First post, by TelamonLivesOn
I love listening to different chiptune music and like the sound of FM synthesis, but I can't help but feel that the Yamaha OPL chips are quite lacking in character. Sure, they hold a lot of nostalgia value but just don't sound right to me. Every time I hear Wolfenstein 3D music, I constantly hear wet farting noises and it just sounds awful to me. I generally prefer to have harsher, dryer sounds than mushy and wet sounds. I remember having played an old arcade game years ago called Thunder Dragon, which was my first exposure to a Japanese bullet hell game. I remember that the sound was disabled, due to the toll it took on the aging capacitors, CRT, and PSU. However, I remember hearing it after the speaker was plugged in one day and being amazed by the awesome music and sounds. Years later, I tried the game on MAME, but felt that something about the sound was off. I eventually found the proper-sounding music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-zjgFA-cEE. I then learned that the chip powering this system was a Yamaha OPN sound chip (first version I believe), which also happened to be the same family that was used with NEC PC-98 expansion boards. That got me thinking: since these chips can be found for a few bucks online, and since documentation is regularly available, would it be feasible to create an ISA-based sound card compatible with the IBM-PC and clones that utilized one of the OPN chips? I am probably just dreaming, but this is one sound chip I would love to use in my dos machine. And yes, I know no games or programs would support it, but I could say the same about the Innovation SSI-2001 (except for a small handful of programs), which a replica was made from.
Edit: Please check out the game btw. You won't regret it, promise.