Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

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Even after 28 years, there continue to be a lot of interesting things happening across MAME - and it goes well beyond the arcade machines MAME is known for to lesser known home consoles, vintage computers and other hardware.

One example I'm excited about is the recent progress emulating professional music synthesizers like the legendary Yamaha MU-series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_MU-series). These are significant not just to musicians but also gamers because in the late 80s PC games started supporting MIDI music soundtracks. Throughout the 90s, most PC gamers only heard these soundtracks through fairly primitive PC sound cards which had limited audio sample memory, bit rates and simultaneous voice counts. So we usually heard chintzy, partial renditions of the lush full soundtracks the game's composer originally created (many composers used external MIDI hardware).

If you were a hardcore gamer with serious money you got an external MIDI sound module like the Roland Sound Canvas which could elevate your favorite game's sound from chintzy to breathtakingly beautiful. However, the absolute best MIDI game hardware was the $699 64-voice Yamaha MU80. I heard one back in the day and it blew my mind what I'd been missing (MU80 Demo Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWxEN2NGHA). Now thanks to MAME I can have a full software emulation of this powerful, pricey professional hardware I could only lust for back then.

I remember the weird, pretty bad MIDI songs that shipped with my Packard Bell Pentium 166 (with MMX technology) and I didn't realize there were devices at that time that would have elevated them. A quick search on youtube shows this video comparing a Sound Blaster output with the MU80. Pretty cool!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C33-YCX7Too

Wow. That's a shocking difference and it's similar to what I remember from back then. There was some truly wonderful music composed for these games which only a lucky few players got to hear. That video shows the similar MU50 which was a cost-reduced MU80 that could play 16 different voices at once with 32 track polyphony. The MU80 did 32 different voices at once with 64 track polyphony, although a game's soundtrack would need to use the extra voices to make a difference.

Most of the MU series were backward compatible with the newer ones mostly adding more voices, polyphony, samples, effects and expansion options. Thanks to MAME we don't have to choose as we can have them all including 1999's MU128 which could play 64 different voices at once with 128 track polyphony.

A lot of game devs of that era sadly treated the Adlib/SoundBlaster OPL2 chip as nothing more than a very poor MIDI synth, but it was capable of much better. For example, listen to some of Stéphane Picq's music. https://vgmrips.net/packs/composer/stephane-picq

For sure. That the MU80 (or later) is the best way to hear MIDI game music from the 90s and early 2000s should take nothing away from the passionate musicians and coders who did brilliant (and sometimes unnatural) things to extract better results from the innately weaker hardware of early PC sound cards (Sound Blaster et al).

Yamaha's many various OPL chips were based on cost and feature reduced versions of the FM synthesis engine in Yamaha's professional standalone music synthesizers. These chips powered not only PC sound cards but also a huge variety of 80s and 90s arcade machines, game consoles and home computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_OPL).

It's fascinating to explore the evolution of the OPL technology as this "lower cost, lower end" alternative to pro gear gained in sophistication and power culminating in 1994's OPL4 chip (aka YMF278) and its even more capable cousin the YMF292 used in the Sega Saturn console. These chips had impressive synthesis power for their consumer console/sound card price point. By the late 90s onboard music synthesis in sound cards, consoles and arcade machines began dying due to increasing storage and CPU power permitting playback and mixing of fully sampled music tracks. By the early 2000s the only remaining consumer application of Yamaha's powerful onboard synthesis chips was for generating ringtones in mobile phones. It's kind of sad such a rich musical legacy ended up playing 5 second mono tracks on half-inch speakers (although those mobile phone chips probably made more money for Yamaha than all their pro music gear til that point combined).

Here are two good links from my retro research bookmarks: The best rundown on the genealogy and capabilities of Yamaha's FM sound chips I've seen: https://gist.github.com/bryc/e85315f758ff3eced19d2d4fdeef01c.... And a collection of very impressive OPL4 music tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqD52xioky4.

There was some project to use/fork MAME to emulate a bunch of digital synths, running the original ROMs with a GUI to replicate the original controls? Some of those might have GM support with far better sounds than any consumer hardware, and in theory that emulator could be wired up to some PC emulator with MIDI output support?

When do you think we'll be able to ask an AI to recreate some nostalgia induced fantasy game in the 90s?

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