OPL passthrough

[endre1952]

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/source-ports/51412-chocolate-doom-and-opl-passthrough-for-cmi8738-sound-cards/

Chocolate Doom seems to support OPL passthrough in XP. I haven't been able to get it working with my YMF724 PCI card, but in theory, this should work with certain DOSBox builds...

UPDATE: I think it managed to get OPL passthrough in DOSBox under XP working!

You need PowerYMF 2.0.1 installed. Turn on legacy support. Copy Porttalk.sys into your System32\drivers folder. Add portalk.reg into your registry. I also have ioperm.sys installed, not sure if it's needed....

[jharris01]

EDIT: Cool! Can you make a quick recording?

I wrote this while you were posting...

Yup. The good old YMF724 family is a great chip to have for those looking to game with OPL FM with late 90s PCI based sound cards.

Considering how everything today seems to be recorded on to FLACs, OGGs and MP3s: Wouldn't it be easier to record the music off your favorite FM card, get it as "canonical" as you want it, and use that with your favorite Doom port? Personally I would find this very appealing cause it gets you the best of both worlds. I bet many people would download a music pack like this for the same nostalgic purposes as those who wish to use the OPL chips on their sound cards.

[endre1952]

May have misunderstood me. I only mentioned that Doom port because it seemed like a possibility to get OPL passthrough in DOSBox under XP. And it does work! To record music, I would use my SB AWE32 with a real OPL3 chip in my 386 and record the digital output off the SPDIF out pins.

[jharris01]

That's great man. Your topic sent me on a tangent. Anything with an OPL3 seems like an excellent choice to me. I think I might do this myself sometime in the near future. Sounds like a nice little project.

[endre1952]

http://www.filesonic.com/file/CekmPfD

Leisure Suit Larry 5: YMF-724 opl passthrough
Test Drive 5: YMF-724 opl passthrough
Sam and Max (stereo OPL3 music): YMF-724 opl passthrough
Wing Commander: digital SPDIF recording from AWE32
Arkanoid 2: digital SPDIF recording from AWE32
David Wolf Secret Agnet: digital SPDIF recording from AWE32, captured in DOSBox, played back on 386 with DROPLAY

[jharris01]

Thanks endre.

[Great Hierophant]

This is indeed great news.  I tried getting OPL Passthrough to work with my YMF-based cards with DOSBox, Windows XP and Porttalk a few years ago and could not get it to work.  (It worked fine on Windows 98SE). 

One great thing about the YMF chipsets is that they support S/PDIF output.  That allows you to make a pure digital recording.    Personally I do not know why people use DOOM ports, except for multiplayer, when the originals have worked perfectly in DOSBox for years. 

My current machine uses a mini-ITX board and only has one PCIe slot, so I could not use it in this current machine. 

[endre1952]

Perhaps you didn't use PowerYMF, which is needed to enable legacy support in XP. The card still doesn't work in Win7 x64, but I use a dual-boot system with XP x86 as a second OS.

[Great Hierophant]

Perhaps you didn't use PowerYMF, which is needed to enable legacy support in XP. The card still doesn't work in Win7 x64, but I use a dual-boot system with XP x86 as a second OS.

I have a dual-boot system, and I did not use PowerYMF.  I thought that the ordinary Windows XP drivers would be sufficient.