that's always great!
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Jelly Stone park, MD USA
4mat wrote:
Continuing the FM fun here's a little .VGM player to run compatible arcade games on the cartridge.
This is totally awesome; any new work on the SFX player? Are sources somewhere, very interested in porting to A8 for support of OPL3 cart, https://translate.google.com/translate? … amari.html
Yogi
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I haven't released sources/converter for that, however FM-Sid has the source with it. It can be setup to run an external player rather than the built-in sid one so I guess you could have FM + a vblank pokey player running at once.
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Jelly Stone park, MD USA
4mat wrote:
I haven't released sources/converter for that, however FM-Sid has the source with it. It can be setup to run an external player rather than the built-in sid one so I guess you could have FM + a vblank pokey player running at once.
Cool, that's what I was hoping to do. Matej and I have been talking along these lines over on AtariAge and his FB page, Atari XEL Club!, about a OPL3 cart. Original design is several years old by T0riman, but has been overlooked for the most part.
If you have any interest in A8 and OPL3, would be great to hear from you. I know Matej is planning a board run for the cart so any suggestion/insight with driver development would be welcome.
Yogi
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There wasn't much traction on the c64 side so I'm leaving it as a proof-of-concept. The driver is quite modular when it builds, so if you set it to use an external sid player it'll only include the FM-related stuff. (and JSRs to wherever the sid player calls are) So I'd assume commenting out that external player stuff and changing the root OPL addresses should get it to do something. I don't know if OPL3 follows the same structure, but the 3526 chip had the registers in a fixed order iirc.
Last edited by 4mat (Jun 24, 2017 7:53 pm)
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Jelly Stone park, MD USA
4mat wrote:
There wasn't much traction on the c64 side so I'm leaving it as a proof-of-concept. The driver is quite modular when it builds, so if you set it to use an external sid player it'll only include the FM-related stuff. (and JSRs to wherever the sid player calls are) So I'd assume commenting out that external player stuff and changing the root OPL addresses should get it to do something. I don't know if OPL3 follows the same structure, but the 3526 chip had the registers in a fixed order iirc.
Totally understand, The SFX cart is a rare beast and even thought Scanner Boy re-designed a clone still only <100 of those in the wild. The big advantage the C64 has over the A8 is the support in VICE for the SFX.
Looked over the FMSID zip, nice docs! TY 
Yes, doesn't look like too much of a 'heavy lift' reusing your driver, will be digging into the sources very soon. And using XMs is a big plus getting started, Lots of talk about how to track for it, so with XM support it's a very good start.
Not sure 100% but I think the OPL3 just adds a second set of OPL2 regs to the internal map; as the OPL3 is backwards compatible with OPL2 songs. Of course there are some added features to account for but much better than starting from scratch
Don't know if you're a A8 guy but if you want one we can get a cart to you 
Yogi
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Another go at an FM Expander cart driver. This allows you to use any SID music editor to write FM tracks, by translating pitch, ADSR and waveforms to FM output. The downside is it's quite easy to run out of rastertime. (working on things to help with that) The example below is playing 2 Goat Tracker stereo tracks, 9 channels are being translated to FM and the last 3 are output to the SID chip for 12 channels total.
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Lets you record sounds/loops from sid files and resequence them into new things.
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Converting a playing sid tune to midi data and outputting to Windows general midi through a Sequential cart.