just in case anyone wants to read the annotation text on mobile or without the annotations restored extension (go get that extension, by the way!), here they all are! some of the annotations in the bottom left also get cut off by the player's border, so perhaps this is more convenient in some cases. (you can read all the text by transitioning into full screen, but it's very inconvenient.) my own descriptive comments of where the annotations are/what parts of the cards they reference will be in [square brackets]! 00:08 - [A bunch of "Hi!" annotations pop up around the text!] *Sound Blaster 16 CT2290* 00:15 - "I will be using this card as a point of reference for the rest of the video." 00:24 - "This card features a CT1747 OPL3 chip..." [The black chip near the bottom center of the card, with "OPL" written on the fourth line] 00:30 - "...As well as a TEA2025B amplifier chip..." [The sideways black chip near the top right, in the center of all those capacitors, the circular things that stick up out of the card] 00:35 - "...A large assortment of capacitors near the amplifier for filtering and other things..." [See above!] 00:40 - "...And two VRMs." [I don't know how to describe VRMs, if someone else can do that I would appreciate it! All I know is that they're made up of multiple components...] 00:46 - "I'm going to take some hate for this, but CT1747 chips have an OPL2 vibe to them. They also feature slightly more crisp treble than a YMF262 OPL3 chip." 00:59 - "The TEA2025B amplifier chip adds in a slight amount of distortion to the signal, and the filtering capacitors give a better bass response." 01:13 - "The end result is a well-rounded sound, with rich bass and bright leads." *AdLib* 01:31 - "The original. This card features a YM3812 OPL2 chip and a very basic circuit design." 01:43 - "The YM3812 chip is right here. For some reason, the markings were scratched off during manufacturing." [The YM3812 is the second black chip up from the bottom of the card] 01:58 - "This card was dead and covered in mold when I received it, so I sent it to a friend to see if he could revive it." 02:10 - "After determining that all of the capacitors were bad, he changed them out, and it came to life." 02:22 - "The new capacitors look quite different, but the AdLib sound is still clear as ever." 02:34 - "The overall sound is actually quite similar to the CT1747 chip." *Crystal FM, CS4236-KQ* 02:57 - "This card has a decent bass response, but it has some distortion on the percussion, as usual with Crystal FM." 03:14 - "The bass instrument is also missing some of its harmonics." *Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600* 04:24 - "The capacitors on this card have all been replaced with capacitors of the same rating." 04:40 - "This card seems to be a fan favorite, and I will agree that it sounds good...." 04:59 - "...But I feel the bass response is a tiny bit too strong on the low end. The bass drum is concussive." *Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 (Modified)* 05:51 - "This card has been heavily modified. The TES2025B amplifier chip has been recapped to the proper specifications." 06:10 - "That includes the nonpolar capacitors here..." [Those blue things in the top right corner of the card] 06:15 - "...And the gigantic ones here." [The green chunky things below those blue things!] 06:25 - "The treble is much cleaner as a result, and I think the bass balance is quite pleasant." *Sound Blaster 16 CT2830 (Modified)* 07:21 - "This card was an experiment to see what kind of bass response could be gained with larger capacitors." 07:41 - "The bass has a lot of punch to it. The lower end is a bit too strong for me, but it still sounds very good." 08:03 - "Even with the massive bass response, the treble is present and crisp." *Sound Blaster 16 CT2900 (Modified)* 08:46 - "This card had absolutely no bass response before modification." 09:00 - "The large capacitors here give it a half-decent response." 09:14 - "There is a tiny bit of distortion on the treble. This is a natural characteristic of the YMF289B chip." *Sound Blaster 16 CT4180* 10:16 - "This card does not have an OPL3 chip. It is using CQM to imitate one." 10:31 - "For being CQM, this actually sounds pretty good. The highs and bass are a little off, but the rest is intact." *ESS AudioDrive, ES1868F Chip* 11:44 - "ESFM often has a lot of excessive chirping or buzzing. This track sounds good on it, though." 12:00 - "This card uses a TDA1517 amplifier chip instead of the usual TEA2025B. In my (limited) experience, cards using TDA amplifiers have less bass response."
@@OPL3music my pleasure! I noticed you also have a couple other videos which relied on annotations, so I might also make comments for those sometime soon!
@@viiuan Sadly I never did make annotations for those. It totally slipped my mind until the annotation editor was already slated for removal. Had I known they would still be accessible, I would have added them anyway. Oh, well. Edit: I'm referring specifically to the two other videos I released on the same date as this one. I do have other, much older videos that also used annotations.
I used to have ess audiodrive and I loved it. Later when I got pci standard pc I got yamaha xg128 having both wavetable and opl3 onboard (ymf724 I believe). I loved it even more as it was capable of both fm and wavetable synthesis. I composed midi files of my own to play through it. I even used to customize wavetable sample bank used by soundcard and memorized sysex codes to control it because I used quite a primitive sequencer software
I was sure this video used to have annotations on each card, but I don't see them now. Looks like youtube disabled that feature a while back. This video really needed the annotations in order to describe the differences between the cards sounds that you might not catch unless you were listening closely.
ack- i hope this hasn't posted multiple times, youtube might have eaten my reply for me daring to insert a link. anyway, if you get the annotations restored extension, you should be able to see the annotations on this video! it's very cool :D
That SB Pro 2 sounds perfect. The experimental SB 16 CT2830 sounds like my current EQ preset. The SB 16 CT4180 is the most interesting. The ESS ES1868F has extra punchy drums. But they're all great, FM synthesis always has a special sound to it.
The ESS ES1868F are my favorite sound cards. I usually pair them with a Dreamblaster X1, X2, or S1 MIDI wavetable daughterboard, or an SC-55. They have the easiest drivers to live with and work on everything from a 286 to Pentium 4 boards with ISA. ESS made me fall out of love with Creative and their damned hanging note bug.
I recently installed a 1868 (triangular model, probably a very cheap card back then) in my Pentium 200mmx retro PC. I also bought a dreamblaster s2 and I tried the card in several games. This is running flawlessly. And the driver is amazingly easy to use under dos. For me, a great great card and the only one to play fm correctly in Day Of The Tentacles game. Even the awe32 could not sound right with this game...
@@AshtonCoolman what is the best ess chip ? I also have a lot of crystal sound cards which are also quite nice, I think. Also have a Yamaha one, and several soundblasters. But for now I'll stick to the ess one.
@@eldontyrellcorp I can't really speak past the 1868 and 1869 cards that I have. I also have a few Yamahas (YMF718, 719, and PCI 744) which I enjoy. They have that nice Yamaha XG MIDI and great OPL3 compatibility. They don't have wavetable daughterboard headers so I can't use my Dreamblasters but I enjoy the unique Yamaha MIDI nonetheless.
@@AshtonCoolman My Yamaha ISA card has the Wavetable header on it, and I refuse to use a different card. Excellent compatibility with that faithful OPL3 sound. Paired with a Dreamblaster X2 and it's a match made in heaven. If I didn't have this card, I'd probably be using an ESS Audiodrive as a close second.
It’s between the ct2290 sb16 and that pro 2, the ct2290 has snappier envelopes on all of the synths and I feel like that makes it cleaner than the muffled other sb16s
I think my favorite is the AdLib, because the sound is so punchy and surprisingly the Vibra 16C without an dedicated OPL chip, because this seems to make the card sound a fair bit different then the cards with an OPL chip and it also sounds very bassy in a good way without the mids being too loud and screamy.
Can you do comparison with Rock Garden from Tyrian? In my opinion it was the best rock music on OPL hardware, when I first heard it as a kid I was blown away, having only heard stuff like monkey island and other games, whose composers didn't really take full advantage of what the OPL can do.
Quite some time after my PMMX board ceased working, I finally managed to score a killer PC for the job of OPL-blasting again! It's a Compaq Deskpro 4000 with a very first-batch Pentium 2 processor in it, with a shielded riser system with three ISA slots, three PCI slots and even an AGP slot! I already tested my OPL3-SA3 on it and I'll be testing all of my other cards on it soon. I hope to be able to compare the cards I have with this beautiful cover of Alloy Run and perhaps improve on the cards' performance by changing their components. You inspired me to do this once again, after you and Eep386 did so once before. :-) Cheers!
With TDA chips, whether using them on sound card or to build a mini amplifier, you can increase bass response with larger filter/stiffening capacitors on the power supply rails, these chips can be power hungry at lower frequencies. You can actually build pretty nice little mini amplifier using the 1517 and not many other components and it can be driven to a few watts of output power if you use a heat sink (notice the BIG metal plate and screw holes on the back of the chip, it was really meant to be a power amp chip!) which is enough to drive decent big stereo speakers.
It does sound really good for CQM, yeah. Honestly, I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't looked at the card first. The minor differences here are delightful. It sounds soooo much better than the Vibra16XV I used to have.
Thanks for this video, it really helped me to decide. I never had a proper Sound Blaster card until the PCI 512. My first card was an AOpen AW35 Pro. But I just picked up a CT2290 on Amazon for $27 shipped and assuming it works as advertised (I can't test it yet) I'm looking forward to putting it in a retro machine when I get all the parts. Makes me wish I had kept all my computer stuff over the years. Just can't decide whether I want to shell out the extra money for a 486 DX4, or Go with a Pentium based system and use tricks to slow it down for DOS games.
I've got the sound blaster pro 2. Very good card imo. Also the last very very good creative card in my opinion. The sound blaster 16 might be good (I've not tried it yet, but I've got a CT2700. Do you think that this one is good ? I've read that it has the hanging note bug but as long as I don't use the wavetable I should be fine I guess), however there are plenty models that have different issues, and it's where creative started to make cheap cards. It's like the "perfect" sound blaster 16 doesn't exist (or if it does, it's pretty rare and hard to distinguish from the other) while the SB Pro 2 is ... just a SB pro 2 and has nothing to complain
my CT2830 has a Asahi Kasei AK4501-VS. I found out on Vogons that it was a variant of the CT1701, which is the noisiest of the DACS, the CT1740, 1750, 1770 has that noisiest DAC. the CT1703-A is less noisy out of the bunch.
Wow. The SB Pro 2 CT1600 does sound noticeably better to my ears than all the other cards. Warmer, deeper and with a good punch. I hate overly "crisp" highs of the other cards (including SB16 CT 2290 and Adlib). They hurt my ears, lol. Crystal FM chip sounds a bit anemic and dirty. ESS seems to have unnatural "metallic" tone to it and again too "crisp" to my ears.
Having owned just about every card on this list, I am still surprised to this day how quickly my ears adjust to each one and think hey that sounds pretty good. Lol😜 🎶🎹🎵Play On
Nice comparison! The CT2230 and the 2290 sound basically identical to my ears, based on the hearing of this video. They have the same CT1747 chip after all. I also happen to have a CT2230, a CT4180 and an ESFM isa card. Between them, my favourite is the CT2230, but the ESFM has some special use in some games that support it specifically
The CT2230, CT2290 and CT2770 all have a CT1747 chip, and use a TEA2025b amplifier chip. So the sounds on all three are relatively similar. Good stuff. Clean sound, deep bass, crisp highs. :)
+RichterEX2 Oh man.......those things are expeeeeensive. I saw one on EBay about two years ago, and I informed a friend who snapped it up instantly. Haven't seen one listed since. Very rare.
adlib gold 1000 cards are very rare because there were not many adlib gold cards released, shortly after that card was released in 1992, adlib went defunct
What's a good source for music files to play on OPL2/3? What software do you use other than the AdLib II tracker? Do any of the classic trackers (.mod, .xm, .s3m, .it) use OPL chips? I believe they are sample based but please correct me if I'm wrong.
I got a Sound Blaster 16 CT2290 a while ago for 20-25$ on Ebay, and it have everything on it, nothing's missing. Why? because i found in a thrift store the actual retail box with everything BUT the card inside, so this is why i had to find one. Also, this might be wrong for some of you, but i'm using a Yamaha DB50XG on it for the musics. And by the way, the DSP version bug seem to not apply in DOS, i only stumbled on 1 or 2 games that give me problems with it, such as King Quest 6 (game freeze for no reason at some points). But then i just use regular Sound Blaster musics.
I honor your work for this video and for the mods, thank you for sharing with us! Would be nice to have a before- after comparison regarding the mods and how you mod them exactly, maybe as an idea for a further video. F.e. did any bigger capacitor works fine or du you recomend a special type? Why sometimes you take metal film caps and for another purpose "normal" electrolyte caps? What kind of amplifier hardware do you use behind the pc, did you prefere the line out or amplified output? So many questions, sorry:-) I just explore my interest in old sound cards, have a few different cards but until now it never comes in mind for me to mod them.
I always use the amplified output. The line out is always missing a lot of bass. I actually did not modify these. Eep386 did. He can give you details on the mods if you can track him down somewhere!
Thank you for doing this - great song and fascinating to hear the differences between cards. I'd like to upload samples of Alloyrun played on some knockoff cards that I have. I'm considering a portable audio recorder with line in such as the Tascam DR-40 to record the output. Wondering what your method for recording is?
Yep, it also happens to be my favorite combo. CT1747 OPL chip plus a TEA2025 amplifier chip. I'm pretty sure I have one, I just never made a video with it since the CT2290 suits my needs just most of the time. CT1747 OPL chips have a clipping issue, so eventually I'll have to go back to a real YMF262 for some recordings.
@@OPL3music I've heard about Creative not matching the recommended values from the datasheets espacially when it comes to electrolytics. But does it change the sound output as well? I mean, more bass/treble or something like that?
@@thomasr.1677 Yes. The bass response is much better when capped to spec. The differences in the highs are more dependent on the type of capacitors used. To me, it literally sounds the same as slightly closing the filter on a subtractive synth, and turning up the volume to make up the shortfall - which, when you have a very tinny sound, is a very good thing to do. That said, it still sounds good either way, at least to me.
@@OPL3music Thank you very much for the detailed answer. I find it difficult to distinguish between the different recordings. On a real machine one can hear it much better. I have the same problem on our channel, especially the recordings of my Dreamblaster X2 with different Reverb/Chorus settings. The sound in the vids sounds quite similar but on my retro rig played on the active speakers it is much different from each other. By the way, today at 6 pm comes the third recording video of this series. If you'd like to check it out, its pc-sound-legacy. Greetings. Thomas
I believe there is a port of Adlib Tracker II that runs on Linux. Its releases are behind the official DOS releases, but it is there and in active development last I checked.
I've got a SB16 CT2700 but when playing sounds, the card is extremely noisy ... Especially it makes a hiss sound which is not something wanted. I can dramatically reduce this with the mixer, but some games such as doom are messing up these and so the problem comes back to these. Is there something that could be done in order to reduce this ? I heared that other sb16 had this problem such as the CT2230. Does the cap mod you did on it helped with this ?
I have heard that cards using a CT1747 have noise issues in games, and I am told it is something internal to the chip, but that's really as far as my knowledge goes. The capacitor changes on the CT2230 did help a bit with line noise for FM, gave a meaty bass boost and made the treble tingle somewhat, but I don't know if it would help with the noise you describe. The point of the capacitor change on the CT2230 was to bring the amplifier chip up to the specs it was supposed to run at, which naturally would have the aforementioned results.
Aw that's a shame......Don't throw any of it away, though - even broken computer parts are still somewhat valuable. There's only so many of them to go around these days.
Quote from another comment which you didn't read apparently: "The capacitors on the CT2230 were all changed to match the specifications in the TEA2025B amplifier chip's datasheet."
For this song in particular, most of the differences are in the highs and require headphones to hear. There are better tracks to showcase the differences, this one is a good example of how similar they can sound.
I didn't do the capacitor work, so i can't answer that. Eep386 did all the modifications. By the way, you mentioned a CT2830 - just need aware that it is not a plug and play card. You will have to set jumpers on the card manually, and configure the driver to match. Once it's running correctly, it should sound just like mine does.
I Know, i saw on the ebay picture that its not a PNP card, most of the PNP sb16 cards on ebay that i see have the CQM which is emulation of the OPL3, i want legit, not a emulation. I would have to look up a sb16 jumpers guide. if i have missing jumpers, i will use some from failed hard drives or use the spare jumpers on my ibm scsi hard drive on my power macintosh 6100 if i do have missing jumpers, the spares are under a strip of electrical tape on top of the hdd on my macintosh.
Yamaha YMF262 OPL3 was very good sound chips, but very few composers knew how to use them. I mean OPL3 unlike OPL2 could do sound with 4-operator per channel mode like Yamaha YM2608 OPNA in NEC PC-98 or NEC PC-88, Yamaha YM2610 OPNB in Neo Geo arcade systems or home consoles, Yamaha YM2612 OPN2 in FM Towns, Sega Mega Drive or Sega arcade systems or Yamaha YM2151 OPM in Sharp X68000 or arcade sytems. Music composers were just too lazy to study them, they prefered to use MIDI which was bad, becuase good MIDI devices like Roland SC-55 or SC-88 were very expensive, and MIDI tracks converteted to FM sound chips sounded like s**t in most cases. Ideal example is Doom soundtrack for NEC PC-98, YM2608 OPNA is simply very poor used and its music sounds bad (but not that bad as is Doom version Sega 32X, it sounds ridiculously bad). MIDI was overused at its times, and too bad that composers did not made a tracker music, like in Amiga (by using compressed sound samples), Sound Blaster 16 or Gravis Ultrasound were capable to play such advanced music modules (and in case of Sound Blaster sound cards, they also could play FM sound in the same time as PCM sound). One of my friend (now former friend, I finally got rid of her, thanks to Laura Leighe song that I discovered) turned against me, because I made a such conclusions. So please, don't hate me, I really don't like fighting others (but I will do this if someone try to spit on me like her).
Practical concern. In mid 90s, 4ch mod is for one, not sufficient for music complexity, compared to 6/9 channels of even OPL2; for other, modules require software mixing, which takes up a lot of CPU! So hardware based synthesizer was necessary, whether FM or ROMpler. Gravis Ultrasound solved the CPU load issue, but not everyone had one! So it's not a great thing to rely on. Demoscene used multichannel modules exclusively, but then, very often, you needed special hardware, a modern CPU, a VLB or PCI video card, "No GUS=No Sound" or "No GUS = No Demo." You can't sell games like this. Ultrasound suffered from the same fundamental issue as OPL. Sure you can get nice sound out of OPL, but for that someone would need to spend time making custom patches, and also make it in conjunction with music. It was just easier to compose for SC55 and then have a middleware take care of OPL conversion with stock instruments - unfortunately only 2op, which is funny and sad in an era when everyone had OPL3. For Ultrasound, ideally you also want someone to make custom patches that actually fit the music, or have the music composed as XM/IT mods to begin with. Too much effort! Instead they just ran an instrument statistic utility across game's MIDI files, and then loaded a limited selection of Ultrasound's standard GM kit by most frequently used instruments - and some instruments would not get loaded and played wrong, especially if you hadn't installed the RAM expansion. Which isn't to say that there is anything wrong with MIDI per se, it's versatile and expressive, it's just treating every hardware as it if was just GM leads to half baked results. OPL3 is the biggest casualty purely due to proliferation and its treatment as fallback with crazy amount of negligence, but fragmentation is just a general problem. What i mean crazy negligence, there's like a few big sound middleware that were used by most games, like Miles Sound System, HMI Sound Operating System, MIDAS, and some others, and it would have made sense for them to at the very least ship a dedicated 4op OPL3 GM kit at the middleware level, it would be a significant improvement to hundreds of games with not necessarily increased per-game effort. By the way, the more things change, the more they stay the same - Apex Legends, one of the most popular games now, also comes with Miles, just like games 25 years ago, and they just can't get themselves to get binaural spatial audio to work properly! In spite of everyone playing in headphones. Miles thinks they offer every feature, it's up to games to use them properly, game devs think since they're using an audio library, it isn't their worry how the sound comes out. It's not wrong to be angry. Also lack of holistic view of PC sound device. In PC middlware, sound effects and music hardware are treated as independent, but it doesn't make sense that you don't use all OPL2 channels for instruments and then just play drums or other unpitched instruments, along with sound effects, via wave audio? On the other hand, once you got AWE32 and could experiment with downloadable banks made by other people... that was amazing! I still love the Chaos 12MB soundfont. And you could fire up Viena and make and edit these yourself! I think this is the best thing that came out of the whole MIDI history on PC.
just in case anyone wants to read the annotation text on mobile or without the annotations restored extension (go get that extension, by the way!), here they all are! some of the annotations in the bottom left also get cut off by the player's border, so perhaps this is more convenient in some cases. (you can read all the text by transitioning into full screen, but it's very inconvenient.)
my own descriptive comments of where the annotations are/what parts of the cards they reference will be in [square brackets]!
00:08 - [A bunch of "Hi!" annotations pop up around the text!]
*Sound Blaster 16 CT2290*
00:15 - "I will be using this card as a point of reference for the rest of the video."
00:24 - "This card features a CT1747 OPL3 chip..." [The black chip near the bottom center of the card, with "OPL" written on the fourth line]
00:30 - "...As well as a TEA2025B amplifier chip..." [The sideways black chip near the top right, in the center of all those capacitors, the circular things that stick up out of the card]
00:35 - "...A large assortment of capacitors near the amplifier for filtering and other things..." [See above!]
00:40 - "...And two VRMs." [I don't know how to describe VRMs, if someone else can do that I would appreciate it! All I know is that they're made up of multiple components...]
00:46 - "I'm going to take some hate for this, but CT1747 chips have an OPL2 vibe to them. They also feature slightly more crisp treble than a YMF262 OPL3 chip."
00:59 - "The TEA2025B amplifier chip adds in a slight amount of distortion to the signal, and the filtering capacitors give a better bass response."
01:13 - "The end result is a well-rounded sound, with rich bass and bright leads."
*AdLib*
01:31 - "The original. This card features a YM3812 OPL2 chip and a very basic circuit design."
01:43 - "The YM3812 chip is right here. For some reason, the markings were scratched off during manufacturing." [The YM3812 is the second black chip up from the bottom of the card]
01:58 - "This card was dead and covered in mold when I received it, so I sent it to a friend to see if he could revive it."
02:10 - "After determining that all of the capacitors were bad, he changed them out, and it came to life."
02:22 - "The new capacitors look quite different, but the AdLib sound is still clear as ever."
02:34 - "The overall sound is actually quite similar to the CT1747 chip."
*Crystal FM, CS4236-KQ*
02:57 - "This card has a decent bass response, but it has some distortion on the percussion, as usual with Crystal FM."
03:14 - "The bass instrument is also missing some of its harmonics."
*Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600*
04:24 - "The capacitors on this card have all been replaced with capacitors of the same rating."
04:40 - "This card seems to be a fan favorite, and I will agree that it sounds good...."
04:59 - "...But I feel the bass response is a tiny bit too strong on the low end. The bass drum is concussive."
*Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 (Modified)*
05:51 - "This card has been heavily modified. The TES2025B amplifier chip has been recapped to the proper specifications."
06:10 - "That includes the nonpolar capacitors here..." [Those blue things in the top right corner of the card]
06:15 - "...And the gigantic ones here." [The green chunky things below those blue things!]
06:25 - "The treble is much cleaner as a result, and I think the bass balance is quite pleasant."
*Sound Blaster 16 CT2830 (Modified)*
07:21 - "This card was an experiment to see what kind of bass response could be gained with larger capacitors."
07:41 - "The bass has a lot of punch to it. The lower end is a bit too strong for me, but it still sounds very good."
08:03 - "Even with the massive bass response, the treble is present and crisp."
*Sound Blaster 16 CT2900 (Modified)*
08:46 - "This card had absolutely no bass response before modification."
09:00 - "The large capacitors here give it a half-decent response."
09:14 - "There is a tiny bit of distortion on the treble. This is a natural characteristic of the YMF289B chip."
*Sound Blaster 16 CT4180*
10:16 - "This card does not have an OPL3 chip. It is using CQM to imitate one."
10:31 - "For being CQM, this actually sounds pretty good. The highs and bass are a little off, but the rest is intact."
*ESS AudioDrive, ES1868F Chip*
11:44 - "ESFM often has a lot of excessive chirping or buzzing. This track sounds good on it, though."
12:00 - "This card uses a TDA1517 amplifier chip instead of the usual TEA2025B. In my (limited) experience, cards using TDA amplifiers have less bass response."
Thanks, man, I really appreciate it! Didn't know it was possible to still get to these.
@@OPL3music my pleasure!
I noticed you also have a couple other videos which relied on annotations, so I might also make comments for those sometime soon!
@@viiuan Sadly I never did make annotations for those. It totally slipped my mind until the annotation editor was already slated for removal. Had I known they would still be accessible, I would have added them anyway. Oh, well.
Edit: I'm referring specifically to the two other videos I released on the same date as this one. I do have other, much older videos that also used annotations.
THAT IS AMAZING TO BOTH OPL2 AND 3 ON THE SOUND BLASTER but not the YM2612 which is OPN2 or YM2203 which is OPN1.
I used to have ess audiodrive and I loved it. Later when I got pci standard pc I got yamaha xg128 having both wavetable and opl3 onboard (ymf724 I believe). I loved it even more as it was capable of both fm and wavetable synthesis. I composed midi files of my own to play through it. I even used to customize wavetable sample bank used by soundcard and memorized sysex codes to control it because I used quite a primitive sequencer software
I was sure this video used to have annotations on each card, but I don't see them now. Looks like youtube disabled that feature a while back. This video really needed the annotations in order to describe the differences between the cards sounds that you might not catch unless you were listening closely.
ack- i hope this hasn't posted multiple times, youtube might have eaten my reply for me daring to insert a link. anyway, if you get the annotations restored extension, you should be able to see the annotations on this video! it's very cool :D
Why don't you write times in your video description?
0:00 Sound Blaster 16 CT2290
1:27 AdLib
2:54 Crystal FM, CS4236-KQ
4:22 Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600
5:49 Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 (Modified)
7:15 Sound Blaster 16 CT2830 (Modified)
8:43 Sound Blaster 16 CT2900 (Modified)
10:10 Sound blaster 16 CT4180
11:38 ESS AudioDrive, ES1868F Chip
Maybe I was tired and forgot, I don't know. I added your comment to the description, though, thank you.
That SB Pro 2 sounds perfect. The experimental SB 16 CT2830 sounds like my current EQ preset. The SB 16 CT4180 is the most interesting. The ESS ES1868F has extra punchy drums. But they're all great, FM synthesis always has a special sound to it.
The ESS ES1868F are my favorite sound cards. I usually pair them with a Dreamblaster X1, X2, or S1 MIDI wavetable daughterboard, or an SC-55. They have the easiest drivers to live with and work on everything from a 286 to Pentium 4 boards with ISA. ESS made me fall out of love with Creative and their damned hanging note bug.
I recently installed a 1868 (triangular model, probably a very cheap card back then) in my Pentium 200mmx retro PC. I also bought a dreamblaster s2 and I tried the card in several games. This is running flawlessly. And the driver is amazingly easy to use under dos.
For me, a great great card and the only one to play fm correctly in Day Of The Tentacles game. Even the awe32 could not sound right with this game...
@@eldontyrellcorp right on! I hope you continue to enjoy it. I bought a couple of extra ESS sound cards just to make sure I had spares.
@@AshtonCoolman what is the best ess chip ?
I also have a lot of crystal sound cards which are also quite nice, I think. Also have a Yamaha one, and several soundblasters. But for now I'll stick to the ess one.
@@eldontyrellcorp I can't really speak past the 1868 and 1869 cards that I have. I also have a few Yamahas (YMF718, 719, and PCI 744) which I enjoy. They have that nice Yamaha XG MIDI and great OPL3 compatibility. They don't have wavetable daughterboard headers so I can't use my Dreamblasters but I enjoy the unique Yamaha MIDI nonetheless.
@@AshtonCoolman My Yamaha ISA card has the Wavetable header on it, and I refuse to use a different card. Excellent compatibility with that faithful OPL3 sound. Paired with a Dreamblaster X2 and it's a match made in heaven. If I didn't have this card, I'd probably be using an ESS Audiodrive as a close second.
There's no hate warranted for the CT1747. It includes a licensed OPL3 core :)
It’s between the ct2290 sb16 and that pro 2, the ct2290 has snappier envelopes on all of the synths and I feel like that makes it cleaner than the muffled other sb16s
I think my favorite is the AdLib, because the sound is so punchy and surprisingly the Vibra 16C without an dedicated OPL chip, because this seems to make the card sound a fair bit different then the cards with an OPL chip and it also sounds very bassy in a good way without the mids being too loud and screamy.
Can you do comparison with Rock Garden from Tyrian? In my opinion it was the best rock music on OPL hardware, when I first heard it as a kid I was blown away, having only heard stuff like monkey island and other games, whose composers didn't really take full advantage of what the OPL can do.
Quite some time after my PMMX board ceased working, I finally managed to score a killer PC for the job of OPL-blasting again! It's a Compaq Deskpro 4000 with a very first-batch Pentium 2 processor in it, with a shielded riser system with three ISA slots, three PCI slots and even an AGP slot! I already tested my OPL3-SA3 on it and I'll be testing all of my other cards on it soon. I hope to be able to compare the cards I have with this beautiful cover of Alloy Run and perhaps improve on the cards' performance by changing their components.
You inspired me to do this once again, after you and Eep386 did so once before. :-) Cheers!
With TDA chips, whether using them on sound card or to build a mini amplifier, you can increase bass response with larger filter/stiffening capacitors on the power supply rails, these chips can be power hungry at lower frequencies. You can actually build pretty nice little mini amplifier using the 1517 and not many other components and it can be driven to a few watts of output power if you use a heat sink (notice the BIG metal plate and screw holes on the back of the chip, it was really meant to be a power amp chip!) which is enough to drive decent big stereo speakers.
That CT4180 sounds really really good for CQM. Gonna listen again later with decent headphones but it seems miles better than other offerings.
It does sound really good for CQM, yeah. Honestly, I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't looked at the card first. The minor differences here are delightful. It sounds soooo much better than the Vibra16XV I used to have.
Thanks for this video, it really helped me to decide. I never had a proper Sound Blaster card until the PCI 512. My first card was an AOpen AW35 Pro. But I just picked up a CT2290 on Amazon for $27 shipped and assuming it works as advertised (I can't test it yet) I'm looking forward to putting it in a retro machine when I get all the parts.
Makes me wish I had kept all my computer stuff over the years. Just can't decide whether I want to shell out the extra money for a 486 DX4, or Go with a Pentium based system and use tricks to slow it down for DOS games.
+Blink Rape Glad the video could help.
486 computers are getting mega expensive, so it might be better to stick with a pentium machine or two.
I have one of the original adlib myself in my 386sx 25mhz, and the sound of this card is just so great ^^
Nintenloup Wolf (FR) Never get rid of it. They are worth major money!
OPL3music I know. I'll keep it, but I don't really do it for it's money value , but because I love it ^^
I've got the sound blaster pro 2. Very good card imo. Also the last very very good creative card in my opinion. The sound blaster 16 might be good (I've not tried it yet, but I've got a CT2700. Do you think that this one is good ? I've read that it has the hanging note bug but as long as I don't use the wavetable I should be fine I guess), however there are plenty models that have different issues, and it's where creative started to make cheap cards. It's like the "perfect" sound blaster 16 doesn't exist (or if it does, it's pretty rare and hard to distinguish from the other) while the SB Pro 2 is ... just a SB pro 2 and has nothing to complain
they're quite pricey on ebay, but i scored one for $90 and it's currently in my Pentium 75 machine, the rest were $120 or even $200+
I'm a big fan of the SB16 CT17XX series. I have a Ct1740, CT1750, and CT1770.
I have 3 CT1740s, 2 with the 4.05 DSP and one with the 4.11 DSP, and 2 CT1770s, one with the 4.05 DSP and one with the 4.12 DSP
my CT2830 has a Asahi Kasei AK4501-VS. I found out on Vogons that it was a variant of the CT1701, which is the noisiest of the DACS, the CT1740, 1750, 1770 has that noisiest DAC. the CT1703-A is less noisy out of the bunch.
Wow. The SB Pro 2 CT1600 does sound noticeably better to my ears than all the other cards. Warmer, deeper and with a good punch. I hate overly "crisp" highs of the other cards (including SB16 CT 2290 and Adlib). They hurt my ears, lol. Crystal FM chip sounds a bit anemic and dirty. ESS seems to have unnatural "metallic" tone to it and again too "crisp" to my ears.
God... my first soundcard was an Adlib... it counts as was one of my greatest computer moments firing up that synth FM music!
Great comparison, thanks 👍
Having owned just about every card on this list, I am still surprised to this day how quickly my ears adjust to each one and think hey that sounds pretty good. Lol😜 🎶🎹🎵Play On
Nice comparison! The CT2230 and the 2290 sound basically identical to my ears, based on the hearing of this video. They have the same CT1747 chip after all. I also happen to have a CT2230, a CT4180 and an ESFM isa card. Between them, my favourite is the CT2230, but the ESFM has some special use in some games that support it specifically
The CT2230, CT2290 and CT2770 all have a CT1747 chip, and use a TEA2025b amplifier chip. So the sounds on all three are relatively similar. Good stuff. Clean sound, deep bass, crisp highs. :)
@@OPL3music Good stuff indeed
First heard this tune on an Atari ST demo back in the day
I'm curious to hear what that AdLib Gold 1000 would sound compared to these.
+RichterEX2 Oh man.......those things are expeeeeensive. I saw one on EBay about two years ago, and I informed a friend who snapped it up instantly. Haven't seen one listed since. Very rare.
+OPL3music i found a ct2830 for about $15.99
indeed to this and that and these and those.
adlib gold 1000 cards are very rare because there were not many adlib gold cards released, shortly after that card was released in 1992, adlib went defunct
The SB Pro2 clearly blows all of them out of the water.
Would be nice if a good CT2290 emulation component for Foobar was available.
What's a good source for music files to play on OPL2/3? What software do you use other than the AdLib II tracker? Do any of the classic trackers (.mod, .xm, .s3m, .it) use OPL chips? I believe they are sample based but please correct me if I'm wrong.
i got a sb16 ct1740 just recently.
Sounds very groovy
I got a Sound Blaster 16 CT2290 a while ago for 20-25$ on Ebay, and it have everything on it, nothing's missing. Why? because i found in a thrift store the actual retail box with everything BUT the card inside, so this is why i had to find one.
Also, this might be wrong for some of you, but i'm using a Yamaha DB50XG on it for the musics. And by the way, the DSP version bug seem to not apply in DOS, i only stumbled on 1 or 2 games that give me problems with it, such as King Quest 6 (game freeze for no reason at some points). But then i just use regular Sound Blaster musics.
You can also try SoftMPU for games that give you hanging note bugs and other problems.
AFAIK the hanging note bug only applies to games that play music through the daughterboard and also continuously play digital audio effects.
I honor your work for this video and for the mods, thank you for sharing with us! Would be nice to have a before- after comparison regarding the mods and how you mod them exactly, maybe as an idea for a further video. F.e. did any bigger capacitor works fine or du you recomend a special type? Why sometimes you take metal film caps and for another purpose "normal" electrolyte caps? What kind of amplifier hardware do you use behind the pc, did you prefere the line out or amplified output? So many questions, sorry:-) I just explore my interest in old sound cards, have a few different cards but until now it never comes in mind for me to mod them.
I always use the amplified output. The line out is always missing a lot of bass.
I actually did not modify these. Eep386 did. He can give you details on the mods if you can track him down somewhere!
NICE
has a pretty good sound to it.
YM2612 (OPN) Can Do a great Job with this song
the adlib somehow seems the most crisp
Thank you for doing this - great song and fascinating to hear the differences between cards. I'd like to upload samples of Alloyrun played on some knockoff cards that I have. I'm considering a portable audio recorder with line in such as the Tascam DR-40 to record the output. Wondering what your method for recording is?
Not much difference if the last 6, but the 1st 4 you can tell the upgrades. Old fun times.
Love this song!
Great Sound .. I love it
ct2770 has an opl chip too
Yep, it also happens to be my favorite combo. CT1747 OPL chip plus a TEA2025 amplifier chip. I'm pretty sure I have one, I just never made a video with it since the CT2290 suits my needs just most of the time. CT1747 OPL chips have a clipping issue, so eventually I'll have to go back to a real YMF262 for some recordings.
AdLib & CT1600
What is the CT2230 BIG caps mod for?
The capacitors on the CT2230 were all changed to match the specifications in the TEA2025B amplifier chip's datasheet.
@@OPL3music I've heard about Creative not matching the recommended values from the datasheets espacially when it comes to electrolytics. But does it change the sound output as well? I mean, more bass/treble or something like that?
@@thomasr.1677 Yes. The bass response is much better when capped to spec. The differences in the highs are more dependent on the type of capacitors used.
To me, it literally sounds the same as slightly closing the filter on a subtractive synth, and turning up the volume to make up the shortfall - which, when you have a very tinny sound, is a very good thing to do.
That said, it still sounds good either way, at least to me.
@@OPL3music Thank you very much for the detailed answer. I find it difficult to distinguish between the different recordings. On a real machine one can hear it much better. I have the same problem on our channel, especially the recordings of my Dreamblaster X2 with different Reverb/Chorus settings. The sound in the vids sounds quite similar but on my retro rig played on the active speakers it is much different from each other.
By the way, today at 6 pm comes the third recording video of this series. If you'd like to check it out, its pc-sound-legacy.
Greetings.
Thomas
Crystal CS4236 buddies
I believe there is a port of Adlib Tracker II that runs on Linux. Its releases are behind the official DOS releases, but it is there and in active development last I checked.
The port is sorta sluggish and I think it's just a wraparound of the DOS release, not using ALSA OPL3 APIs, so you're not getting the native sound.
Ah. Good to know. Thanks.
Linux port supports only OPL3 emulation(Nuked OPL3 emu). Real OPL3 passthrough is not supported.
See now I think the Vibra has a brighter sound..
even with mod, i hear the same, OLD STOCK sound.
Fury of the Furries?
I've got a SB16 CT2700 but when playing sounds, the card is extremely noisy ... Especially it makes a hiss sound which is not something wanted. I can dramatically reduce this with the mixer, but some games such as doom are messing up these and so the problem comes back to these.
Is there something that could be done in order to reduce this ? I heared that other sb16 had this problem such as the CT2230. Does the cap mod you did on it helped with this ?
I have heard that cards using a CT1747 have noise issues in games, and I am told it is something internal to the chip, but that's really as far as my knowledge goes.
The capacitor changes on the CT2230 did help a bit with line noise for FM, gave a meaty bass boost and made the treble tingle somewhat, but I don't know if it would help with the noise you describe. The point of the capacitor change on the CT2230 was to bring the amplifier chip up to the specs it was supposed to run at, which naturally would have the aforementioned results.
You mean playing Doom in pure DOS or DOS command shell inside Windows?
Ct1600 wins :)
wat kind of caps did you use on the ct2230
i put my ct2830 into my pentium 3 gateway cause my pentium 1 packard bell stopped recognizing ide devices so i retired that pc.
Aw that's a shame......Don't throw any of it away, though - even broken computer parts are still somewhat valuable. There's only so many of them to go around these days.
The SB16 works fine in Windows 98 SE and MS-DOS Mode
i just got a socket 7 motherboard but one of the tabs on the socket that holds the heatsink on broke so i had to superglue the heatsink to the cpu
What does the SB16 ct2230 capacitor mod do?
Quote from another comment which you didn't read apparently: "The capacitors on the CT2230 were all changed to match the specifications in the TEA2025B amplifier chip's datasheet."
hey can you show me how to mod the ct2230 does it sound better after the mod ?
He didn't mod it. Eep386 did.
So basically a recap makes them all sound the same
For this song in particular, most of the differences are in the highs and require headphones to hear. There are better tracks to showcase the differences, this one is a good example of how similar they can sound.
where did you get those green nichicon capacitors from on the 2230?
I didn't do the capacitor work, so i can't answer that. Eep386 did all the modifications.
By the way, you mentioned a CT2830 - just need aware that it is not a plug and play card. You will have to set jumpers on the card manually, and configure the driver to match. Once it's running correctly, it should sound just like mine does.
I Know, i saw on the ebay picture that its not a PNP card, most of the PNP sb16 cards on ebay that i see have the CQM which is emulation of the OPL3, i want legit, not a emulation. I would have to look up a sb16 jumpers guide. if i have missing jumpers, i will use some from failed hard drives or use the spare jumpers on my ibm scsi hard drive on my power macintosh 6100 if i do have missing jumpers, the spares are under a strip of electrical tape on top of the hdd on my macintosh.
+Windows Ninety Five 66 Awesome. Good luck, then, and have fun!
It hasn't come yet :( the item location was in Brockport, NY and i live in Nevada.
I didn't hear a knock on my door or see a USPS mail truck.
+OPL3music it came, and it works good, but the jumper pins were bent, so i bent them back into shape and put it into my pc.
what player did you use to play this song?
These were played in AdLib Tracker II. The song is included in the sample files.
+OPL3music i just ordered a ct2830 from ebay.
can 1 missing pin vga monotor plug not work on pentium 200? but could it work on windows 7 computer? why? why not?
remember the time sound tech was impressive, instead of just buzzwords and bullshit
I'm still waiting for another sound card with a real digital synthesizer integrated into it! All this modern software nonsense doesn't sound the same.
Yamaha YMF262 OPL3 was very good sound chips, but very few composers knew how to use them. I mean OPL3 unlike OPL2 could do sound with 4-operator per channel mode like Yamaha YM2608 OPNA in NEC PC-98 or NEC PC-88, Yamaha YM2610 OPNB in Neo Geo arcade systems or home consoles, Yamaha YM2612 OPN2 in FM Towns, Sega Mega Drive or Sega arcade systems or Yamaha YM2151 OPM in Sharp X68000 or arcade sytems. Music composers were just too lazy to study them, they prefered to use MIDI which was bad, becuase good MIDI devices like Roland SC-55 or SC-88 were very expensive, and MIDI tracks converteted to FM sound chips sounded like s**t in most cases. Ideal example is Doom soundtrack for NEC PC-98, YM2608 OPNA is simply very poor used and its music sounds bad (but not that bad as is Doom version Sega 32X, it sounds ridiculously bad). MIDI was overused at its times, and too bad that composers did not made a tracker music, like in Amiga (by using compressed sound samples), Sound Blaster 16 or Gravis Ultrasound were capable to play such advanced music modules (and in case of Sound Blaster sound cards, they also could play FM sound in the same time as PCM sound).
One of my friend (now former friend, I finally got rid of her, thanks to Laura Leighe song that I discovered) turned against me, because I made a such conclusions. So please, don't hate me, I really don't like fighting others (but I will do this if someone try to spit on me like her).
Practical concern. In mid 90s, 4ch mod is for one, not sufficient for music complexity, compared to 6/9 channels of even OPL2; for other, modules require software mixing, which takes up a lot of CPU! So hardware based synthesizer was necessary, whether FM or ROMpler. Gravis Ultrasound solved the CPU load issue, but not everyone had one! So it's not a great thing to rely on. Demoscene used multichannel modules exclusively, but then, very often, you needed special hardware, a modern CPU, a VLB or PCI video card, "No GUS=No Sound" or "No GUS = No Demo." You can't sell games like this.
Ultrasound suffered from the same fundamental issue as OPL. Sure you can get nice sound out of OPL, but for that someone would need to spend time making custom patches, and also make it in conjunction with music. It was just easier to compose for SC55 and then have a middleware take care of OPL conversion with stock instruments - unfortunately only 2op, which is funny and sad in an era when everyone had OPL3. For Ultrasound, ideally you also want someone to make custom patches that actually fit the music, or have the music composed as XM/IT mods to begin with. Too much effort! Instead they just ran an instrument statistic utility across game's MIDI files, and then loaded a limited selection of Ultrasound's standard GM kit by most frequently used instruments - and some instruments would not get loaded and played wrong, especially if you hadn't installed the RAM expansion.
Which isn't to say that there is anything wrong with MIDI per se, it's versatile and expressive, it's just treating every hardware as it if was just GM leads to half baked results. OPL3 is the biggest casualty purely due to proliferation and its treatment as fallback with crazy amount of negligence, but fragmentation is just a general problem. What i mean crazy negligence, there's like a few big sound middleware that were used by most games, like Miles Sound System, HMI Sound Operating System, MIDAS, and some others, and it would have made sense for them to at the very least ship a dedicated 4op OPL3 GM kit at the middleware level, it would be a significant improvement to hundreds of games with not necessarily increased per-game effort. By the way, the more things change, the more they stay the same - Apex Legends, one of the most popular games now, also comes with Miles, just like games 25 years ago, and they just can't get themselves to get binaural spatial audio to work properly! In spite of everyone playing in headphones. Miles thinks they offer every feature, it's up to games to use them properly, game devs think since they're using an audio library, it isn't their worry how the sound comes out. It's not wrong to be angry.
Also lack of holistic view of PC sound device. In PC middlware, sound effects and music hardware are treated as independent, but it doesn't make sense that you don't use all OPL2 channels for instruments and then just play drums or other unpitched instruments, along with sound effects, via wave audio?
On the other hand, once you got AWE32 and could experiment with downloadable banks made by other people... that was amazing! I still love the Chaos 12MB soundfont. And you could fire up Viena and make and edit these yourself! I think this is the best thing that came out of the whole MIDI history on PC.