Resolved a mystery of many years tonight. I always wondered why my old Win95 MIDIs would never sound like I remember on emulators. I thought I had an OPL3, but I actually had an ESFM? Backward compatible, but its Win95 MIDI drivers were custom/enhanced!?!
As far as I can tell nobody has every reverse engineered the ESS1688's custom FM chip. I can't seem to find any emulators that try to replicate it. I guess I need to find myself and old computer with a PCI slot.
Mood: 🤯 🎹 🖥️
Frustratingly, the datasheets for the ESFM cards don't actually describe anything about what the extra FM features are or what they do. Maybe I can approach this by sassembling its Windows MIDI driver and see what it does that doesn't fit the OPL3 paradigm?
I did a pretty big disassembly of the ESFM midi drivers. I don't have hardware yet to test, but the ESS cards look really interesting! Not just an OPL3 clone, but like some sort of hyper double OPL3 with 18 full 4-op voices? Maybe?
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=37497&start=120#p738552
I now have a dusty old ESS-1688! No ISA slot to stick it in yet, but I'm working on that...
Also I wanted a standard SoundBlaster / OPL3 card for reference. This SB Vibra16S fit that bill, was cheap, and is new old stock!
Finally received this cute little Wincor-Nixdorf Beetle!
Its power supply fan makes a horrible noise, though... gonna have to replace that.
First task is to get Windows 95 onto it without a CD-ROM somehow!
