The yamaha sound emulation for dosbox

[BananaJane]

The popup screen before the game starts talks about it
Is this something that's possible for other games?
Like can I configure the steam version of doom to use the yamaha sound?

[ThreeSon]

The Yamaha OPL2/OPL3 is a chip that was used on sound cards during the period when this game came out, including the Sound Blaster 16. It's not an actual seclectable sound source.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I'm fairly certain that if you're using Sound Blaster 16 as the music card for whatever DOS game you're playing, then you are already hearing the Yamaha OPL3 sound chip in action, or the OPL2 for games that only support Sound Blaster or Sound Blaster Pro.

However for Hocus Pocus on Steam, they configured the game to use General MIDI as the music source by default, which sounds better than the Sound Blaster option, to my ears at least.

You can change it if you want and see if one of the other music options sounds better to you. To do that, open the Hocus.conf file located in steamapps\common\Hocus Pocus\Hocus Pocus. Scroll down to the very bottom to the autoexec section that looks like this:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

@echo off
Mount C ".."
C:
cls
Hocus.exe
exit

Replace that entire section with this:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

@echo off
Mount C ".."
C:
cls
echo.
echo  Hocus Pocus
echo  by Apogee
echo.
echo  1. Play Game
echo  2. Setup
echo.
echo  3. Exit
echo 
choice /c123 /s Choose option: /n

if errorlevel 3 goto exit
if errorlevel 2 goto setup
if errorlevel 1 goto play


:play
cls
Hocus.exe
exit

:setup
cls
setup.exe
exit

:exit
exit

Then save the file, run the game and select 2 for the Setup program, "Select Music Card", and then one of the options.

You can try Sound Blaster, which would then use the OPL2 chip for music (I think) and see how that sounds for you. If you don't like it, go back to using General MIDI with MIDI port 330 (default).