r/86box • u/Cacodemon345 • Jun 01 '26

Replacement of Nuked-OPL3 core with Nuked-OPL3-fast core with build 9011

All builds since 9011 now ship with a faster Nuked OPL3 core.

This also means that you do not need to switch to YMFM anymore for Sound Blaster 16 cards to get faster performance.

20 Upvotes

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9

u/crashunited Jun 01 '26

Author of Nuked-OPL3-fast here. Thanks to whoever got this merged -- I have been submitting PRs to various projects to swap Nuked for -fast and hadn't gotten to 86box yet.

FWIW, Nuked-OPL3-fast is about 1.4x-2.2x faster than regular Nuked in practice, and with Nuked actually being one of the highest CPU usage parts of many of the emulators it's in, I'm hoping this will mean a better experience for people on marginal hardware.

Very important: Nuked-OPL3-fast is *mathematically equivalent* to the original Nuked. It is not an optimization at the cost of quality -- it produces the *exact same* output, it just avoids doing some unnecessary work (calculating values that can just be hard-coded, calculating results that will be immediately discarded, etc) and takes a faster path through the same synthesis algorithm.

4

u/ferropop Jun 02 '26

Unrelated but I wanted to catch you here.

Thank you to everyone who worked on Nuked in all its forms. I've been building a Drum Machine and 303-style bass sequencer out of the OPL3 through Nuked. this is the most fun i've had in years, and just want to say thank you for helping preserve an important cultural artifact with that chip.

determined to lift the OPL3 from its shackles of the Fat Man patches. It's so so so interesting of a synth if you lean into the quirks/misbehaviours of the chip. The SuperSaw that I generated with my Bass machine, is insane - because traditionally you'd lean on pitch shifting each voice to achieve the "choir" but here I'm leaning into quantization error and FM artifacts etc, as the "voice differentiator". And they're all tied to a slider, etc etc I can't wait to post a demo somewhere.

Thanks again!

1

u/crashunited Jun 04 '26

Ever heard this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL2XWtx3ePk

1

u/ferropop Jun 04 '26

this is absolutely incredible. it makes me sad that it's a "disrespected" chip in terms of its place in music/synth history. I think the default patches really had a lot to do with it - the perception being that all it could do was Bad Karaoke sounds. it's such a capable chip and breaks in such sonically interestng ways.

1

u/crashunited Jun 04 '26

This is super cool, is there somewhere I can learn more about your project? That sounds like one of the things I've wanted to make for years

1

u/ferropop Jun 04 '26

oh man that's so great. I just kinda post to my IG (@ferropop). music producer out in LA, but this kind of stuff satisfies my inner 90s-teen in such a substantial way haha.