- It's sort of retro time, but not really. One of the best things about being a PC gamer,
is that you can basically run any PC game you want
all the way back to the very beginning of PC gaming. But there is a problem.
There've been a couple of technological shifts
over the course of the lifespan of the PC. We've gone from having like a monochrome display
with a beeper to having CD audio and 256 Colors to,
well 3D accelerated glory that we have today
with full surround sound, with Dolby Atmos and everything.
But there were some steps along the way that were pretty significant and lasted a long time.
That is what this is for.
This little guy right here is called the retro wave by Pseudo Maker or Pseudo Maker,
I don't know how they actually pronounce it, I saved Pseudo. So if you say Pseudo, then I don't know, it's on you.
What this is is a little Raspberry-Pi hat kind of thing
that you can plug into well, a Raspberry-Pi or any other kind
of single board computer. And I don't know if you can see that,
but right there is a Yamaha YMF 262.
That is what is otherwise called the OPL3, which was commonly used on the soundblaster cards
back in the 1990s and also the Ad-Lib Gold. It was also the successor to a earlier format
called the OPL2, which I don't remember, the 3812,
YM3812 is what that one was. So why are those chips important?
Unlike modern sound chips or really anything since these,
these actually generate the sound on the chip. What the computer is doing is sending the chip commands
to generate a wave form and then change it in ways
that are basically magic but it sounds unlike anything else
that I think exists still, and there are emulators you can get for these,
but they don't sound quite as good. Now, we know pretty much everything there is to know
about the sound chip here, how it generates sound, what it should look like, what it should sound like.
But there's a question that you have to ask yourself, even if you know exactly what the wave forms
that this should spit out look like, nobody got those but their original hardware, everybody had sound blasters,
pro audio spectrums, they had knockoffs
and these all had different amplifier circuits.
So who's to say what amplifier circuit sounds accurate
and for that matter, the amplifier is going to subtly change all of the wave forms
that come out of this, no matter what it is. So if you're just straight up using the output of this
to generate sound, then you're kind of missing a little bit of the tonality
that used to come with those older chips. And that's where this comes in.
I happen to have another piece of the puzzle. This, don't mind the bend, is the PotatoPiLight,
currently discontinued as a result of parts shortages.
What this does is it takes this and accepts it
like so to create a little sandwich, then I can plug this here,
type A connector directly into a computer.
This has firmer on it that basically sets it up as nothing more than a serial port.
So any software on your computer can access that to send and receive data.
What we're doing is we're just sending commands to this here, chip,
and we get to listen to the output through this here, headphone jack.
We have an op amp here and we have some capacitors.
I think there are two different types of capacitors you can ask for when you purchase these.
This I think is just the default, which is supposed to give a warmer sound.
So I guess it's time to plug it in,
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Let's go ahead and plug this boy in. Oh, oh, come on.
There we go. It lights up. So first things first, let's go to device manager.
And if we go down to ports here, we will see that we have a USB serial device.
And if we go into the details here and go down to bus reported device description,
we will see retro wave USB adapter. That's how we know that this serial port
is in fact the port we need to use, that is COM3. I've already set it up, but I'll show you how it goes.
I've got DOSBox-X here. That is a special version of DOSBox that can use this.
I'm currently in the emulator configuration. So this has the nuked OPL emulator currently running.
That's what we're going to compare against. The nuked OPL emulator is probably the more accurate
of the emulators available. Basically, all you need to do is,
under soundblaster just change OPL MEU to a retro wave, OPL3
and you're good to go. That COM3 that we saw earlier,
this will change depending on what your computer assigns it, but it's COM3 for me.
Now ,you might be thinking, hey, Anthony, this is a lot of setup for 30 FM synthesis,
like Duke Nukem 3D or whatever. And you would be right if you were talking about that.
Generally speaking, they were actually written with a very different type of music in mind, middy.
That, generally speaking, was written with the MT-32
by Roland or some other wave table synthesis in mind.
So what that is basically recordings of instruments that are just played back at different pitches and volumes.
This is generating it all on here. All the implementations for those older games
and for Windows and what have you, tried to emulate wave table with this thing,
they would create a default patch set that sort of sounded okay for most middy
and they just kind of left it at that. So I'll show you what that sounds like now.
So let me just go into, let's do duke 3D,
sound set up music card, soundblaster, yup. (video game music)
It's not bad, but it is mostly just farts.
Like you think, Sega Genesis, you think like all this kind of crunchy stupid crap.
I'll go ahead and switch it over to the retro wave now and you can kind of hear what that sounds like.
What you're hearing right now is the actual genuine waves
coming out of this card. It's not actually pre-rendered in any way.
It is digital, but it's not digitized. So let's just get out of this.
There are other ways of using this chip
other than the middy way. And that is through what is called a tracker.
(video game music) So there are games out there that this kind of middy
is only accessible via this kind of emulation.
You're not gonna be able to get wave table or anything for this game. It's all through the OPL chip.
So let's switch over to the retro wave here.
The soundstage in the OPL3 on the real one is a little wider and it's a lot warmer.
(video game music)
It sounds smoother. It sounds less crunchy, you know?
So you would've seen something like this maybe not. I don't think there were actually OPL keyboards,
but there were similar keyboards on the market and that's kind of what digital pianos and stuff
or electric panels were for a little while. If you've heard modern electronic music,
maybe even like dubstep, I'm not entirely sure if that's using something like this,
but it's very similar in terms of how it's generating those sounds.
And in fact, there are some steppy kind of sounds that you can get with this that we'll get to momentarily.
Obviously again, not all games used it like this.
A lot of it was very underutilized. It's kind of like how there are some second Genesis games,
like Thunderforce IV that sound amazing. And then there are some games that sound like-
(makes bass noise) That's why people say it sounds like farts.
It actually does sound like farts. It can sound real good. You just got to put the work in.
Anyway, let's get out of this. There's something I wanted to kind of highlight here
and that's that not everything works with this
for some reason. Something is up with the interface here. There's some songs that just use the OPL
in ways that apparently this was not designed for. Like, I think with one of these,
that doesn't sound quite right I think it's two, or it might be one and I don't know why?
I don't have another one to test to see if that's actually a problem. So let me see if this is the one.
(video game music) Yeah, so right here, there should be more notes playing,
but there's not. Let me stop this here and switch over to the emulator.
(video game music) So it works fine on the emulator,
but not so much on the retro wave. And unfortunately that's just how some of them are,
not a lot is like that though, which is thankful.
So let's switch it over to the actual music player now
because people actually have been making music on these things for a long time.
In fact, this is kind of late in that era, but it was kept alive by people who do key gins
and other such crack things. (video game music)
Okay, so this is back into the emulator section now.
Let's see, the one that is sort of distributed with the command player for Linux for this thing,
is this rendition of a key gen or other crack trow
kind of thing. (video game music)
That's what this sounds like on the emulator. Here goes the retro wave.
(retro wave video game music)
As far as making old game sound good again, it really depends on the game you're talking about.
So games that took full advantage of the OPL, like Tyrian 2000,
the examples that you'll find are usually by European or Japanese developers,
because they had a kind of thriving chiptune scene at that time whereas in the US was more of a middy thing,
people were kind of transitioning over to like professional audio.
It really depends on the game you're talking about, if you're talking about like Duke Nukem 3d, and you might get a little bit of a fuller
(mimics video game music) kind of thing, but it's still not going to sound as good
as it was intended to sound on the MT-32 or Sound Canvas.
I think that this with its output circuitry and with its versatility in terms of how you can connect it
to basically whatever you want, it makes it really good for people who want to make music.
And yeah, people who missed out on this generation of music and who are just now understanding
that this is the thing, like in a lot of ways, it was a lot better than anything that was being produced
by middy at that time, it just wasn't as realistic and people were after realism
in the '90s, they wanted that 3D. They wanted that, oh, this sounds like an actual trumpet or close to it.
The good news is it only costs 40 bucks. So without the, oh yeah,
(offscreen laughter) that's even worse than it was before.
Folding tech is the new thing. So for 40 bucks, you get this module here.
That includes everything that's on this module, you get the amplifier circuit,
you get the YMF262 and that can just slot directly in onto,
hang on, what are these switches? I don't think they're documented.
Right, so you get everything you have here. This will plug directly into a Raspberry-Pi
or like a spring single board computer, like an Orange Pi or a LattePanda, or what have you.
It'll work pretty much right out of the box, for, how much is the Pico?
Well, you can't buy this anymore, but the PotatoPiPico24 is $29.
So for a total of like 70 bucks, you get the whole package.
So how much is this (inaudible) worth it to you? How much is having an authentic synthesizer worth it to you?
If you do play games that do take advantage of it, it's going to sound a lot better.
And if you listen to tracker music in any kind of way,
it is the definitive way to listen.
It's obviously not for everybody. This is for the purest, plain and simple.
But ShortCircuit is for everything. Literally, like we just unboxed like a $1,600 keyboard.
Wow, we wasted a lot of money around here and we unbox cars and we, we unboxed an iMac once,
that was fun, an old one. Subscribe.