
How to Party Like It’s 1999: Emulation for Everyone - ohjeez
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11386
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strictnein
Slightly tangential: I've been wishing for years that a cottage industry would
form around building quality systems for playing old games. Maybe a 486 100mhz
with 16mb of RAM, or a Pentium 133 with 32mb and a decent video card so Quake
would run well (Diamond Monster 3D 2 maybe?). Proper Soundblaster, 3.5 and
5.25in floppies, 4x CDROM, and a correctly configured autoexec.bat and
config.sys. Hell, an external 28.8 or 56k modem too.

Dosbox and the like are great, but the sound is never right. Soundblaster
16/Pro/etc had a very distinct sound that none of the emulated stuff even
approaches. Miss it mostly when playing Doom/Doom 2. The music is never right.

~~~
khedoros
The OPL2 and 3 chips were all-digital, so it's possible to verify that the
bitstreams from the original chips matches the outputs of an emulator of the
chip...but the original hardware also included some specific ADCs with some
kind of buffer feedback loop, and I think that's where the real difference in
the sound comes in (like the overly-harsh drum sounds from most of the
emulators).

I'm working on a side-project right now to build a USB-connected YMF262+YAC512
board for the reasons you've mentioned. I've actually got a 600MHz K6-3 with
128MB of RAM, Geforce4 ti4400 and SB16 that I use as a retro computer, but if
I can have the same, proper audio output on my regular machines, that would be
even better.

~~~
Grishnakh
Relying on ancient hardware is not a good idea for the long term: it'll
eventually fail.

It should be possible to revive some of this old hardware and characterize the
sound, using specific inputs and recording the outputs, and creating a filter
which can then be included in emulators to recreate the original sound.

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brianzelip
Prince! Libraries!

FYI, the journal this post is from is a seasoned group of coders & librarians.
It's annual and regional conferences always include hands-on programming
workshops that I've found useful as a medical and web librarian. Love the
multidisciplinary community of Code4Lib. The Open Paren podcast is close to
this community ([http://openparen.club](http://openparen.club)).

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zellyn
Seems weird they only tangentially mention archive.org in a reference: check
out the 4am collection of cracked Apple II software running in an in-browser
emulator, with full descriptions of how over 680 disks were de-copy-protected.
And that's just one archivist, on one system: they have scores!

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jbclements
I'm sorry, I can't help it: "Salmon Rushdie archives"? Literally laughed out
loud.

