First post, by Mike 01Hawk
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I'm really REALLY surprised there wasn't THAT much talk about these chips on here, queststudios, or even dosgames! 😳
I was at the local computer wholesale joint over the weekend rumaging thru their old sound card bin and I happened to find myself staring at a few PCI cards with the well known XG graphic on the chips. None had header boards, but I figured.. for $3.. heck.. why not give it a try? 🤣
Here she is nestled in my new Dell GXpro
Closeup of the flavor of my chip YMF724:
I spent all this afternoon being a Google Ninja and found quite a bit of goodness for these chips, basically it's sorta the famous DB50xg + OPL3 FM synth on a chip 😁 😁 😁
What was GREAT for my application was I got BOTH General Midi and Sound Blaster support working for DOOM in Win98se!!! 😁 😁 😁 😁 WooT Happy Dance!!! 😀
Come to find out there's even a nice wiki for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YMF7xx
On the Wiki there's a HUGE PDF about the chip, and a link to this awesome customizer called PowerYMF that can load up extended wavetable banks 😁 http://www.yohng.com/powerymf/
And here's the site for the drivers from Yamaha themselves, I had to use the WDM drivers to get the FM Sound Effects to work in Doom:
http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/u … /downloads.html
So, anyway.. I'm doing the happy happy dance, playing the Comparison Midi and it sounded decent, even the 2005 All Star file (man.. guess nothing other than Roland can make that nice applause sound?) . Anyway there's even this SWEET XG file called Gentle Love that you can get from PowerYMF, I was blown away to say the least when you could hear them make the sound of gutiar string movements (don't know the proper term for it).
Well.. I guess all can't be well though, I started to mess around with some other Midis.. and well.. playing T7G samples on this was well... for a lack of a better word... quite crappy 🙁
Oh well.. can't have everything I guess?
I did an ebay search and there were quite a few that could be had for cheap! (under $10 shipped).
I almost feel like I should go back and by the other 3 or 4 YMF7xx sound cards I saw 🤑
This place seriously had like 100 or so PCI sound cards, butt load of AWE64s, the XGs, a few Vortex2, some Lives, all kinds. And I coulda had them for $3 a pop. Hmmm... maybe I should ask the dude if I could buy the whole lot up? 😁 I started talking Roland talk with him and he was clueless 🙁 Oh well, that's another thread.
-edit Stupid question, could I get Doom Sound Effects to work with Non-WDM drivers? I've read that the WDM drivers for this card stink (I can't really tell to be truthfull in Doom, however T7G sucked.. guess that might be a XG thing instead maybe?)
Dell Optiplex Gxpro: Built solely so I could re-live my SB16 days properly with newly acquired sound pieces: MT-32, SCB-55, and DB50xg 😀