i'm very interested in this, except i'd love to keep the possibility of having OpenMPT adhere to a single hardware OPL3 chip as well, aside of the option with per-instrument OPL3 instances

This is in case somebody writes a module converter to formats that have real hardware replayers (think A2M), which isn't an impossible prospect, since i already know of one person who might be willing to do just that

You can easily constrain yourself to that by not using more than 18 channels and not using NNAs. As soon as you use NNAs you would be way outside of the A2M specs anyway. I don't really see any value in this limitation that cannot already be achieved in simply by writing a song that conforms to the hardware limits.

Fair enough, now that i think about it again

Note-Cut behaviour has been reworked in r11226: ^^^ cuts the note as expected, pitch/volume/pan can still be modified after note-off.

Behaviour was modified once again in 11233 as the legacy flag was not 100% compatible; the meaning of the flag was also inverted, if the flag is enabled, the more logical mode is used. The flag is now also disabled automatically when converting from S3M to preserve playback behaviour more accurately.