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- It's sort of retro time, but not really. One of the best things about being a PC gamer,

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is that you can basically run any PC game you want

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all the way back to the very beginning of PC gaming. But there is a problem.

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There've been a couple of technological shifts

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over the course of the lifespan of the PC. We've gone from having like a monochrome display

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with a beeper to having CD audio and 256 Colors to,

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well 3D accelerated glory that we have today

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with full surround sound, with Dolby Atmos and everything.

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But there were some steps along the way that were pretty significant and lasted a long time.

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That is what this is for.

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This little guy right here is called the retro wave by Pseudo Maker or Pseudo Maker,

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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.

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What this is is a little Raspberry-Pi hat kind of thing

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that you can plug into well, a Raspberry-Pi or any other kind

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of single board computer. And I don't know if you can see that,

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but right there is a Yamaha YMF 262.

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That is what is otherwise called the OPL3, which was commonly used on the soundblaster cards

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back in the 1990s and also the Ad-Lib Gold. It was also the successor to a earlier format

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called the OPL2, which I don't remember, the 3812,

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YM3812 is what that one was. So why are those chips important?

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Unlike modern sound chips or really anything since these,

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these actually generate the sound on the chip. What the computer is doing is sending the chip commands

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to generate a wave form and then change it in ways

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that are basically magic but it sounds unlike anything else

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that I think exists still, and there are emulators you can get for these,

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but they don't sound quite as good. Now, we know pretty much everything there is to know

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about the sound chip here, how it generates sound, what it should look like, what it should sound like.

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But there's a question that you have to ask yourself, even if you know exactly what the wave forms

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that this should spit out look like, nobody got those but their original hardware, everybody had sound blasters,

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pro audio spectrums, they had knockoffs

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and these all had different amplifier circuits.

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So who's to say what amplifier circuit sounds accurate

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and for that matter, the amplifier is going to subtly change all of the wave forms

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that come out of this, no matter what it is. So if you're just straight up using the output of this

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to generate sound, then you're kind of missing a little bit of the tonality

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that used to come with those older chips. And that's where this comes in.

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I happen to have another piece of the puzzle. This, don't mind the bend, is the PotatoPiLight,

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currently discontinued as a result of parts shortages.

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What this does is it takes this and accepts it

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like so to create a little sandwich, then I can plug this here,

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type A connector directly into a computer.

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This has firmer on it that basically sets it up as nothing more than a serial port.

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So any software on your computer can access that to send and receive data.

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What we're doing is we're just sending commands to this here, chip,

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and we get to listen to the output through this here, headphone jack.

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We have an op amp here and we have some capacitors.

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I think there are two different types of capacitors you can ask for when you purchase these.

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This I think is just the default, which is supposed to give a warmer sound.

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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.

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There we go. It lights up. So first things first, let's go to device manager.

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And if we go down to ports here, we will see that we have a USB serial device.

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And if we go into the details here and go down to bus reported device description,

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we will see retro wave USB adapter. That's how we know that this serial port

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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.

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I've got DOSBox-X here. That is a special version of DOSBox that can use this.

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I'm currently in the emulator configuration. So this has the nuked OPL emulator currently running.

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That's what we're going to compare against. The nuked OPL emulator is probably the more accurate

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of the emulators available. Basically, all you need to do is,

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under soundblaster just change OPL MEU to a retro wave, OPL3

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and you're good to go. That COM3 that we saw earlier,

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this will change depending on what your computer assigns it, but it's COM3 for me.

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Now ,you might be thinking, hey, Anthony, this is a lot of setup for 30 FM synthesis,

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like Duke Nukem 3D or whatever. And you would be right if you were talking about that.

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Generally speaking, they were actually written with a very different type of music in mind, middy.

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That, generally speaking, was written with the MT-32

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by Roland or some other wave table synthesis in mind.

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So what that is basically recordings of instruments that are just played back at different pitches and volumes.

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This is generating it all on here. All the implementations for those older games

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and for Windows and what have you, tried to emulate wave table with this thing,

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they would create a default patch set that sort of sounded okay for most middy

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and they just kind of left it at that. So I'll show you what that sounds like now.

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So let me just go into, let's do duke 3D,

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sound set up music card, soundblaster, yup. (video game music)

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It's not bad, but it is mostly just farts.

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Like you think, Sega Genesis, you think like all this kind of crunchy stupid crap.

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I'll go ahead and switch it over to the retro wave now and you can kind of hear what that sounds like.

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What you're hearing right now is the actual genuine waves

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coming out of this card. It's not actually pre-rendered in any way.

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It is digital, but it's not digitized. So let's just get out of this.

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There are other ways of using this chip

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other than the middy way. And that is through what is called a tracker.

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(video game music) So there are games out there that this kind of middy

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is only accessible via this kind of emulation.

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You're not gonna be able to get wave table or anything for this game. It's all through the OPL chip.

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So let's switch over to the retro wave here.

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The soundstage in the OPL3 on the real one is a little wider and it's a lot warmer.

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(video game music)

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It sounds smoother. It sounds less crunchy, you know?

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So you would've seen something like this maybe not. I don't think there were actually OPL keyboards,

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but there were similar keyboards on the market and that's kind of what digital pianos and stuff

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or electric panels were for a little while. If you've heard modern electronic music,

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maybe even like dubstep, I'm not entirely sure if that's using something like this,

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but it's very similar in terms of how it's generating those sounds.

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And in fact, there are some steppy kind of sounds that you can get with this that we'll get to momentarily.

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Obviously again, not all games used it like this.

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A lot of it was very underutilized. It's kind of like how there are some second Genesis games,

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like Thunderforce IV that sound amazing. And then there are some games that sound like-

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(makes bass noise) That's why people say it sounds like farts.

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It actually does sound like farts. It can sound real good. You just got to put the work in.

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Anyway, let's get out of this. There's something I wanted to kind of highlight here

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and that's that not everything works with this

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for some reason. Something is up with the interface here. There's some songs that just use the OPL

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in ways that apparently this was not designed for. Like, I think with one of these,

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that doesn't sound quite right I think it's two, or it might be one and I don't know why?

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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.

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(video game music) Yeah, so right here, there should be more notes playing,

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but there's not. Let me stop this here and switch over to the emulator.

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(video game music) So it works fine on the emulator,

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but not so much on the retro wave. And unfortunately that's just how some of them are,

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not a lot is like that though, which is thankful.

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So let's switch it over to the actual music player now

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because people actually have been making music on these things for a long time.

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In fact, this is kind of late in that era, but it was kept alive by people who do key gins

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and other such crack things. (video game music)

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Okay, so this is back into the emulator section now.

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Let's see, the one that is sort of distributed with the command player for Linux for this thing,

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is this rendition of a key gen or other crack trow

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kind of thing. (video game music)

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That's what this sounds like on the emulator. Here goes the retro wave.

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(retro wave video game music)

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As far as making old game sound good again, it really depends on the game you're talking about.

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So games that took full advantage of the OPL, like Tyrian 2000,

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the examples that you'll find are usually by European or Japanese developers,

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because they had a kind of thriving chiptune scene at that time whereas in the US was more of a middy thing,

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people were kind of transitioning over to like professional audio.

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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

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(mimics video game music) kind of thing, but it's still not going to sound as good

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as it was intended to sound on the MT-32 or Sound Canvas.

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I think that this with its output circuitry and with its versatility in terms of how you can connect it

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to basically whatever you want, it makes it really good for people who want to make music.

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And yeah, people who missed out on this generation of music and who are just now understanding

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that this is the thing, like in a lot of ways, it was a lot better than anything that was being produced

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by middy at that time, it just wasn't as realistic and people were after realism

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in the '90s, they wanted that 3D. They wanted that, oh, this sounds like an actual trumpet or close to it.

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The good news is it only costs 40 bucks. So without the, oh yeah,

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(offscreen laughter) that's even worse than it was before.

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Folding tech is the new thing. So for 40 bucks, you get this module here.

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That includes everything that's on this module, you get the amplifier circuit,

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you get the YMF262 and that can just slot directly in onto,

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hang on, what are these switches? I don't think they're documented.

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Right, so you get everything you have here. This will plug directly into a Raspberry-Pi

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or like a spring single board computer, like an Orange Pi or a LattePanda, or what have you.

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It'll work pretty much right out of the box, for, how much is the Pico?

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Well, you can't buy this anymore, but the PotatoPiPico24 is $29.

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So for a total of like 70 bucks, you get the whole package.

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So how much is this (inaudible) worth it to you? How much is having an authentic synthesizer worth it to you?

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If you do play games that do take advantage of it, it's going to sound a lot better.

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And if you listen to tracker music in any kind of way,

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it is the definitive way to listen.

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It's obviously not for everybody. This is for the purest, plain and simple.

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But ShortCircuit is for everything. Literally, like we just unboxed like a $1,600 keyboard.

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Wow, we wasted a lot of money around here and we unbox cars and we, we unboxed an iMac once,

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that was fun, an old one. Subscribe.