that a cottage industry would form around building quality systems for playing old games. Maybe a 486 100mhz wi

Slightly tangential: I've been wishing for years that a cottage industry would form around building quality systems for playing old games. Maybe a 486 100mhz with 16mb of RAM, or a Pentium 133 with 32mb and a decent video card so Quake would run well (Diamond Monster 3D 2 maybe?). Proper Soundblaster, 3.5 and 5.25in floppies, 4x CDROM, and a correctly configured autoexec.bat and config.sys. Hell, an external 28.8 or 56k modem too. Dosbox and the like are great, but the sound is never right. Soundblaster 16/Pro/etc had a very distinct sound that none of the emulated stuff even approaches. Miss it mostly when playing Doom/Doom 2. The music is never right.

oxide 11y ago
I bet there is a community out there committed to this kind of thing, it sounds like you have a very specific desire. I'd be shocked if there weren't more people out there who feel the same way, and are doing something about it.
deleted 11y ago
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khedoros 11y ago
The OPL2 and 3 chips were all-digital, so it's possible to verify that the bitstreams from the original chips matches the outputs of an emulator of the chip...but the original hardware also included some specific ADCs with some kind of buffer feedback loop, and I think that's where the real difference in the sound comes in (like the overly-harsh drum sounds from most of the emulators). I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512 board for the reasons you've mentioned. I've actually got a 600MHz K6-3 with 128MB of RAM, Geforce4 ti4400 and SB16 that I use as a retro computer, but if I can have the same, proper audio output on my regular machines, that would be even better.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Relying on ancient hardware is not a good idea for the long term: it'll eventually fail. It should be possible to revive some of this old hardware and characterize the sound, using specific inputs and recording the outputs, and creating a filter which can then be included in emulators to recreate the original sound.
- strangecasts 11y ago
  I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512 board for the reasons you've mentioned. Do you have a progress log/project page up anywhere? I've been meaning to build a similar board for an earlier FM chip.
mynewtb 11y ago
You will love the vogons forums

oxide 11y ago

I bet there is a community out there committed to this kind of thing, it sounds like you have a very specific desire. I'd be shocked if there weren't more people out there who feel the same way, and are doing something about it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

khedoros 11y ago

The OPL2 and 3 chips were all-digital, so it's possible to verify that the bitstreams from the original chips matches the outputs of an emulator of the chip...but the original hardware also included some specific ADCs with some kind of buffer feedback loop, and I think that's where the real difference in the sound comes in (like the overly-harsh drum sounds from most of the emulators). I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512 board for the reasons you've mentioned. I've actually got a 600MHz K6-3 with 128MB of RAM, Geforce4 ti4400 and SB16 that I use as a retro computer, but if I can have the same, proper audio output on my regular machines, that would be even better.

Grishnakh 11y ago
Relying on ancient hardware is not a good idea for the long term: it'll eventually fail. It should be possible to revive some of this old hardware and characterize the sound, using specific inputs and recording the outputs, and creating a filter which can then be included in emulators to recreate the original sound.
strangecasts 11y ago
I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512 board for the reasons you've mentioned. Do you have a progress log/project page up anywhere? I've been meaning to build a similar board for an earlier FM chip.

mynewtb 11y ago