MSX related podcasts

Personally I find it hard to listen to a podcast while doing something else though... It easily fades to the background for me, especially when there's also music, and I can eventually suddenly find myself at the end of the podcast, without knowing what the heck was being talked about in the past half hour or so. For the same reason audio books don't quite work for me.

Searching for MSX on Spotify also yielded this Brazilian Portuguese (?) Podcast

Mostly by actually focusing on them, without doing much else in the mean time.

Being on the MSX episode was very fun. We tried recording as much as we could from hardware as possible (which is evident when you listen to some recordings as you can hear the mains hum) so we could have true, real audio examples of the chips on the MSX. Everything PSG, OPLL, and Moonsound was recorded on hardware. Some SCC tracks were emulated though, because we couldn’t find a reliable way of recording the soundtracks at the time. It wasn’t until later that we found a disk containing the soundtracks of all non-Game Collection games and we’ll be using that for the SCC episode. As is stated in the start of the episode, Patrick sat out during production and researching so it was largely down to Steve and I to make everything happen. It was mostly because Steve and I both had actual MSX hardware that it was easy for us to make this without too much trouble, I have every MSX sound chip besides MSX-Audio and an original FM-PAC, but my XDJ has -Music built in and Steve owns an FM-PAC and a WSX. This ended up being great because it meant we could do a side-by-side comparison between different implementations of MSX-Music in case someone wanted to find an option they liked best.

Then there are mistakes and corrections. Late in the episode, they mention Illusion City uses PCM for some of its drums, when this is obviously incorrect. Of course, I knew this beforehand but it never dawned on me how serious of a mistake this was. The surprise you hear in my voice is genuine because that was the first I’d ever heard of that (since it’s incorrect), but I later went back and corrected the error in the comments. Then, early in the episode. I briefly talk about MSXes with stereo and mention a Casio (I think) and give a specific model number, when in reality I was specifically thinking of the Toshiba HX-20. I also corrected this in the comments later. Afterward, to show off PSG stereo we played an example song from a Spectrum game on hardware from my XDJ. How? The game files have .pt3 sources, so I was able to find them, rework them for 60 Hz, and record the three channels separately with PT3PLAY and recombine them as a stereo recording.

And finally, the SCC gloss-over. Doing this episode we realized that the SCC is really the only chip people seem to really care about (and I don’t mean that in a bad way). There’s SO much information available about it that if we were to include it in the episode, it’d be another two hours long, so we decided we’d rightfully dedicate those hours to it. There are some things we don’t know about it yet though, like how similar it is to the 2-channel arcade version in games like Twinbee, how many arcade games it was used in as the “proper” SCC (I only know about one), and how the deformation/rotation/test/etc. register works on the SCC+. Hopefully we’ll find all of that out for its episode so everyone can hear some news about our favorite expansion chip.

I don’t know much about the 2-channel arcade ones either. I do know that I could barely make out an SCC sound in those tracks last I listened to them on Youtube. Perhaps MAME source codes shed some light on it. Hexion does use the SCC proper though (and quite a catchy tune, though the VGM recording is too slow unfortunately, needs to be updated).

Deformation / rotation / test afaik don’t really have many interesting sonic applications. One of the bits resets the phase, which seems mostly useful to ensure the waves stay locked in the same phase whenever you play a song, then again they could easily drift out of phase again so not sure how useful that actually is. Or maybe to drive a CPU-controlled sync effect, but that takes a lot of CPU power, is difficult to time, and affects all channels at once (I think), so yeah… not super useful.

Really enjoyed this, ofcourse. I do have some remarks and additions.

• The comparison with AY to SN was fair, but apart from the 'missing' lower frequency section in the SN, another important difference that wasn't mentioned is that AY has 32 noise frequency increments (0-31) and SN has only 3 (low, mid and high).
• "Penguin Adventure by Zemina"?
• Apart from the "Jungle Theme", Metal Gear NES also has a different "Indoor Theme". For the rest, the soundtracks are the same.
• The soundtrack of "Starship Rendezvous" does actually also use the PSG for melodic purposes, not just percussion.
• Apart from "Starship Rendezvous", another software that uses the 9-channel setting of the OPLL is "Valis II". It only uses 8 of them, though. It would be reasonable to suspect the free channel being reserved for sound effects, but actually, it is not used at all in the game.
• I kind of missed even a brief mention of MB-Stereo, meaning combining of OPL and OPLL. To be honest, I find that more relevant than the theorizing about piling up a bunch of chips which follows.
• Illusion City does not use the PCM for music at all. It is just extremely clever use of the OPLL+PSG. The percussion is mentioned in this context. For instance, the snaredrum sounds so full because it consists of no less than 2 OPLL drum channels and 1 PSG channel combined.
• I get the remark about creators of Moonsound music not knowing what to do with suddenly having 24 channels and I more or less subscribe to that observation. However, I felt only playing a re-arrangement of an Ys song (that uses older chip generations that the OPL4 is simply compatible with) for an example doesn't do justice to the efforts that were done on the chip. I'd like to cite the soundtrack of "Sonyc" as an example.
• I don't get what's so weird and/or hilarious about the construction under which Moonsound cartridges were produced and sold, but maybe that's just because it was a normal situation to us. I've seen scene-produced add-ons to improve graphics or sound for other platforms as well. Are those strange and funny, too?

Looking forward to the podcast focused on the SCC that was announced!

Thanx rjp! I noticed there are a lot of portuguese and spanish spoken retro podcasts out there, but for me it is hard to decide which ones are relevant to our system. So thank you and don´t hesitate to complete this list whenever you found other interesting podcasts!

Looks that Conexión MSX Podcast is not on the list as its first program appeared on February 11th 2018.
It's an spanish spoke podcast....

Pixalated audio released 2 episodes feuturing MSX music after this post:

Episode 105: Illusion city, indepth about the game and its music
Episode 128: Psycho World (Music from the SMS and MSX version, both FM and PSG)

Hey Defnanny, Thanks for adding them
In the mean time they also did a podcast about Greatest Driver (PA154).. but no hurry