Hi! I'm Malfunction/Altair and I'd like to present You this page. It's dedicated to all people who love oldskool chipsongs. Some people hate chipsongs because of "plastic" sound, some love for that "plastic" sound :). Making music on REAL sounchips like AY, POKEY, SID or OPL2 is a real fun because of many parameters, that can be tweaked to make the sound original. Samples just can't be tweaked so much. Besides of original, electronic sound - chipsongs are very small. This page contains utilities and documentation useful for making music on Yamaha OPL2/3/4 FM chips.
What is Yamaha OPL? This is soundchip family installed on most PC soundcards. Famous AdLib soundcard and all Sound Blaster family (except that PCI crap like: SB64 PCI and SB128 PCI, and maybe (I hope that I'm wrong!) SB Live!) has Yamaha FM sounchip called OPL. On AdLib and Sound Blasters 1.0 - 2.0 OPL2 chip was present. On Sound Blaster Pro were installed two (!) OPL2 chips, and on Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 and later (SB16 and SB AWE32/64) was installed much better OPL3 sounchip. What is possible with that chip? If you have ever heard famous SID on C64, the OPL2/3 is quite similar in basis. You can tweak the timbe onthe fly!

OPL2 (YM3812)

• two modes: melody mode (9 channels) and percussion mode (6 channels of melody and 5 channels of percussion)
• 2 operators per melody channel (various in perccusion channel)
• each operator has ADSR envelope, 64 levels volume, vibrato and tremolo LFOs
• operators can be connected in FM (Frequency Modulation) or AM (Additive Modulation) mode
• 8 octaves tone resolution
• 4 waveforms (sinus and sinus-based waveforms)
• mono

• compatible with OPL2
• 18 channels of 2-operator FM/AM synthesis
• 4-operator mode (up to 6 channels)
• 8 waveforms (square too!)
• stereo (only left/central/right settings per channel)
• much faster (smaller delays between register writes needed)