How dose volume even work

[Karmeck]

How is it determined?

The volume knob is not emulated to my knowledge.

Why is there no way to increase it? Independent from system audio.

That is the only difference I can find as a simple volume match, makes samples from a real unit and the emulator, sound the same.

So why is it set so low? Is my real question.

[johnnovak]

So why is it set so low? Is my real question.

To avoid clipping, that's pretty obvious.

There are wild volume differences between the effective volumes of different game soundtracks. So you can avoid clipping by setting it so low that even the loudest games don't clip. But a volume control is the real solution, just like on the real unit.

The real unit also starts saturating the analog components fairly early even with medium-volume ouput, around 10-11 o'clock of the volume knob. If you set it to 3 o'clock, there is obvious saturation going on, looking at the recorded waveform (the peaks are shaved off), but it still sounds good. Then if you keep increasing it further, you get distortion, but it's not hard digital clipping, more like transistor distortion.

So aadding soft-clipper / waveshaper output stage would be nice to emulate this (with the option to disable it).