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General >> General Board >> Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre tools
(Message started by: WohlstandFox on Aug 24th, 2020, 4:00am)

Title: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre tools
Post by WohlstandFox on Aug 24th, 2020, 4:00am
Hello!

I am glad that Jamie O'Connel made these tools: These tools gave me a big power in my childhood: I had to learn how OPL voices are looks, and I had to tweak with hand-made banks (one thing I did is an attempt to backport Doom's bank). About 8~9 years later since I learned C++ programming, I began some of my projects, related to OPL3 chip:

- libADLMIDI, a MIDI synthesizer library with OPL3 emulation. It's a fork of ADLMIDI by Bisqwit, made in 2014'th year, majorly reworked and improved. While it's mainly used for music player plugins or game engine embedded music players, it also can be built for DOS (with using of DJGPP).
https://github.com/Wohlstand/libADLMIDI

- OPL3 Bank Editor, an editor for various OPL3 related bank formats for various DOS games, sound engines, and music applications.
https://github.com/Wohlstand/OPL3BankEditor

I developed it because was no good OPL3 timbre editors for the modern platform was exist:
-- SBTimbre is a good thing, however, it needs DosBox on modern platforms. Also, it can use IBK banks only and it can do rhythm-mode drums only (other OPL3 synthesizers do use drums via melodic voices without rhythm mode).
-- IMF Creator that I had to use to work with OP2 banks for DOOM game. While it's good, it had a very inaccurate OPL2 built-in emulator, and also, it crashes sometimes.
-- Other bank formats never had their own bank editor (an example, TMB for Apogee Sound System, or AD/OPL for AIL), or a bank Editor was being a part of a paid proprietary dev kit for a certain audio library (for example, Junglevision or DMX).
-- All of these editors can't deal with all existing bank formats, and can't save into any format at all.
So, I did the thing that can that.

Coming back to the main discussion about FM-Symth and SBTimbre: after 20 years, these tools became a part of history, and I think, it's a time to open their source. While they can still be useful in as-is form, I want to modify each of them (to fix some known glitches, or add some random feature by myself). It's your choice what to do with source code, however, I beg you to publish the source! (You can apply any license you want: "GPLv3" to restrict FOSS projects only, "BSD" to allow everything except mentioning of self and this project in ads, "MIT" or "ZLib" to allow everything but keep credits, "Apache" to enforce forks take different name than original, or write your terms you want to apply). I also want to look at these codes to better interpret rhythm-mode drums I had to make at me, however, they aren't working the same as at you, and I want to fix that.

Jamie O'Connell, Thank you for making my childhood richer and more interesting!

Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by Jamie OConnell on Jul 3rd, 2022, 5:14pm
Thanks for the kind words!  I might be able to release the source for these, but it will take an ancient system to build them:

SBTIMBRE was written in object pascal using a GUI framework from Borland!

FMSynth is a C++ windows driver built using the Win 98 DDK from Microsoft.  

If you're still interested, I'll try to find some time to dig up the source. Let me know...

Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by WohlstandFox on Jul 3rd, 2022, 5:22pm
Hello!

I'm so glad you finally replied after a long delay!

Yes,  I'm still interested in that. You may don't worry, I have a big collection of various historical stuff, but right, it's always good to make a brief explanation of requirements for others' understanding.

Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by WohlstandFox on Jul 3rd, 2022, 5:24pm
P.S. Even without having actual ancient system to build the stuff, the code itself can be inspected or ported to work somewhere also.

Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by Jamie OConnell on Jul 3rd, 2022, 5:31pm
Cheers. It will take me some time to get it together.  Sorry for the 2 year delay -- I just saw the forum post today.



Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by Jamie OConnell on Jul 18th, 2022, 11:09am

on 07/03/22 at 17:24:13, WohlstandFox wrote:
P.S. Even without having actual ancient system to build the stuff, the code itself can be inspected or ported to work somewhere also.


Bad news first:  I cannot locate the SBTimbre code anywhere! I believe it is irretrievably lost, sorry...

Good news:  I have created a repository for the FMSynth driver project on Github.  It is released under the MIT license:
https://github.com/Jamie-MIDIOX/FMSynth

Title: Re: Please, open source of FM-Synth and SBTimbre t
Post by WohlstandFox on Jul 18th, 2022, 11:22am

Quote:
Bad news first:  I cannot locate the SBTimbre code anywhere! I believe it is irretrievably lost, sorry...


Sad, but I hope, once upon you would find some in a random place, as my buddy from China who found his old sources made 20 years ago and lost in a time, on one of his backup CD disks from the huge heap. Or, probably, somebody also among your buddies held a copy of the stuff. But, having FMSynth being found, it's much better than nothing!


Quote:
Good news:  I have created a repository for the FMSynth driver project on Github.  It is released under the MIT license


Thank you very much, I'm so happy now! Gonna research this and tweak this as soon as possible.



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