Genuine Yamaha OPL3 FM Pop Music!

Judas by Lady Gaga



Bad Romance by Lady Gaga



Neutron Star Collision by MUSE



Fairytale by Alexander Rybak

I've been busy getting my old CreativeLabs SoundBlaster AWE32 card up and running, for nothing more than to make use of the on-board Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesis chip. The original problem with the card was that it's a ISA and not PCI board so it didn't fit on any modern motherboards. I managed to find a 300mHz Celeron board lying around with a single ISA slot and hobbled it all together. It would run Windows XP but was a bit slow for audio work, so I thought about being totally retro and installing Windows 95. I gave up with that idea after a few days of constant install conflicts. I now have it running Windows 98se, which is very smooth.

I intended to record from the boards line-out but that was very noisy so I recorded all sounds internally. This mean't that there are a few moments of lagging in the recordings as the machine struggles to keep up with playback and writing PCM data to the hard drive. I have since cleaned the Line-out ports and the noise has been dramatically reduced, so all future recordings will be done like this, eliminating the lag problems.

All music here is written by the respective artists, I only hold claim on the recordings. The sequencing was done by others too. Unfortunately, the midi files came without any info on the creators. All MIDI files found at http://cool-midi.com I decided to go with pop tracks for the novelty value of people hearing tunes they might be familiar with, in FM form, plus I was delighted to see people (or companies) still producing MIDI files of relatively new "chart-music".

More recordings to follow. This projects SoundCloud account is YMF262 by the way.