[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Errrh, no. You cannot "easily" reproduce YM2149 sound on Paula. Not accurately in any case.

Define 'accurately'.

First, the volume levels of Paula are (more or less) linear, whereas YM has logarithmic scale. This means not enough volume levels on Paula to impersonate as an YM, at least with small values. But this is probably your smallest problem.

Paula has 14 bits per channel, which should be plenty enough. But as you say, this is the smallest problem.

Second, the YM has 3 outputs that get mixed on the ST in a strange way...

Not that strange, it just sums the 3 DAC current outputs in a single 1k resistor. This causes compression at higher levels, with the level of each channel affecting the others. On my AY/YM board each output is loaded individually with 470 Ohms, which virtually eliminates compression and interaction.

The output isn't an exact square wave either.

On the ST this is true, since low pass filtering is applied with a cutoff frequency of ~2kHz.

At the end, you can play many musics with simple emulation, but it will not sound like real ST and it's easy to tell the difference. And some musics will fail miserably.

And those same musics could well 'fail miserably' on my own actual YM2149 (assuming I could even get a player for them).

More complex emulation, like what's done in emulators require output table of 4096 entries sampled from real ST, and takes half the power of 68030/50. I know this, because i wrote both.

This is where you went wrong. I never said anything about emulating an ST, but simply reproducing the 'sound' of a YM2149 - the same way we can reproduce the 'sound' of a piano or a guitar. Yes, there will be differences between that sound and various YM2149 implementations (which themselves have their own slightly different sounds) but unless you define 'better' to mean 'closer to the exact sound of an ST', the Amiga is objectively better because it can play AY/YM style music and more.

Making the ST's sound the 'gold standard' (that makes other platforms no better because they can't easily emulate it exactly) is silly because in the ST the YM2149 is crippled by its mixer circuit. It's not even as good as a YM could be, let alone as good as an Amiga.