sound Sound

The Sound page contains settings related to the emulated machine’s audio hardware.

Parallel port sound devices such as the Disney Sound Source and Covox Speech Thing are not present on this page; they can be configured through the Ports page.

Sound card

Sound card to emulate. Only cards supported by the machine’s expansion buses will be listed. On machines equipped with an onboard sound chip, the Internal option enables the onboard sound.

The Configure button opens a new window with settings specific to the selected sound card, such as the I/O ports, IRQ and DMA channels for ISA cards.

Emulation for the Yamaha OPL series of synthesizers (used by many of the emulated cards) is provided by a modified Nuked OPL3 library.

MIDI Out Device

Device to output MIDI music to, for sound cards equipped with an external MIDI output.

  • None: don’t output MIDI music.

  • FluidSynth: a software soundfont synthesizer. Selecting a soundfont file is required. There will be no synthesizer output if no soundfont is configured, or (on Windows hosts) if the included libfluidsynth.dll or libfluidsynth64.dll file is missing from the 86Box directory.

  • Roland MT-32/CM-32L Emulation: emulate a Roland synthesizer module. Emulation is provided by the Munt library.

  • System MIDI: output to a MIDI device on the host system, such as the Windows software synthesizer or a USB MIDI adapter.

The Configure button opens a new window with settings specific to the selected output device, such as the soundfont to use for FluidSynth and the host MIDI device to use for System MIDI.

MIDI In Device

Device to receive MIDI music from, for sound cards equipped with an external MIDI input.

  • None: don’t receive MIDI music.

  • System MIDI: receive from a MIDI device on the host system, such as a USB MIDI adapter.

The Configure button opens a new window with settings specific to the selected input device, such as the host MIDI device to use for System MIDI.

Standalone MPU-401

Emulate a standalone Roland MIDI Processing Unit ISA card, which allows for MIDI input and output without a MPU-401-equipped sound card.

The I/O port and IRQ can be configured through the Configure button.

Innovation SSI-2001

Emulate the Innovation SSI-2001 ISA sound card, based on the MOS Technology 6581 chip (commonly known as the Commodore SID) and supported by a limited number of games.

SID emulation is provided by the reSID library.

CMS / Game Blaster

Emulate the Creative Music System or Game Blaster ISA sound card, based on dual Philips SAA1099 chips and supported by some games.

Gravis Ultrasound

Emulate the Gravis UltraSound ISA sound card.

The I/O port and amount of onboard RAM can be configured through the Configure button.

Use FLOAT32 sound

Use the 32-bit floating point (instead of 16-bit integer) data type for audio output, which is less prone to clipping but may not work at all on some host systems. Try disabling this if you’re getting no audio output from 86Box at all.

FM synth driver

OPL2/3 emulation back-end to use. Nuked is the default, while YMFM may improve emulation performance at the cost of accuracy.