I know the vibra16 cards had opl3's but the newer cards used an E-mu clone called the CQM. The only other sb cards that used an opl3 were the sb pro2 and ct1600 series. Earlier series sb cards used the opl2. Those were all isa cards too. The pci cards used ensoniq and later E-mu chips.
I absolutely love this era of music generation, really cool to see it making a come back! The early FM chips can be easily misused for DIY sound production too which is super fun.
The Secret of Monkey Island had amazing music, no matter which sound device you had (PC speaker, PC Jr/Tandy 1000, Creative Music System/Game Blaster, Ad Lib, MT-32/LAPC-1/CM-32). They pushed each device to its limits. Except the Roland units of course, which always sounded amazing.
SAM (software automatic mouth) on the Apple II (I built a card) and the SiD chip (became ensoniq) where more interesting... Though, then again, Yamaha buying the license from the developer at Stanford was pure class... And expanded on the Ideas.... After all, Even the NED Synclavier was just that... Thats really where Fairlight trumped them all.... Blah Blah Blah.. Yep, Yamaha brought FM to the masses... As did that fk prick comany "Creative Labs".... GM , wave table address style samples, then into Win... etc etc... And Creative Bought Ensoniq , after seeing its soundscape ISA card, with actually onboard DSP , but it was its implementation of buss dresses using PCI.. Yeh... Imm Angry.... The Windows consumer gave Creativelabs a reason to destroy companies that pioneered music tech. In the end, Analog is analog, Digital is digital..... But no matter the platform, even with just FM, music generally had more finesse than most the production that they call music today. TX7 FTW! (The 12bit convertor is just GOLD... Dexd comes closer than any, and its free....) Ah fk... I was doing music then, still am... so , just sharing what is my thing. BTW... Midi and Phones..... Thomas Dolby took the MIDI standard and implemented on Phones... Midi is that GENERAL MIDI is not midi... but a standard of sorts.... To deep to explain (I'm sure you know) after a few beers... But, Its a PC , gaming channel for most part...... But hey, I won't hold it against them
This video really needs more side by side A/B comparison without cuts. EDIT: well that blew up more than expected. Keep replies positive folks. It's not because it would have been a better sell for the RetroWave that it makes the video necessarily bad. I still enjoyed it, and you can still kinda get some comparisons by jumping around clips. Filming is hard, and getting good sound capture is complicated. Sometimes, not everything can be saved in the edit.
Yeah, by the time they played the second clips I wasn't sure what was different besides, maybe, a bit wider stereo. I guess I'm getting older or something, but back-to-back sound would really have been nice.
The capture made it a bit difficult to do this adequately since I had very few clean A (and long enough) clips. Bit of an oversight to have had the audio sync going on the same track as the laptop audio. All the Retro wave audio was clean since it was recorded separately. If this wasn't a SC I'd normally ask for a recap.
@@AlexPotvin yeah, I figured it had to be done kinda quick. It's just sad because it doesn't sell the RetroWave as much as it deserves. The sound of those hardware synths is always really unique.
A fantastic companion video to this is "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" by Ahoy. It's a masterclass of a retrospective view of trackers, and is full of amazing music from that age.
Before that video I always wondered why cracks, keygens, etc had that kind of music. Never would have guessed that cracking groups emerged from music groups.
I really like how Linus mentioned that he would love to review this on the Wan Show a few weeks back and it's being reviewed by Anthony now on Short Circuit with an affiliate link!! It's very impressive to see how fast and how smooth everyone is working at LMG, and it's amazing to find out that this piece of hardware was brought into light by literally just talking about it for a short period on a podcast.
Demo scene at LANs... okay... Pretty sure demos were released on discs and more was used on Amiga given the raw power of the Amiga in the 80s... I mean DOS and IBM compatibles were weak compared to micros... So many fakes on here just chucking out words they think fit. Demo scene... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. As I said pretty damned sure the Demo scene was more to do with micro market and linked to things like Amiga and ST.... Okay. Mind you doesn't help when Anthony gets it all wrong himself.
As someone who started gaming in the 80's and 90's, and who also basically cracked every piece of software I owned as a teenager, this video definitively strikes a nostalgic note.
The nostalgia and memories. I owned the adlib first but switched to Sound Blaster and used Creative cards ever since. The adlib was really nice though.
You know I thought wavetable midi break in the 90s was absolutely incredible. But listening back now, the Yamaha FM stuff sounds much more pleasant to my ears, whereas the sample stuff just sounds naff these days.
To this day there are video game sounds and old game music that I remembering sounding completely different to what I see here on youtube and other games I've gotten to work through dos box or something else today. Glad to know I'm not crazy.
You also have to remember that speakers were worse back then, too, and they added their own sound signature. Even if the waveforms are 100% the same, you might not get the same exact nostalgia without having actually old multimedia speakers. You have to have the old chips and the old speakers. There are channels on RU-vid who show off actually old PC hardware, and you'll find that those sounds are 100% accurate.
but also keep in mind that your hearing changes as you get older, there are some frequencies that your ear can't even hear anymore, but young ears can.
The main issue is that old computers relied a LOT more on peripherals for processing, so you could have a quantifiably different experience using your computer based on the peripherals you bought. If you had a less-than-common text terminal, some programs would literally not display correctly because they would not know the control sequence that the terminal used. If you had a less-than-common CRT, it may not have the required resolution and refresh rate combo to run a game correctly. If you had a less-than-common or shitty sound card you could actually end up with measurably different sound output to a quality one. Interoperability is a modern phenomenon, and that's why backwards compatibility does not mean authenticity.
@@thebaker8637 Shame I don't remember what hardware was on my dad's computer back then. Was too young to know anything other than we had a sound blaster and a pentium. No idea what generation or what kind. But I do remember having a turbo button on the front of the case that actually controlled the clock speed. I remember a few games that were unplayable if you had the turbo button on.
1:40 Knowing how FM synthesis and just digital signal processing in general works, I can confirm that Anthony's description of "basically magic" is accurate
Most motherboards don't have a speaker. It's usually up to your case, or you can buy a separate speaker yourself and plug it into the front IO headers.
Props to the sound technician and editor in this episode... I mean, I would done the same setup as them, but, the differences are obvious for the demostrative porpuses and also is a crystal clear recording/mixing that doesn't lose objective in video, digital and YT compression. A FAN OF YOU GUYS, hope you someday can read this. ❤
The keygen song Anthony plays is called Paradox Keygen 3 by Dubmood if anyone is interested. Always loved the sound of FM synth, probably because I had a Mega Drive and always thought it sounded better than the SNES for the arcade style games I played (Xeno Crisis which came out somewhat recently shows what the YM2612 can really do), although I managed to dodge most of the awful sounding MD games like Marble Madness - which would have maybe soured my opinion a little if I'd heard it in the 90s. I picked up an MT32 Pi hat (and an SC-55 sound font) and I think I'll pick one of these up too.
Anthony making sound effects always makes my day! Pretty impressive and noticeable differences with this device and really find this era of VGM interesting. How much work goes into making a decent game soundtrack back in the 80's and 90's?
TYRIAN!! That was my first ever game! I didn't even understand most of it (I was like 7, probably, and didn't understand english). I love you so much for bringing it back, Anthony! Keygen music is BALLER BTW.
Back in the days of antiquity, I remember nearly falling off my perch when one of the games I started up detected the Roland Sound Canvas card plugged into one of the ISA slots (that's how long ago :), and the music quality was outstanding… as to be expected.
Honestly to me the sound difference is like the emulator is soft clipping or something, while to Retrowave is clean and natural. Can definitely tell they aren't the same.
Hell I remember wanting to pick something like that in the games and couldn't understand why it wouldn't work. The emulation (not the retrowave) still is awesome, but the retrowave seems more authentic. Thanks for the video!
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER does some really cool hand made oscillators and synths. Great channel for getting into how music is made down to the very waveform, and making your own oscillators.
Speaking of soundcards of the 1990s, I wonder what result this would give on the PC version of Sonic 3&Knuckles. Different soundcards (with different sounding chips) give different results on the same exact game. I was a kid playing it on PC and it sounded strange compared to Sonic Mega Collection Plus.
Cool hardware. The best example I can think of from my past is the game Descent. The sound library they used allowed them to patch instruments and there were a few game tracks that used them. They sound very different from the general MIDI instrument sets. It's one of the things that ruins the nostalgia when I decide to fire up a source port and play a little for old time's sake.
Okay so I'm thinking to myself right now, "I'd there anything in computing or IT or just tech Anthony isn't good at" and "Where does he store all that knowledge"? He's just the coolest on set! Great work, Anthony!☺☺☺☺☺👌👌👌👌
Man!! I feel like I'm being transported back to the 1980s and 1990s again!! I spent a lot of time on my dad's 386/486 at that time. And later in my teenager years, the time spent on Quake and Doom. It was glorious!
This is pretty legit, I want to see if I can run this myself now. I gotta say, anytime Anthony is running the show on a video I find myself enjoying it because he gives tech insight, history, how to, why, and generally stuff I care about in addition to new tech go brrrrrrrrr. Keep it up man, you're my favorite dude at LTT
If you want a lot of music to carry around on your phone, it's a pretty space-efficient way of getting it. A huge chunk of tracker modules are under a meg, so you can easily fit several thousand into a couple of gig. Finding software to play ones with FM instruments is a bit of a problem, though. Most formats don't support FM instruments and in the few that do, they're not widely used, so support is rare. Especially for hybrid files that contain both FM and sampled instruments. I've found that when it comes to S3M files, player programs fall into one of four categories when it comes to FM instruments: 1. Refuse to play outright if FM instruments are used. 2. Only plays the sampled instruments (may or may not complain about the presence of the FM ones). 3. Only plays the FM instruments. 4. Actually plays a hybrid file properly. The only programs I've encountered that fall into that last category are Scream Tracker 3 (which you'd use to create them in the first place, so no surprises there), some old versions of XMP for Android (which didn't do that great a job on the FM implementation and later removed it entirely, grr...), and to my surprise when I tried it, VLC Media Player. I never expected it to play S3M files at all, let alone ones with FM instruments.
Key gen music / tracker music are so cool... I love this kind of music. BTW, this video earned my subscription: your narration & precise description is great. I wish I have professors like you when I went to collage.. they all explained so bad LOL!!!!
I'd love to go to an art installation with Turbo Kid playing through this sound card, just because it can be done. Even if I just stood by the installation for 10 minutes in a really long line up. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AFlZ6pVtnv0.html
Those OPL chips used FM Synthesis, and are distant cousins to Yamaha's famous DX7 synthesizer, using in things like the Miami Vice theme, among thousands of other songs..
love the opl3, my favourite sound chip to write for, even if adlib tracker 2 is not the easiest thing to work with heh. got this device a few months ago, it's awesome and so convenient, especially since old hardware is so temperamental. i seriously didn't expect this to be covered by you guys!
@@QuichardBitzgerald here's a playlist of some renders i've done: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YqxJCu_WFuA.html i'm missing one track from the list for now, at least for more developed stuff
tbh Anthony gets half of the stuff wrong and all I can think is "man, LGR would be laughing!" like the demo scene being in DOS IBM compats and not on Micros such as the Amiga! AMAZING!!!! Even down to the really wrong statement he makes about audio in NA and about them being more "professional" CUBASE was for Amiga and Atari and is one of the most used programs for music over last 30 years!!! These video is so funny with how much it gets wrong.... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA It's actually cringy. I had to stop the video when he claimed trackers and demo scene was PC in early 90s... Made me laugh but so incorrect its untrue. Like me suggesting Harriet Tubman was a hispanic news reported from CNN in the late 80s.
@@razerow3391 I feel like there's a language barrier or something here, because I didn't say or even imply any of that. I was talking about the state of *PC* audio at that time, not computers in general (the Amiga had wavetable in the 80s and never had OPL). I certainly didn't say that North America was "more professional", just that the industry there (broadly) didn't develop chiptunes because there was a heavier focus on MIDI, which was *seen* as "more professional". Europe and Japan had a chiptune culture thanks to the success of the C64 and MSX etc, and consequently most of the games with 'proper' chiptune music were developed outside of North America. Also, I... Never actually made reference to the demoscene? I mentioned keygen music, which was definitely a PC thing. Just because I didn't mention something else doesn't mean I think it was all the PC.
Anthony strikes this beautiful balance of being the guy who knows way more than you but isn’t covetous, he’s excited to share parts of the world many of us didn’t even know about.
Piping midi from a computer through my daughter's Yamaha PSR-275 gives me the same fidelity as the best retro soundcards I've used. There are a few that actually use a higher end direct cousin of the OPL-3 and OPL-2 that are sometimes harvested for chiptune projects.
Anthony! Thank you so much for validating with a game like Cybersphere (or in your case CYBPLUS). As a kid, I remember trying to mail order for that game from the order page and never being able to get a hold of Clay to get that game. I remember telling my friends that you could hear differences between cards like the SB16, Clone, and the AWE64 which I still believe is the greatest sound card ever made! 2022 has sucked so far, thank you LMG for giving me some much needed nostalgia!
In the 90s I got way into making tracker music. I put together a heap of songs of the years and in 1997 I sent them in to the national youth radio station and ended up getting an interview on air. I used a Mac IIsi and a program called 'meditor'.
One of the best OPL3 pieces IMHO was Dune's soundtrack. It was intended for this chip and its composer later extended it into its own 'spice opera' ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gUfGyfbzl9k.html
While I don't have a desire to go back to that soundscape, this was a really fun blast back to my misbegotten youth of Commodore 64. It's kind of amazing how much I smiled hearing it.
Audiohile: It's magic gold plated... Anthony: The specific imperfections and personal setups are all different and add great atmosphere and personality to the sound... Thanks for being so amazing Anthony, by enjoying the audio and experience, and really understanding it and not faking through it. :)
The OPL3 actually has FOUR output channels! You can do very simple (channel on or off) 4.0 surround sound with it if you have all four channels hooked up to speakers. Alas, most sound cards that used the chip only connected the first two to an output DAC. There is a card out there called the Resound OPL3 which actually exposes the other two, but given it's a relatively recent invention (2010s), there's very little software out there that supports it.
If anyone is interested in 90s FM synths in general you can pick up something like the old Roland Sound Canvas lineup super cheap. Picked up an SK-88pro (which is just an SC-88 pro built into a keyboard) for 100 bucks in box from Japan. Really amazing pieces of kit to either get started with music making or to expand your setup.
"The best part of being PC gamer is that you can play any pc game every created" The worst part is that isn't true, at all. On modern PC is much easier running PS1 game than PC game from that era.
We're getting there. WINE/Proton compatibility can be surprisingly good sometimes. Max Payne is a (pardon the pun) huge pain to get working properly on modern versions of Windows, but if you're on Linux, just telling Steam to run it with Proton is enough (though you do have aspect ratio issues, which is forgivable, given the age of the game). Other old games, not so much. Tex Murphy Overseer is notoriously hard to get working on Windows, and it doesn't fare any better with Proton.
I remember that the first sound card I ever bought, didn't even had a headphone jack. It was to be connected to the internal speaker of your computer. Later on the Soundblaster cards came out and you started to be able to buy a PC with a soundcard preinstalled. Biggest fun you could have was playing Wolfenstein or Doom with 4.0 surround stereo as the soundcard had a double stereo headphone jack to also give you the possibility of stereo back speakers.
Not gonna lie, This feels like the retro equivalent of audiophile snake oil (AKA "its for the _experience_ !") to me. Do I just not get it? Likely. But I know how the math of computer audio works, and this doesn't make sense to me as a product from that perspective.
If you can't hear what a huge difference it made to even the small audio they played, you probably don't need this. Personally it was night and day. *shrug*
It's the difference between an analog knob and a digital one, both change values while turning, but there are some quirks in the analog Resistors that would have to be purposely added in to make both perform identically. For things like the impossible Date bug in Excel, we add quirks back in because of genuine usage. But, since pure MIDI music hasn't been mainstream relevant for quite a while, the way that MIDI is emulated today is damn near the same as the 90s, meaning that if there's a specific set of MIDI reproduction you want to do, it isn't a thriving field in terms of emulation. It's like how Emulating faults like CRT artifacting, even on a 4K TV, is imperfect. The same goes for audio, in that even if we made a SPICE simulation of all the chips and circuits of the time, the output still would need real world fuzzing manually added, which makes it sometimes easier to just get a real CRT, old Gameboy, or in this case Sound Chip. An echo in Audacity is made with algorithms, while a chip like this might literally make echo with a looped set of transistors. The timing and execution of each bass tweak and vibrato function on the actual chip adds up in differences if you spent years listening to it
When he *ahem* talked about Key Gens and Cracks, that unlocked a memory I had back when I’d go to LAN Parties all the time in the 00s. I KNEW I recognized those melodies
Oh memories, tracker music ♥ Me and some friends used to send around a 3.5 floppy disk with a tracker song, and just add to it, making it longer and more weird each time.
Two seconds in and Anthony made my day, got a chuckle out of me and got me to pause the video, smash like and comment this out. Linus, whatever you're paying this man and the editors, it's not enough.
I believe Casio actually had a line of low end keyboards that used either the OPL2 or OPL3. I think 8 bit guy did a video on 8 bit keys about it from memory.
I only have my Roland SC-88 Pro and I will forever be happy with what it does for me, be it retro games with decent MIDI music and playing around with my MIDI keyboard.
I remember when Anthony first came to work for LTT and thinking he wouldn't be around long but now I love seeing him cuz he always some cool pi machine or retro thing to show off and I've started dabbling with both pi and Linux because of him; by far my favorite person from LTT!
Oh man the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe music is forever burned into my brain. I still use chiptune songs to pick me up on a shitty day at work. A proper pavlovian response. The people (Like Chipzel!) making music with banks of gameboys are the real MVPs.
Correction - The MT-32 actually used something called LA-synthesis, which was Roland's variation of FM-synthesis (OPL-based). It's basically FM-synthesis but they couldn't call it that b/c that was Yamaha's TM. What might throw you off is it actually had a reverb effects processor built into it, giving the FM sound a bit more realism. No recorded waveforms involved, though. Also, the LAPC-1 was a ISA card that could plug directly into a PC just like a sound blaster, but it was basically a roland MT-32 without the external housing. The Sound Canvas is true wavetable synthesis (ROMpler). Totally different technogies, but if this Yamaha OPL3 chip really interests you, the MT-32 really is worth taking a look at. It's basically PC FM synthesis at its fanciest. I remember each game had its own separate soundset, my favorite was the original Wing Commander and Wing Commander 2 games which would literally transmit brand new sound architecture data (patch data) to the MT-32 via MIDI Dump into its RAM before the game started, and then have its own unique sounds. Some of them were mimics of factory preset sounds, some of them were totally new (the explosions were very realistic for the 90s). Because it's true synthesis as opposed to using waveforms, the sound creation possibilities were virtually limitless.
This is giving me flashback on how difficult it used to be before the internet was easily accessible and getting sound to work in Dos games was a pain in the ass.
Cool stuff Anthony. I would love it if you did a history of Creative Labs Sound Blaster and other cards and what really made the realtek chips that seems to be in all of our mobos these days so popular. My parents had what I felt was a crappy adlib or not sound blaster in our first family pc. Later when I got a job and was working on my parts list Sound Blaster was a must piece of take I had to have next to whomever had the best graphics card of the day before nvidia existed.
I'm not much of a retro gamer, but I absolutely love Anthony's passion for it. It's so cool to see a side of PC gaming that is normally nowhere on my radar.
This is interesting. So many memories of those old games and the sound tracks. Have you considered doing a retro music series on stuff like Octamed ( it was so fun) and other early music production stuff and how the tech of early synths, samplers and stuff worked.