We want to hear your thoughts! Please watch our video and let us know what you think here on our blog, YouTube, Twitter or even Facebook. Your comments and feedback are much appreciated as we seek input for our next revision of the Resound OPL3 – 4 Channel Sound Card 8-Bit ISA.
Thanks for taking the time to watch and listen, we hope to hear from you!
I think the card is pretty awesome right now! One feature I would find useful is if you added some method for detecting your card in software. For the music system I wrote you need to manually specify that 4 channel output is in use. It would be great if you could differentiate the card from a standard adlib by reading from some kind of register, and possibly check a flag to see if anything is plugged into the secondary output. Don’t know how difficult that would be to add, but I think it would be a big help to software developers who want to support the 4 channel feature.
I usually have my card plugged into something with a volume control anyways so I don’t really see a need for a gain or volume control on the card. A header that taps the dac output would be nice too!
Hey Jake, thanks so much for your support. Ultimately, I really don’t know of a way to detect 2 vs 4 channel output. The OPL3 is blissfully unaware of whether or not something is plugged into the 3rd & 4th channel output, and will even try to output them on a SoundBlaster, etc. with an OPL3 even though there will be no sound. I’ve been starting to play around with CPLDs and someday, I hope to get into more advanced sound cards and could add some custom check. For the moment, the OPL2 / OPL3 detection routines which I’m sure you already know about are really all that can be performed against this card. The OPL3 is plugged directly into the address lines, so there is no real way to inject any more intelligence into the current design.
We could certainly add some header pins before going through the last stage of amplification. However, just curious, what would you need them for? It would just be a lower volume output, and I guess I don’t understand why you would want them.
Looking forward to your game, btw! I’ve been a huge fan of Sierra games since I was a kid, and I really love the idea of a new game in that genre!