Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this thing right here is the OPL2LPT
I bought one of these recently because it does something i have always
dreamed about. And yes I do dream of these things, and that is: it provides a
proper sound card that is not only using the parallel port, but is Adlib
compatible at an affordable price. Especially compared to a full-sized
original Adlib card. But yeah this really takes it a step beyond by going with the
parallel port. Augh, what I would have done for one of these back in the day. On a retro
MS-DOS machine with only a PC speaker having Adlib support is a notable
upgrade. But yeah the OPL2LPT is built and sold by Serdashop in Belgium, the
same folks responsible for the excellent DreamBlaster daughter boards and the
CVX4 Covox Speech Thing clone, among other things. And it is currently available for
30 euros for a kit you assemble yourself or 50 euros for an assembled and tested
unit, for a limited time. I bought the preassembled one because I'm lazy and I
wanted a plug-and-play solution much like the Covox Speech Thing.
In fact you might be thinking that the OPL2LPT is similar to the Covox and the
Disney Sound Source which I have covered here in the past. And that's true, but
instead of only working with software that specifically supports it, this
provides the much more common Adlib compatible standard used in thousands of
DOS games. And this is not just emulating it or imitating it in any way. This is the
legit way of doing it. It features an original Yamaha YM3812 OPL2 sound chip,
ahh! The same as the Adlib and the original Sound Blasters back in the day
and this is quite important to me considering I'm personally quite picky
about how I like my FM synths to sound. And while I would have preferred the later
OPL3 I'm happy with the 2 in this case. And there's a chance of an updated
version with an OPL3 in the future. As for the rest of the board you get the
expected male parallel port connector as well as a mini USB cable spot for power
and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack for sound output. And there's a
little volume knob on the end just like you'd get on an original Adlib card
from 1987. There's also a tiny reset button nestled
in there in case things go weird, as well as a jumper that can be shorted to
increase the bass output on the OPL2. Setting it up is straightforward as you
might expect: you just plug it in to a free 25-pin parallel port, plug in the
audio cable to your speakers or whatever, then power it via USB... which is one of
the more irksome pieces of the device. The PCs that I want to use this on do not
have a free USB port, so I had to plug mine into an adapter and into the wall.
And apparently you can also use a USB to PS/2 adapter and plug it into the PS/2 port
but that again doesn't work if you have that port filled up. Still even with the
extra cables dangling all over the place this is absolutely ideal for say, laptops
that lack a built-in sound chip of any kind. Or even those of us who want a
proper OPL2 chip on a desktop with something inferior installed already, or
you just have limited slots and you don't want to fill it up with something
else. I just have a bunch of tiny desktops and laptops and stuff that this
is ideal for, it's great. Now seeing that this isn't exactly working in the same
way as an original Adlib would, I mean, that didn't require any drivers or
really set up of any kind... This does need a little bit more to get
it going with your games. One program provided to do this is called ADLIPT
a TSR that lets your computer know there's an Adlib device present on the
printer port, just like there's an Adlib installed. But this runs into problems
with protected mode games and it also requires a 386 CPU or better, so running
it on an IBM PC, XT, or AT is pretty much out of the question.
And even running on a 100MHz 486 DX4 here I ran into some audio slowdown
and gameplay stuttering, so it's not ideal
So, short of running it on a much faster machine, in that case you'd want to use
ADPATCH which patches games directly to specifically look for the OPL2LPT
and also runs smoother while supporting sub-386 CPUs. The downside is that it
only supports a handful of games right now, and sadly this means that games like
Duke Nukem 3D don't yet work with the OPL2LPT at all. But for the games that
do work with it, dude, this thing does its job wonderfully. Despite the
slowdowns here and there on certain hardware, the OPL2 sound is dead-on as
it should be, and the fact that it's working over freakin' parallel just
amuses me endlessly. So with all that being said here is the reward, the payoff.
Enjoy some lovely Adlib sound samples!
*lovely Adlib music and sounds play*
Yeah that's pretty much it for what I want to show of the OPL2LPT
I hope that gives you a good idea of what it can and cannot do. Such as with
Doom there you might have noticed that the sound effects were not playing.
That's because Doom uses digital PCM sound effects and the Adlib does not
generate those, it's only an FM synth. Now some games will modulate this and play
PCM through Adlib but most often that is not the case. So unless the game does
Adlib sound you are pretty much just gonna get music through this. And that's
just normal for an OPL2 Adlib compatible. Again the real downsides here
are if you're running it on a slower system then the games are probably gonna
slow down here and there and have some stuttering issues. But even on a faster
system with a Pentium or Pentium II or beyond, there's still plenty of times
especially with games after 1992 or 93 or so, where it just will not work. A lot
of my favorites don't give sound at all. Games like Duke Nukem 3D, SimCity 2000,
even games like Wacky Wheels it just doesn't see that there's an FM synth
there whatsoever. But really if the alternative is having no FM synth at all
on the particular computer that I might want to use this on, then well here you
go! For those ideal situations this is pretty ideal! And support for other games
will pretty much only improve over time as the TSR improves and ADPATCH gets
more support. And that is awesome.
The OPL2LPT gets the LGR seal of approval!
EDIT: Um. There was supposed to be an outro here, but instead it's just quiet music.
Whoops.
Thanks for watching!