Making music in MSX Basic
78I'm probably one of the few people who live in the US who owns an MSX computer, which, unless you live in Japan, Europe, Brazil, or Japan, you might've never heard of until now. Well, long story kinda long...
In the early 1980s, Kazuhiko Nishi, then vice-president of Microsoft Japan, envisioned a standardized hardware platform based around one of the hottest CPUs of the time, the immortal Zilog Z80A. Until that point, most Japanese computer makes were doing their own thing. After the MSX platform was introduced in 1983, pretty much everybody under the sun was doing MSX systems. Outside of Japan, they also achieved popularity in Europe, Brazil, some parts of the Soviet Union, among other places. Here in the US, only a few models were released, including the system this video was recorded on, the Yamaha CX5M "music computer", and the platform had a hard time in general, competing against well-established systems like the Commodore 64, the Apple II family, the ZX Spectrum (in Europe), and many, many more.
Later on, there were the MSX 2 and 2+ standards which expanded on the original MSX architecture. I'm not sure if there were any models released in the US that supported the 2/2+ standards, since, by that point (1986-1988), there were much more powerful systems available, including the ever-expanding IBM PC compatible market. The MSX was finally retired in 1995.
This particular system, the Yamaha CX5M, has an interesting addition, the SFG-01 "FM Sound Synthesizer". Yes, this thing actually has an FM synth, but I haven't really messed around with it. I know I've got the original box for this thing somewhere as well as a couple of cartridges for it (software for the FM synth), an MSX Basic reference manual, and *I think* even the YK-01 keyboard. The Basic program at the start of the video is actually a sample from the owner's manual, and, beyond that, it's just me doing a short thing with what the MSX Basic reference manual calls "Music Macro Language", which allows full use of the built-in AY-3-8910 sound hardware.