In this video, I have captured Jill of the Jungle's complete soundtrack from an Adlib card. However, for these captures I did not record from the headphone output from the Adlib card, instead I captured the audio digitally. Let's start with a track listing and then I'll describe my capturing method :
00:00 - Funky
01:47 - Zeppelin
03:49 - Spiders
05:12 - Ominous
06:36 - Dan
08:20 - Stealth
09:52 - It [Song]
11:50 - Jupiter
13:13 - Seven
15:28 - Peaks
17:25 - Cubist
19:19 - Action
20:52 - Dungo
22:30 - Bonzo
24:08 - Mobydick
26:14 - Undrgrnd
28:05 - Wild
30:03 - Neoclass
31:36 - Kuntamon
33:38 - Desert
35:08 - Alien
36:43 - Deepevil
The track names are their MS-DOS names. Jill Goes Underground and Jill Saves the Prince begin with "Peaks" and "Wild", respectively. Each track is a Creative Music Format (.CMF) file with a renamed extension. CMF was Creative's answer to AdLib's Visual Composer .ROL format. Both formats were used to store FM Synthesis music for the YM3812 found on the Adlib and Sound Blaster cards.
The Yamaha YM3812 OPL2 chip outputs samples in a digital serial format. The output is sent to a small 8-pin DAC chip, the Y3014. The Y3014 converts a data stream of 16-bit signed numbers using a sample rate of 49,715.90...Hz to analog voltage levels and sends that to the amplifier on the Adlib or the mixing stage of a Sound Blaster.
With the aid of a hardware device called Digi-Snap and associated software, one can capture this data stream from the YM3812. The Digi-Snap device is a parallel port dongle with a few logic chips on a small PCB. This board connects via wires to an 8-pin socket. This socket is inserted into a socket on the Adlib or Sound Blaster card where the Y3014 DAC chip resides. The DAC is piggybacked onto this socket.
The Digi-Snap is not a common device. First, there are no schematic files you can take to a company like PCBWay to print up a board. The board I borrowed has hand-made circuit trace etching on one side and used wire-wrapping to make the remaining connections. Additionally, the DAC chip on all Adlibs and many Sound Blasters and clones is soldered to the board and needs to be desoldered and replaced with a socket. Without a motorized desoldering tool the process will not be painless.
This method of capturing requires two PCs. The first PC is where the Adlib is being employed for playback. The second PC is where the parallel port is being employed for recording. The parallel port must have EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port) capabilities and the system should be fast enough to support the required 32MiB of RAM. The software must be run in real mode DOS to avoid skipping or interrupts. The software will record 9 minutes of audio before replacing the oldest samples with the newest samples. Of the three methods of digital FM Synthesis capture using original hardware I descrive here, nerdlypleasure..., this is by far the most complex method.
I used my 486DX266 for playback and my Pentium III 600EB for recording. I used Creative's PLAYCMF utility with a batch file to play the tracks in an order which would likely be encountered in a full playthrough of the Jill of the Jungle Trilogy. The Digi-Snap software crashed until I disabled the Sound Blaster Emulation of my Vortex 2 sound card. After that the program ran and did its job. Sometimes the first part of a song was cut off and I had to re-record. Once I had captured all the audio, then I imported the raw capture to Audacity and edited it into its final form. Even in the final RU-vid upload the audio is still a 16-bit WAV file with a sample rate of 49716Hz. I hope RU-vid treats it kindly.
Now you might remark that this recording may not square exactly with your memories of playing through the game. Jill of the Jungle's soundtrack may sound different depending on which version of the game you are playing because different versions of Jill embed different versions of Creative's SBFMDRV.COM driver. This driver will not work if it does not detect a Sound Blaster card (and the game will not play music with an Adlib card until v1.2(d)), but NewRisingSun hacked the one used for this playback to support a bare Adlib card. The SBFMDRV.COM driver used is based on v1.22, which was used in Jill of the Jungle v1.0 and v1.2b. The driver found in v1.2d does not support certain music events causing a loss of fidelity in the music playback. Additionally, this driver resets the OPL2 rhythm instruments each time a new music track is played, without the reset the rhythm instruments may not sound as intended.
Even with all this, the soundtrack is not ideal. Jill's composer, Dan Froelich, ironically composed his music using Adlib's Visual Composer. The conversion from the original .ROL-formatted files to CMF-formatted files was not without issue. As those originals are not available, these are the best recordings anyone other than he can offer at this time.
1 окт 2024
