Better Than OPL3? The FM Chip Nobody Talks About
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- Опубліковано 6 лют 2025
- Did you know that ESS sound chips support more advanced FM compared to YAMAHA OPL? ESFM is the technology, and there is support in a few DOS games. Let's check it out!
koolnESS ESFM Music Disk: files.scene.or...
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Hey, always nice to see people talking about ESFM! I am the main developer of the ESFMu emulator, and I also helped integrate it into DOSBox-X and 86Box, as well as Furnace Tracker of course. DOSBox-X should indeed have support for ESFM, but I'd say my implementation of ESFM there isn't 100% compatible with everything (e.g. Windows drivers won't necessarily work, though DOS games should work fine). DOSBox Staging is a better pick, though it wasn't really done by me.
But if you want the ultimate experience of having an emulated ESS card, I really recommend 86Box (or PCBox, for that matter). I spent way more effort not only integrating ESFM support into it and testing with a bunch of scenarios, but also reverse engineering the DSP part of the ESS soundchip and adding support for the ESPCM compression format for which there was not much known about.
I've seen the ESPCM commands in the datasheet. What is the compression like? Is it better than Creative's ADPCM compression?
@@thegreatcodeholio123 as bad as SB-ADPCM is (due to its badly-designed adaptation tables), it's nowhere as bad as ESPCM... ESPCM is almost like a joke, all ESPCM modes are internally companded 4-bit PCM, there's no way that could have had high quality... btw I have implemented an ESPCM encoder/decoder which is in my Github
@@thegreatcodeholio123 I think UA-cam might have swallowed my last comment. Well, unfortunately ESPCM isn't nearly as good as Creative's SB-ADPCM compression; anyway I have implemented both and made my implementations public in my Github.
Will those things eventually come to dosbox-x?
@ I'll read the code to understand ESPCM decompression and add it. Where did you find DOS/Windows programs that play back in ESPCM format?
ESS Audio Drive is probably the best OPL3 compatible implementation without the hanging node bug, DMA clicking and Midi issues affecting cards from creative labs.
Not enough people are talking about Phil's Computer Lab. Guaranteed if we talk more to others, he'll be at a million subs in no time!
❤️🤗
Indeed! I've seen soo many in the retro community reference his work too but somehow he has fewer subs than some of the other retro channels.
Keep up the great work Phil! Been watching since your k6-2 vs PII videos back in the day, maybe earlier but that's the earliest video I remember atm 😅
146K is criminally low.
Well, are We that many retro-HW geeks in 2025?
Well... There's enough for LGR to have 1.7mil. @dallesamllhals9161
The ESS AudioCore 1688 is the soundcard I have in my Retro/DOS PC. (Pentium 133 / Asus TX97-E ATX compatible)
I knew it had one of the good OPL3 "clones", and it didn't bother me. I does sound pretty good with FM synths.
ESS cards are my favourite retro pc soundcards. Cheap, trouble-free installation/configuration, great audio quality / low noise and ESFM sounds just great, native and emulation mode. Too bad it wasn't popular back in the days and only a few games supporing native mode.
I disagree on the noise level. I have a ESS card, but it does not stand a chance against my other card AWE64 Value. The ESS card is terribly noisy. Maybe it's just a defective unit?
Yes it might just be that card, I also find them very quiet in general.
Yes just a handful of games, what a shame. I'm hoping for a community General MIDI to ESFM driver...
ESS was considered like homeless sound cards back then. You enable the ESS Audio Drive if you are a beggar or you get a Sound Blaster like any functioning member of society. Then we found out that modern Sound Blasters have their DSP/DAC chips made by ESS.
@@UCs6ktlulE5BEeb3vBBOu6DQ The irony
Genuine OPL3 sound card sellers 'Hate this one trick!' In other news ESS cards just went up in value.
Haha best title, I should hire you!
And he did it now, six months after I gave away two of these for free because no one wanted to buy them.
Guess I'll hold onto mine for a bit longer.
Hopefully a FPGA recreation will be on the 'cards' That would be incredibly awesome or maybe a combination GUS & ESS Audiodrive FPGA based reproduction, there was a Gravis Ultrasound that had the GF1 and ESS 1688 chip onboard although that particular chip by itself doesn't do ESFM if I remember right by itself
Moin Phil, schön wieder was von Dir zu hören!
Danke! Du ich war letztens in Österreich. Außer eBay, ich habe nichts gefunden auf den Flohmärkten. Ein paar alte Konsolen, Musik CDs und Konsolen Spiele. Aber nichts für den PC...
I'm so glad to hear you're doing well and enjoying this all! Can't wait to see what else you have in store!
Welcome back PhilsComputerLab
Thank you 😊
Great video, man! I have love for the ESS Audio Drive, too. All my 386, 486 and Pentium I machines have ISA ESS Audio Drive cards. Main reason is becouse they are cheaper then original Sound Blasters but still have nice FM music and good dos games compatibility. I also noticed the better audio with the ESS in Warcarft 2, one of my favourites.
The ESS 1688 chipsets were also common in many brands of laptop from the mid 1990s, as well as mid 1990s Compaq machines, which is how I've often come across them. They not only support Sound Blaster Pro but they also have extra "extended" DSP commands that enable up to 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo if you know how to program it.
Also as the main developer of DOSBox-X, I was given a merge request to add ESFM emulation, so that should still be there unless something broke in the last 6-12 months or so. There is also a GitHub project somewhere (I forget where) where someone took plenty of notes while poking at the ESFM native mode to determine what registers are there and how they seem to work.
DOSBox-X also has basic though incomplete ESS1688 emulation (sbtype=ess1688) that is at least good enough for any test code I've written and Windows 95 seems happy with it.
As a sidenote, Gravis Ultrasound Extreme had it's Sound Blaster compatibility done with an ESS 1688, I wonder how that combination would sound, running the ESS 1688 in the ESFM mode, while using the GUS side for something else. Hmm. I think I need to dig up my basement for some old hardware so I could fiddle around with it..
@@Icedmanx Interesting. I only have the GUS MAX which has a WSS chipset (CS4231) alongside the GF1 to provide a proper sound card for Windows. The Windows driver otherwise will fall back to using one of the GF1 channels to try to do Windows audio playback.
@ Yeah, it was an interesting combination, which is why I bought it back in the day (and I think GUS Max disappeared before Extreme came available). My previous system had a combination of PAS16 and GUS Ace, before the system got stolen at Assembly (I think 1998).
I have an ESS AudioDrive 1869 and I'm trying it out in these games right now! Wow!
Had one of these in my gateway 2000 p90. I was at first disappointed it wasn't a sound blaster, but it always worked perfectly.
Nice to finally see some proper love for the ESFM synthesizer, which in my opinion is the best OPL3 clone out there. It mimics the original OPL3 pretty well, actually amongst the clones this is one of the most authentic-sounding ones, and it has its advanced mode where you have, if I remember correctly, 20 voices of polyphony with full 4-operators capability for each voice instead of the combined mode of the OPL3 (something like 6x 4-ops voices + 6x 2-ops voices). And, last but not least, the relationships between the operators (the so-called "algorithms" in Yamaha's FM synth terminology) are fully configurable in the ESFM, a thing that Yamaha didn't offer even in their professional FM synthesizers like the DX-7, where you had a finite number of fixed combinations. That's very sweet for an FM synthesizer and I bet the demo disk you featured in your video takes full advantage of that feature, judging by how complex are the sounds in those tunes.
By the way, the ESFM Windows' general MIDI driver uses the chip in its native advanced mode, that's why the GM patches sound so different from a standard OPL3 GM soundset. A lot of patches are programmed to sound heavily stereo, where you have a couple of operators tied to the left channel and the other couple to the right channel, so for a single patch you actually have two separate timbres which when heard in stereo make a very cool effect.
I guess that after this video the prices for ESS-based sound cards will skyrocket xD
Awesome video 📹 thx for Sharing, love these sounds! 😊
I'd like to clarify things a bit: General MIDI is a standard set of 128 instruments, emulated this or that way by digital synthesizers, basically - a set of instructions for the synthesizers or soundboard chips to interpret. It does not directly defines the method of sound synthesis. FM chips could support General MIDI too. Mr. Phil apparently calls 'General MIDI' sound chips that has been (incorrectly) called 'Wavetable', in fact - sample-based synths found in the likes of GUS, SoundBlasters WaveBlaster daughterboards, SoundBlaster AWE 32 and later on, Ensoniq AudioPCI et al.
Windows by default still features this kind of sample-based synth provided by Roland for the backward compatibility. And it is still called 'Wavetable' although the actual wavetable synthesis is an entirely different thing.
To add further clarity: All OPL chips synthesis sound the exact same way with instrument data using AM/FM, ADSR envelopes, feedback, noise, etc. General Midi is just a specification and has nothing to do with the quality of the sound. As mentioned by @blacksidedsun, chips that use wavetable is NOT synthesized sound. The reason it sounds "better" is because it's using actual instrument sounds instead of generating a waveform from basic data.
@@stephenclark4129 I would respectfully disagree on the 'all OPL chips sound exact the same way' take: in fact, there are some differences between OPL2 and OPL3 (two operators vs four, more channels, etc.). But essentially, yes, it's hard to mistake FM synthesis for anything else.
@@blacksidedsun "Experiment (ESS AudioDrive ESFM, Furnace 0.6.1 demo song)"
ua-cam.com/video/Ie3_fLwNiH8/v-deo.htmlsi=tqqabjGeu8g9wMhk
As it seems to me, it doesn't look like a typical track on OPL3 ;)
@@blacksidedsun Yes, I meant to say they produced sound the same way.
My first sound card was a ISA Terratec Maestro 16 (Crystal chip, OPL3, SB1.5, SBPro, MPU401, volume knob, Sony/Mitsumi and Panasonic CD). I played many hours dos games and ran Win95 with it on my 486 machine. When I upgraded to Pentuim, the computer was highly integrated; it had sound, video, IDE, floppy, etc onboard. The sound was an ESS chip that sounded just like this. I was amazed how well and different dos games sounded from OPL3 on 486 to ESS on Pentium.
I always searched for that sound and now I know what soundcard it is. Because the soundcard was integrated, I never remembered what ESS chip it had.
Yeah. Terratec were of the few ones doing retail quality cards with the ESS Audiodrive Chipset (plus custom Terratec drivers). Is interesting these cards worked flawlessy when using VxD drivers, but their first WDM drivers were sham, so people started to dump the cards in the Windows 2000 and ME era, because their WDM driver bugs. The problems got mostly solved when Win2000 SP2 came around with the updated drivers built in the SP, but then you still would lose all the Terratec custom extras and the ESFM device (I don't remember if Terratec made custom drivers around the bugfree codebase) . Later in the XP era ESS finally released bugfree drivers with the ESFM device enabled. I guess they also built bugfree drivers for WinME around the time, but for that OS was too late then.
Holy shit I love how the ESS cards sound playing back midi under windows
The toms sound so good
Our first soundcard was indeed an ESS audiodrive, but my brother bought it as a separate upgrade.
I've always looked at it as a decent SoundBlaster clone. Had I knew about this ESFM feature, I would've liked it more.
my childhood Compaq Presario had a similar chip on board (es1887) so I've always been very fond of it! :)
I had absolutely no idea ESFM was capable of producing such interesting and close-to CD Audio tracks, what an interesting project KoolnESS is! It's a shame it came out far too late in its life.
Thank you Phil 🙂 I have a bunch of these ESS's, often my fallback choice for compatibility and ease. Often had good experience with them, even in old non PNP systems with Unisound 😊
I love ESS audio cards, they just work and sound amazing. My favorite setup is ES1879S+ES692S in an old Kapok laptop, ES692S is General MIDI chip with 1MB ROM, 128 melodic instruments and 32 voices.
Yes the little known ESS wavetable. Serdaco made a board based on this one...
My very first sound card was an Philips NMS-1205, or MSX Music Module ;-).
My very first PC sound card was a Covox SoundMaster II, of which I had ultimately two in my XT class PC. These things were far from Soundblaster compatible (although there was a special "emulator" that you could use if you had a 386 class PC, which I didn't at the time), but they had one advantage: it was far easier to program for. Which I did of course. Writing 'drivers' for existing MOD players was done relatively quickly, especially if you had the original source code for a player lying around. I had great fun with these cards.
Also, having a MOD player run on your XT class PC is a sure way of impressing your friends, especially when they all had way faster computers than you did.
Btw.. OPL3 had a successor, OPL4, which add 24-channel sample-based synthesis (sometimes incorrectly labelled wavetable synthesis), although I think it was only ever used in a PC ISA card made by Yamaha themselves. It did however feature heavily in the MSX audio scene, where it was in the original Moonsound cartridge, as well in many of its clones.
When I was in my late teens / early 20's I used to have a Pro Audio Spectrum 16... I loved it, and considered it an upgrade from my Sound Blaster at the time. Admittedly I was no audiophile, but I did notice how little noise was output by the card as compared to the always-noisy Sound Blaster.
Yes they are indeed quieter!
If I had more room in the house I'd absolutely go ham and start in on the retro PC complete with all these audio options. Phil's channel is always in the background so I can add more things to my to-do and wish list. Thanks bro!
I'm glad you're enjoying the content!
Great recording quality Phil!
My first sound card, if that counts, was a homemade Covox Speech Thing clone, back in 1993 or so. I was a student with no income but with a soldering iron :)
My first pc audio device was also a diy covox. Going to the local computer club with my 286 pc and an amp. The look on those faces of the Amiga guys when I hooked it up and started ripping mod files on the Amiga. Those were the days. Later I bought a adlib clone, after that I really don’t know anymore. I know I used a sb live!gold as one of my last stand alone sound cards.
Awesome 😎
Whoa how good is that music disc! I have 2 ess cards (1868/1869) and also had a couple of the same as a kid. Great cards 😃
The first sound card we had was a Sound Blaster 16 with the CDU33A 2x cd drive in a bundle.
ESS AudioDrive one love since 90s!
I have ES1868, ES1869 and ES1879 of different production years in my collection.
The Terratec 16/96 Gold used one of these ES1868F chips. Bought one in 1997. Trouble free and nice sound.
@@christian2659 I use this card in my 486 with a Dream Blaster X2 on it. Great Card!
Nice card!
I've prefered the ESFM ESS cards over OPL for a while I have them in most of my DOS builds, they pair really nicely with a Dreamblaster S2 or better on the wavetable header too.
There is an ESFM.SF2 soundfont floating around the net (720mb), but I wouldn't know anything about that.
I love your videos. You answer every question I have really well and always give really great reviews and overviews. You rock!
Awesome! Thank you!
My first sound card was an Orchid NuSound 3D which was an Aureal 3D Vortex. I still have that card to this day. :)
My first soundcard was a adlib-clone - what a step up from the pc-speaker.
I'm thrilled about your video and must try the sounddemo on one of my ess cards soon! Thx
I was introduced to ESFM through old dos laptops. I really like the sound! Is there any sort of definitive list of games that support all the extras of esfm?
Not sure of a definite list...
@ That list isn't accurate in the context of ESFM support.
Building a retro Machine for DOS the hardest part was getting a reasonably priced ISA card, I had Creative SoundBlaster's back in the day but the prices are too much online, ended up being given an ESS Audio Drive 1688. After hunting down a set of drivers that actually worked, it has been really great! I recently got hold of a Soundblaster 16 Vibra XV(I know not the most loved SB) and was so excited! I plugged it in, and wow there is was noise with a background hiss! I noticed it especially because I use headphones quite a bit, I ended up going back to the ESS, its much better cleaner signal, no noise or background hiss at all. I was also given a Crystal ISA card and that was absolutely abysmal, heaps of noise and all sorts of background hiss. ESS has really impressed me!
The ESS is definitely a hidden gem.
Sounds amazing. Wish I knew about it back in the 90's. A bit of Googling - they're also famous for their DACs in phones like LG's V20 (which is now a collectors piece for music nerds) and high end Sennheiser HE 1 earphones. Like you suggested, they're a bit of a sleeper company. Cool find!
Yes ESS still produces high end DACs.
Great to see a video from you mate. Bonus points for that glorious stunts music ❤
Now my favorite card price will skyrocket 😀. I didn’t know that I have such a gem inside my PC 😎
Hi Phil!
Lovely video
I just recently got my hands on a ESS OEM card that has the ESS ES688FC, this seems to be an early version, it even has the volume whell and what is supposed to be a OPL3 clone the "S-062" chip
I can't wait to test it in the games you just mentioned
Wow, I've NEVER heard an ESS Audiodrive chip sound like this! Glad I've got a couple of these! People still aren't going to prefer these things for most purposes since they want DOS games with a real OPL3 … but I generally prefer a MIDI device for those OPL3 titles, and I think the Audiodrive can do well enough for OPL2.
For me I treat it like an OPL4. The difference with OPL3 is so small that to me its like playing an OPL2 tune on an OPL3. Doesn't bother me at all, but the ESS Solo-1 does give me fantastic dos compatibility on my Athlon 64 via motherboard and then this native mode on top. I dont use my OPL3 card much at all.
I spent the whole 90s with a 286 and pc speaker 😁 The first soundcard I bought was in the very end of 2000, a Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024. It's basically the same as the Value model, though the included CD had quite a few programs included. It worked quite well on 9x and DOS games, though the DOS driver had to be loaded in conventional memory. Using memmaker and excluding it, I was able to empty enough conventional memory to play Dune II with speech though! Fun times 😄
At one point in time I had an Audiodrive in a Compaq Pressario (don't remember the model though). I loved that soundcard.
6:21 Wow, that sounds really good.
wow.. ESFM ..? I didn't even know there are native mode for it. I will look for it. Thanks for info~! also KoolnESFM disk sounds wonderful. thanks!
Another great find Phil, thank you. I actually have ES1688 based card and I will try this right now.
Wow. I didn't know that my "cheap" substitute for SBPro in my P1 build has such a capability. Check with ESFM under DOS and got amazed 😊 Thanks Phil again for exposing hidden features of ours 20-30 years HW (like the one with Audigy drivers for SB Live)
When I was a freshman in high school, I got a new PC, which was a Compaq Presario CDS 924. It came with an integrated ESS sound chip. It performed very well in both DOS and Windows. Everything sounded great.
After I graduated high school, I ended up getting a more powerful PC, which came with a Yamaha OPL3-SAX ISA sound card. It was horrible. It would only play PCM audio at 11, 22 and 44 khz. If it tried to play any other playback rate in between, it crashed the entire PC. For instance, when I tried to voice chat with people online using Mplayer, the rate was 8k and it would not work at all. I ended up replacing it with a PCI sound card made by SIIG. I don't remember the model number, but it was so much better. It played any WAV file I wanted, Mplayer worked like a charm, it was compatible with DirectSound and it had hardware wavetable support. Since it was a PCI card, my PC was also a little faster as a result.
I'm not trying to slam Yamaha or anything; I love the chiptune power of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive for example. Still, that Yamaha sound card was just...not good. /rant
Great video. Thanks Phil! DOS sound options are such a fascinating topic.
Great video! I would like to add that there are many motherboards in the early Pentium/ AMD era that had onboard ESS which are fantastic. I have several Slot 1 and Slot A motherboard rigs that have such good onboard graphics and sound that it really eliminated the need for add-on cards. I'd love to see you do a video on these boards and compare sounds from the onboard to the ISA cards. Keep up the good video work sir!
Especially laptops, quite common!
This reminds me I have a Gravis Ultrasound in the drawer. 😁
@@DM-rq6yx showoff.
I'm kidding.
the gravis was great but terribly underutilized by pc software.
Nice review video Phil! I've been enjoying that E-Wave waveblaster module from Serdashop as well
Love the E-Wave. Great choice!
Nice, I love exploring these alternate options.
Yes. I couldn't believe too how fast development went after the reverse-engineering info is dropped. You can see how much a retro and chiptune community wanted to try this out. I'm hoping too that someone will make a MIDI driver with a good sound bank so more games can be heard in a new way.
I'll also thank to everyone involved in the Furnace ESFM music contest here. Without you guys Cielos Esfumados and koolnESS music disk wouldn't exist
😅
Hey, it's Natt Akuma. OT, but why did you leave GB Dev? I remember you made a FPGA board for experimenting with PGB mode. Sono finally figured out PGB mode just the other day to the point of displaying an image from a cart!
@Gameboygenius Ah, I lost an interest in it. Right now I'm making a NES game
A General MIDI ESFM driver would be awesome.
Awesome video as usual Phil! Maybe you could do an LGA 775 Voodoo 2 SLI rig sometime? Of course with a Vortex 2!
Great to see some attention for the ESFM. ESS are one of my favorite cards, even though I have multiple Soundblasters (16, AWE 32, 64, 64 Gold) and PAS16 cards.
Only downside I can think of it the Descent soundtrack sounds a bit off, for most other games it just sounds about right or even better.
Those demo songs are out of this world! It's really nice to see the evolution of early games using it (like Wolfenstein 3D) compared to titles like Tyrian.
Hope this new ESFM emulation can someday make it into SBEMU or the AdPlug library as alternative to other FM emulators :)
I mostly know ESS cards from prebuilts I've collected over time. I didn't really think good or bad of them, but due to my Creative bias, I never really regarded them.
My first sound card? Our family computer from the early 90s had a Sound Blaster clone marketed as the Reveal SC400 which came as part of a multimedia kit. For my first computer in 1997, I eventually got a Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE 64 Value, later got a Gold edition, which I used all the way through my Athlon XP system until that computer was retired from primary use in 2008. I then transferred that sound card to a secondary system and continued to use it there until early 2013 when I switched to using the Garritan samples in Finale for my amateur music composition. I guess I hung on to that AWE 64 card for so long because that was the sound I was used to. Nostalgia is a funny thing.
I remember my dad surprised me one day with a new Soundblaster 1.0 or 1.5 I think for his newly then bought a 286 machine with 50mb hard drive. The games that I played (mostly Apogee games) were so much more fun to play with a Soundblaster. I think one of my first soundcards were a SB16m I also had an Aztech soundcard, can't remember the exact model though. I even used a ESS card at one time. In the early 2000's around 2003 or 2004 I rescued a SB AWE64 GOLD from a scrapped workstation with dual PIII 700mhz slot 1 cpu's. I still have the motherboard and that soundcard.
I never had an Audiodrive based card back in the day, but I do remember articles about how they sounded amazing. My first sound card was a PAS 16 which I still have and love, but it has a few quirks that make it a pain to work with -- especially the -5v power requirement. Also, no Wavetable connector. Next time I put an old DOS machine together I might look for an ESS chip to finally try one out.
Ha! I guessed right. I had a hunch though, as I had to previously replace the weird IBM Mwave audio modem combo in my Thinkpad 760E with an ESS1688, which has just been an outstanding up/sidegrade.
Had one of those back in the day. Had no idea it's this good!
Thanks for the video. ESS AudioDrive and Solo-1 are both great for DOS gaming. Excellent compatibility, and the sound quality is better than most Soundblaster cards (except for SB16 and newer of course).
The ESS chips support OPL3 instructions. It sounds quite nice in Adlib Tracker II, but a bit different from a real OPL3.
When it comes to games though, it's more a comparison of OPL2 and ESFM.
One advantage with the Labway card you showed in the intro (Yamaha YMF718/19), is that it supports WSS (Windows Sound System), for 16-bit, 44.1 kHz playback in supported DOS games.
With ESS, you are stuck with SB Pro compatibility (8-bit), and the FM emulation sounds a bit off in some games. It's still one of the best cards for DOS gaming though.
The native ESS1xxx mode was also 16bit / stereo/44100Hz, and some games used this mode. And by the way, SB16 was not compatible with SBPro, and if the game was not compatible with SB16, then the maximum you could expect is on SB2. 0 8bit/mono/44100 :))
Finally got my P166MMX build together (inspired by your video on how flexible it is) and have been pricing one of these cards for a bit now (it came with an OptI card that's... okay enough). At this point I just need to decide between the McCake and the Dreamblaster X16GS. I'm primarily using the PC for MS-Dos but i do have a compact flash card with Win 95 I use on occasion too and opinions seem to be split. Either way thank you so much for everything you do!
The McCake is all about MT-32. The X16GS is Serdaco's best option for General MIDI.
All the sound cards I've had have been Creative ones. SB16ASP, SB Live!, and SB X-Fi Fatality (PCI interface, though I think they may have made a PCI Express version later on). Current machine doesn't have a dedicated card, but its output goes over TOSLINK to a transmitter for wireless headphones and all the FM I listen to is from emulators, so it doesn't really matter if the chip is rubbish if all it's doing is just acting as a glorified serial link.
Might look into the ESS FM emulation, though. I've always enjoyed listening to MIDI files with different patch sets.
I have a whole box full of new old ESS audiodrive cards somewhere. No joke thought they were worthless but bought just because wanted something basic for DOS systems.
Ha!! i had this card!!! It even gets better when your game supports "ES FM Synth" It goes from sounding like ablib to sounding incredible. Side note, the 1688 itsnt the only one that supported it, So did the 1686.
Had it ESS in most of my early machines, I found it to be a decent card, even in non native mode.
Good and informative video. Definitely got a dub from me. I'm a 90s kid that's a sucker for FM Synthesis
PC store I worked in used those cards in most of our custom builds unless something else was specifically requested. I couldn't even begin to estimate the number of them I had installed back in the day.
I am an OPL3/ESFM purist, I like them both equally 🙂
Yes!
so glad i've got a few ess cards in my collection.
Awesome to hear the Comparison in MIDI in The Settlers II, since I only heard General MIDI and OPL3 Music... But the OST is just nostalgic, regardless if it's a different MIDI Device than I was used to 😊
Also, never looked deeper into ESFM, I only remembered something to do with ESS Audio MIDI in Settlers II. Great that it's being discovered though.
My first sound card? Well, I only had those onboard Sound cards on the motherboard...(Until building these Retro PCs myself) It was some weird C-Media thingy, which was fine I guess, but nothing to write home about. 😅
Yes I am a big fan of the ESSFM, I love my ESS Solo-1 and to me its an unofficial OPL4.
What I love so much about it is that even though the majority of games don't support it the OPL3 emulation sounds so close it doesn't matter.
And of course the fact I can use it in nearly all games on my more modern via board is fantastic, my YMF744 didn't support it.
In my build in particular I have it paired with a SoundBlaster Audigy by hooking it up to the AUX port of the audigy and hooking up the cd-drive to the audigy. That way in Windows i get all the EAX / Soundfont stuff and rebooting to MS-Dos for the ESS is seamless. Theres a tool out there on vogons for the Audigy 1 that enables its mixer without an IRQ or driver running in the background. So I activate that and then the ESS driver.
Beautiful solution!
About ESS ESFM! Mystical, mysterious, with great depth, but unfortunately not really recognized... :(
What a pity that the game creators only used it in OPL3 mode. But even in compatible mode, it sounded a little deeper and brighter. This was especially noticeable in the game "Dune" from Cryo.
theALFEST Channel "cqm vs esfm vs opl3. audible defference."
ua-cam.com/video/rXWIx60FKS0/v-deo.htmlsi=fur9E3WUl339l89l
theALFEST Channel " Dune-Opl3 Soundtrack (esfm)"
ua-cam.com/video/NsiGWP-FpSw/v-deo.htmlsi=7OXB1MZTGX3V8zH7
The Tech Ambrosia channel also has a video comparing how different OPL3 implementations sound, in particular ESS ESFM " OPL vs ESS vs ??? - Six cards tested"
ua-cam.com/video/OgVhxEaWLz8/v-deo.htmlsi=9k7gcvReO4oAlLhZ
Fun fact, in DOS games, ESS could be used in its native 16-bit/stereo/44100Hertz mode, where it sounded much cleaner than in SBPro compatibility mode. But that's not all! There were several trackers whose creators were able to" overclock " ESS AudioDrive to a sampling rate of 96,000 Hertz! Incredibly, the change in sound quality was audible to the "naked" ear!
Nice comparisons, I'll listen to them later.
Really amazing audio coming out of a budget FM chip. Very cool stuff.
I love the ESFM synth on my Terratec GOLD 16/96 which is by far my favourite soundcard in my 486(DX2-80). Especially on The Settlers II - my favourite game from the old days! 🤘jenzGuitarist🤘
the IBM ThinkPad 365XD has an audiodrive ES1688 and i happen to own one.
good to know that it has this secret trick.
my first sound card I don't remember exactly but it did use a Crystal chip. I still have it and I'm pretty sure of where it is but I don't feel like digging out from where it's buried to find out more about it. Do also have an ESS card around somewhere I picked up much later on.
I compose new music with the opl3 for my channel, so I did a sound comparison with 10 other cards ( including the ESS) and I was very surprised to discover how similar the FM synthesis was and how much more treble there is on other ISA SBP compatible cards from that era. Regardless, my first card was a Sound Blaster Pro so I'm dedicated to it for sentimental reasons and my love of FM synthesis. Had a laugh at "Noise Blaster" I may have to steal that one. Great video.
I grew up in the era when SB Pro was new. We all called them NoiseBlasters, for what they indeed were :) None of us wanted one so ultimately we ended up bragging about our GUSes, PASes and whatnot later on :) But then again, none of us wanted an FM synth either (who would, when there were much more realistically sounding WT cards already?), so even ESS was out of question.
Anyway, it is beautiful to see someone still creating music for OPL3 in this era, that in itself is very commendable. Keep up with your efforts, there are not many people like that anymore.
@@Beus38 Thanks for that, I recall being overjoyed to leave the SBP behind back then, and the idea of having "real" instrument sounds (with my Roland SCC-1) was a dream come true. But 30 years later when I decided to revisit the SBP demo song on UA-cam, I had a rush of memories and started to realize how much I really enjoyed FM synthesis sounds. I think it's due to the endless hours I spent in front of my 386 back then, burning those sounds deep into my brain. I love that chip.
@@esc2dos I only came to love it much later in life. As I said, I was one of the spoiled kids who never experienced true OPL synth back in the day and lived through years of PC beeps (I even played MOD files on PC speaker and had a Sound driver for PC Speaker in my Win3.1 installation!), before getting a soundcard much later, and a WT one right away. Oh, how much I loved its sound :) It was a fast 486 IIRC, sometime in late 1995. So, in a similar fashion, my GUS PnP Pro patchset is burned in my brain as I spent years playing on it :)
@@Beus38 It was really quite a surprise what an impact these sounds made. Big regret that I don't have my SCC-1 card anymore, that and the GUS cards are going for insane prices. I'd imagine you'd probably even have similar nostalgic memories with that PC speaker sound. Those were exciting times back then when all this stuff was new, it had a profound effect on us.
@@esc2dos Exactly, I still hold those memories dear :) Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to give away my GUS years ago but at least I managed to get a more-than-decent replacement for it - the Orpheus II, with original AMD Interwave. And I occasionally relive those memories - like when I built my 486 machine lately, I cloned the disk I was using until around 2003, and one of the first things I ran (besides a few notorious DOS games) was my original ModPlay configured for PC speaker, and marveled at the sounds again :)
Wow I remembered that model name right off the bat.. Audiodrive 1688. Had one of these back in the day and it sounded so much better than the cheap Opti card that my first 486 came with.
wow, especially heroes 2 surprised me, almost like midi 😯
I owned a BTC 1859 PnP ISA sound card with wavetable. But mainly I used general midi on it. From what I traced on the internet it had ES1868F, ES690F, ES981P, ES983J chips on it. I had no idea I had such a treasure. 😁
I have an Atrend ATC-6631 with Yamaha YMF719E-S OPL3-SAx (and X2GS add-on for MIDI) in my 486DX2/66 build and an unknown brand SC1868-3D with ESS AudioDrive ES1869F (and E-Wave add-on for MIDI which by the way also has an ESS chip on it namely the ES692S) in my P233MMX build. I fully recapped both with Panasonic caps and I'm very happy with both of them for all my retro DOS gaming. Didn't know about the ESS FM native mode and that demo disk. I'll be sure to check it out for myself!
NOICE! Too bad this info wasn't available almost 30 years ago.
Interesting, it sounds closer to Genesis/Megadrive 2612 music (with more polyphony of course), which makes sense because it has more operators and didnt have to double up on it's channels to get four-op like the OPL3 did. Nice little showcase.
One thing I never understood was that even though OPL3 was capable of basic stereo, it always seemed to come out of soundcards in mono.
Yes, most games just focused on the lowest option, the OPL2.
I had the PAS Card it sounded really nice when games had the option for the card.
The issue is most of the games you would end up in SB 16 or 32 modes.
If I remember right, my first Soundcard was an obscure Aztech NX pro Stereo. It was an improvement over having no Soundcard at all, but I remember it sounding dull. Such a ESS would have sounded way better. But I will never forget hearing that Soundblaster Sound on the Gunship 2000 Intro back then. A lot of other Soundcards followed until today.
First sound card was an Adlib. I reverse engineered it because I couldn't afford a book, and wrote a sequencer. Then I found another Adlib, cut one of the address lines, and was able to get stereo fm with my sequencer! If I hadn't switched to digital computer music, I would have been thrilled to explore this chip! I had a few over the years but didn't know they were anything special at the time.
Wow, awesome, thank you for sharing.
FM Synthesis always puts me in a good mood..
"better" is relative anyways ^^, what I enjoy about retro soundcards is that there is so much variety, that's what I enjoy, listening to stuff on all kinds of different soundcards, not necessarily some "better" version.
I loved my PAS16. It was an awesome card.
great video thank you for sharing!
Nice. It is the first I have heard of this. To be honest though, all of my DOS builds have Creative cards with Yamaha OPL. Apart from one that has Soundblaster 32 CT3670 with Creative CQM instead of OPL3.
Have a few Thinkpad 760s which also have an ESS1688 Audiochip. Usually used the SBPro option for games there but will need to try out if they also support ESFM. Although I also noticed the ESS1688 option in some sound selections...
I'm one of those that will probably still stick to OPL2 and 3 for my FM synth needs, out of familiarity and nostalgia. However, I do appreciate exploring all the different sounds and quirks between them that are out there, and it's part of the fun of this part of the hobby. I'll have to give some of my ESS cards another look sometime! Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is that ESS Audio Drive was really popular for OEM prebuilt machines in the late 90s, so a lot of systems will already have one ready to go.
Some Compaq Presarios from the mid 90s came with built in ESS Sound.
I got lucky and found phenom 2 1100t new in box with fx8150 aswell to top that for 20€. Just arrived and started watching the video at the same time.
~happy times.
Even more happy times! Someone sold me a working pc with 7900 gtx for 40€ and brought it to my home after 30minutes of paying lol.
1:03 Have a guess? I can recognize that chip's logo right off! ESS! Though I can't be sure of which ESS, so, yeah, that part will be a guess. 1868?
4:57 Darn it! A 1688!
8:40 That is some good news! I used to have a computer with an 1868 Audiodrive, and it sounded pretty good to me. In the past, I've been disappointed with some emulators, and MIDI soundfonts, because they didn't replicate the sound of the Audiodrive.
Man esfm is truly underrated. I dont have much material in the midi department but the drivers for win95 work pretty good. My best guess is esfm can utilize 4op mode natively because it boasts 72 operators which gives a very respectful 18 4op channels. The thing is besides them developing it the instruments patches they used seem a little lacking. Maybe if they had more time to let it shine we would see more amazing things.
I had no idea there was a demo disk for the thing either.
I do like how midi sounds on the cards though. I believe i have 1 ess audiodrive card floating around and an ess audio drive built in on my ThinkPad i still kick around once in a while.