This again

[tgies]

Somebody sell me an old laptop? A not-laptop would be acceptable too.

I mean old. I have a good laptop. I need an old laptop. I'm thinking a 486 (edit: or a very early Pentium) and 16MB of RAM. A 386 might be okay, too. A 286 wouldn't quite cut it. The most important thing, though, is that it has to have an OPL3 FM synthesis chip or a good OPL3 clone in it. This is going to be my bass laptop. I will play laptop bass on it. If you do not know if your old junk computer has an OPL3 in it, I will help you check.

I would also be interested in an old Sound Blaster 16 or something.

I will pay money for these things, because I am retarded.

Comments

[trapezzoid.livejournal.com]

Have you messed around with DosBox's FM emulator? Sounds pretty good to me.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

And indeed it is (provided you roll the sample rate up from the default 22050 so it doesn't alias like hell), but there are a couple problems. DOSBox is not fast enough on any computer I own to reliably handle, say, Adlib Tracker, which I would like to mess with. Also, there are a couple of inaccuracies in that emulator (which aren't really a big deal and I'm just being nitpicky but I can't really help it), and sometimes it likes to pop and click a bit because it internally processes something or other at too low a bit depth, which is really annoying when I'm trying to use stuff in an actual song.

I can and do use the MAME/DOSBox OPL2/3 emulator in recordings, but for other things it's not quite there. Really, though, a lot of my reason for wanting the real thing is because I have this obnoxious purist streak which annoys even me. Translation: no good reason.

One could argue that I should stop using horrible reedy FM synthesizers in my stupid music but I'd just make some kind of dumb excuse and keep right on doing it

[tgies.livejournal.com]

oh also it has this annoying bug where sometimes it fake-delays register writes in an odd fashion which sometimes makes for instance some of the instruments in the music in Commander Keen get a little fucked up at the loop point

arguably i could fix that in like ten minutes but then i'd have to do DSP programming

nobody wants that

[efleck999.livejournal.com]

I have a Pentium 166 MMX laptop with 16 megs of ram
you can have if you pay for shipping and "handling".
I BELEIVE it has the right FM sound chips you want,
but I am not sure. I think it was a CTX 700 series.
It works, but there is no battery for it, and there
is some slight physical damage, but I can still get
it running. It has Windows 95 installed right now,
and a 3 gig hard drive. I just need to find it.
It might be in storage. It might be under my bed.
It's an EXTREME BACKUP device, but I will be replacing
it very soon anyways. It has a PC CARD 56K modem / LAN.

I also recently acquired a
computer with an AT motherboard, but I haven't
checked it out yet. I might still have lots of
other old parts, but I usually tend to throw out
anything that is ISA or REALLY REALLY OLD in general.

[efleck999.livejournal.com]

The one thing I remember, is that the sound was
NOT anything fancy... it had a Sound Blaster Pro or 16
or something, and definately not wavetable,
it was FM... not sure if it was OPL3 though.
A generic soundblaster driver always seemed to
work for it.

HOWEVER, sometimes when using Nesticle, the
sound output would come out very distorted.
If I restarted, the sound would come out fine.
Sometimes it depended on what resolution I ran it at.
It used a Neomagic video driver that I had a hard
time finding... (I still have the 95 driver for it)
eventually found on some japanese
website. It has TV OUT, and works great in that department.
It was a great laptop (except for only 16 mb of ram)
for me about five years ago, although I could only
run Windows 95. HOWEVER, I have connected to the
internet with it in the past year. My only other
issue besides lack of ram was that it would get
VERY HOT. Now it has physical damage... but it still works.


Please excuse my dear aunt sally over use
of words and sentences.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

If it's a Sound Blaster Pro or 16, then it has an OPL3. That's what those were.

This sounds like exactly what I need. If you can dig it out of wherever it's hiding, let me know how much you want to ship it to 68005.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

I think I have an old ISA SB16.

Although given my geographical position, I'm guessing you'd prefer mine as an option of last resort.

[bdu.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, nevermind, it's a C1. Different beast.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd like to have a few. If I can get some spares, I want to try to build my own synth out of YMF262s I pull off of them.

Really I need to try reimplementing the YMF262 on an FPGA one of these days

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you know, I'm not actually sure if I still have it. I definitely know I now have absolutely no fucking idea where it is. I looked where I thought it was and it was just an old 16550 UART controller.