Finally looked a bit more dilligently into a bunch of SBI files on my hard drive, and discovered a ‘golden lode’ – a number of timbres from Dune II: Building a Dynasty (aka Battle for Arrakis), the ‘mother of all real-time strategy games’.

SBI stands for Sound Blaster Instruments: those are tiny files of instructions for early SoundBlaster and AdLib soundcards based on Yamaha’s ancient FM synthesizer chips. Those synthesizers are very simplistic, basically just two operators, although they are capable of producing more waveforms than just the classic sine, and this makes them pretty much incompatible with the professional DX/TX series of Yamaha’s synths. I have covered this in a longread for my gaming-related project – Facelifted Gaming – at Substack and Instagram.

Well, since the DOS games still have a cult following, there are whole-range PC hardware emulators like DosBox, that also simulates thos FM chips, namely YM3812 (also known as OPL2). No surprises that eventually they have been forked and turned into VSTi instruments, capable of reading (and sometimes writing) SBI files, along with the zoo of other flavours.

JuceOPLVSTi (see screenshot) is one of them. RN I’m rendering those timbres into .wav files in order to adapt them for Korg wavestate as part of the second volume of Phi Mu Labs soundpack. With some petty trickery to make them sound as rough and lo-fi, as though sounding through the original hardware, – but in stereo. Why? I firmly believe these ‘chirpy-n-chippery’ sounds are a great building block for sound design. And not just for the ‘retro’ sake alone.

Look below: it’s a fully fledged professional synth based on those very OPL2 chips.