PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[commodorejohn]

I like the Z80 for having an astonishingly large register complement for an 8-bitter, but it just chews up so many cycles per instruction...

Wish the 8086 had evolved from it instead of the 8080, that's for sure.

[commodorejohn]

Again, just to nitpick, this is not entirely true, as there are XG implementations based on OPL3 (look at YMF719). XG is no more of a particular sound than General MIDI is, and implementations vary, although I recognize that most were boring romplers.

Not really. The YMF719 is a sound-card-in-a-chip combo deal; it only includes the OPL3 for legacy purposes. For its "XG" implementation it's actually got wavetable synthesis capabilities (though I don't know that every YMF719-based sound card used them, since it required external sample memory, and that would've cost money.) By the time the XG standard came around, all of Yamaha's synthesizers were "AWM" (their name for PCM.)

XG isn't an exact particular sound set, yes, but in practice it's even more narrowly confined to certain sounds than GM, which at least sees variation from manufacturer to manufacturer. About the only variation in XG instruments is in overall sound quality (rather than significant differences in actual sound design,) plus a few sounds unique to particular models that they throw in for variety.

(And frankly, GM was really the start of the problem to begin with - while I understand the motives behind it, it turned out to be a disastrous move from MIDI-as-instrument-control to MIDI-as-sound-reproduction, which was never what it was intended to be in the first place.)

[commodorejohn]

And again, for the record: I don't think all ROMplers are boring crap, or that there's anything inherently wrong with the concept. Some of them I quite like; I just got the keyboard version of my E-mu Proteus/1, and I'm on the lookout for a good deal on a Korg X5D to replace the 05/RW I had to sell a while back. But they live or die by the sounds the manufacturer puts in 'em, and more often than not (especially in the age of GM, GS, and XG) that's a collection of maybe technically-quality but character-free samples covering a set of generic bases, and there's rarely much you can do to make that very interesting aside from experimenting with whether or not they sound less bland when layered together. And with the way they've completely dominated the synth landscape for the last 19-20 years, it's been extremely disheartening to realize that the vast majority of the good synths are about as old as I am, or older. (Though we've finally started to see an analog revival gathering steam in the last decade, thank God.)

[commodorejohn]

I want to, but I've got a lot of brushing up on low-level electronics to do before I'm ready to try my hand at that

[commodorejohn]

The Sega Genesis uses one of Yamaha's many four-operator FM chips, so there are actually a number of MIDI modules/keyboards that are essentially the same. The Yamaha FB-01 in particular is pretty much identical in terms of capabilities (minus the ability to play samples and the PSG carried over from the Master System,) with a couple more channels to boot.

[commodorejohn]

Quite. It was basically a competitor to the MT-32 back in the day (and also formed the guts of the IBM Music Feature Card.)