Welcome to The Other Blog!


Two guys from Paris.
Fond of vintage synths and computers,
video games music and 8-bit culture.
We make chiptune on the hardware we love:
Nintendo Game Boy, Sega Megadrive/Genesis, Commodore 64.
We compose and record them from the real stuff, plain and pure,
just for your ears.
Website: http://theotherdays.net
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Jun 9, 2012

The Joy Of MSX

After several attempts, we finally did it!

We soldered a DIN 8 to SCART video cable for our mysterious CX5M-II. A CX5M-what, you say? Please don't tell me you don't remember?

So we started it and suddenly, we saw a dark pink screen with  light pink letters:


MSX system
Version 1.0
Coryright 1983 by Microsoft

We just SCREAMED WITH JOY!
Obviously there is something fishy with the blue channel in the video cable. Looks like we didn't solder it appropriately but that's good enough already. The reward was worth the skin burns!

So right after that, we saw this new screen :


MSX BASIC version 1.0
Coryright 1983 by Microsoft
28815 bytes free
Ok



color               auto                  goto                list                      run 



Aww, what a nice way for this machine to tell us that it is working, 100% perfect!

Happiness never comes alone: the machine came with a cartridge embedded in Slot A. 
This is the YRM-301, short name for YAMAHA MIDI RECORDER.
We ran it with a simple:

CALL MR
 

And we saw it popping on screen, just like the almighty Internets have predicted. O glorious day.
But wait, we don't want to record midi, do we? We rather want to hear something!
So we tried something like:


CALL FMV 


And boom, here shows FM VOICING PROGRAM II!
Yup, this CX5M-II integrates the YRM-502 ROM for tweaking the integrated SFG-05 FM synth and create custom FM sounds. Yay, how nice!... But we'll leave that for later, cuz what we want now is:
HEAR SOMETHING!

So we ultimately ran this last command:


CALL MUSIC

And somebody up there definitely heard our call:
 


30 years old machine, alive and popping FM corn via MIDI! Ain't it just awesome? 

Well, we know what we're gonna use for our next tunes! 

Later fellow bleepers!

Cheers, 
The Other Days.




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