SoundFX Macs Opera support for AdPlug

Many of you remember the FM-sounds that the OPL-chips on old soundcards like the AdLib or the Sound Blaster make. One cold day last December, I remembered that when I was around 12 years old, I bought tracker-software for creating AdLib-tunes. More important things had to wait, I had an “open invoice” with that specific piece of software…

It was boxed software on one 5¼” disk and I bought it because the box promised that with that software, I’d be able to add music to my own programs!

Being an avid QuickBASIC programmer (and electric guitar player) at that age, I was hooked. However, my enthusiasm waned off when I read the documentation on the TSR that came with it: Allocating memory? Calling an interrupt? What?

None of my computer-friends could tell me how this works. Since this was one of the few softwares that I actually bought back then, I was disappointed.

Some 25 years later I didn’t remember the name of the software any more, but after some looking around I stumbled over YouTube videos by a Mr. Grzondziel that showed the tracker. Thanks for sending me the software! Oddly enough, I was in contact with him a few years before that about some other topic.

Also, I noticed that AdPlug, an open source AdLib player, didn’t have support for files composed with this tracker.

I couldn’t find the original author, so after some reverse engineering (and running Turbo Debugger through a virtual serial port on two DOSBoxes) and lots of listening, here goes: SoundFX Macs Opera support for AdPlug.

And this is how it sounds, this song is “Necronom” by Michael Tschögl: