yes i can provide more information, i have been looking at this chip a while ago, but didnt start any design with it yet. Way too many other projects going on at the moment...
Here is the information i have :
- basic datasheet - see attachment (probably you already found this)
- a Russian site describing a project interfacing this chip, with many useful links : https://vrtp.ru/index.php?act=categories&CODE … le&article=3718
- example code including some YMU762 SDK source - see attachment, in YMU762 subdirectory, SDK files. -> this was found at site above.

Please do figure out this chip! I've been fascinated by it since I learned of it. The YMF825 is extremely similar FM-wise, it pretty much seems to just be the FM synth from the MA-3, but without the voice-doubling in 2op mode. Not only does it have so many FM voices, it has a bunch of different waveforms. Each operator can be one of like a billion different waveforms. It's insane. Just look at all the bloody things! (attachment gotten from a tweet, look at all of them. I believe that might actually correspond to the YMF825 but they should be the same.).

If you want any help from Yamaha they might be more helpful if you ask them about the YMF825 instead, as it has so much in common and is still in production. They also have an ADPCM thing still in production that's probably also the guts of a Yamaha MA-x chip put in its own device, but their website doesn't appear to have a datasheet for it so I'm not sure.
https://device.yamaha.com/en/lsi/products/sound_generator/

That Russian site even has a youtube demo video : https://youtu.be/qqYftv_KT-s

Another guy, Konrad, made many more demos, based on the same MA-3 middleware code (see zip in my first post) :
NaariaylLove.mmf : https://youtu.be/NvPzxPiDSsY
FamiCommodore.mid : https://youtu.be/OF20K_QSMMo
Body&body : https://youtu.be/_gZqhSFfekk
808 Kingdom : https://youtu.be/lPee91aMjOQ
ninja2-3.mid : https://youtu.be/wFPPzIiRzqY

He even has an OPL2 to MA3 conversion demo : https://youtu.be/-R5K8wFJCRA
So I think he has figured out a lot already 😀

dreamblaster wrote on 2021-07-11, 20:02:

That Russian site even has a youtube demo video : https://youtu.be/qqYftv_KT-s […]
Show full quote

That Russian site even has a youtube demo video : https://youtu.be/qqYftv_KT-s

Another guy, Konrad, made many more demos, based on the same MA-3 middleware code (see zip in my first post) :
NaariaylLove.mmf : https://youtu.be/NvPzxPiDSsY
FamiCommodore.mid : https://youtu.be/OF20K_QSMMo
Body&body : https://youtu.be/_gZqhSFfekk
808 Kingdom : https://youtu.be/lPee91aMjOQ
ninja2-3.mid : https://youtu.be/wFPPzIiRzqY

He even has an OPL2 to MA3 conversion demo : https://youtu.be/-R5K8wFJCRA
So I think he has figured out a lot already 😀

I already found these videos, but it seems that this guy is unwilling to share their knowledge (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

What's more, our goal is to completely figure out how this chip works, and write open source software to interface with it, not just relying on the leaked proprietary Yamaha code.

ClassicOldSong wrote on 2021-07-11, 20:45:

I already found these videos, but it seems that this guy is unwilling to share their knowledge (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

That is unfortunate, did you really contact him ?
He seems friendly, if i look at this youtube comment (at video https://youtu.be/-R5K8wFJCRA)

And the videos show the chip is definitely worth it, it sounds great.

ClassicOldSong wrote on 2021-07-11, 20:45:

What's more, our goal is to completely figure out how this chip works, and write open source software to interface with it, not just relying on the leaked proprietary Yamaha code.

Yes that is a nice goal, did you try to receive official documentation from Yamaha ?
That would be the first source of information, of course.

Very interesting, ClassicOldSong - thanks for this, and good luck!

Hi all.

Lord Nightmare sent me this link.
I also did quite a lot of MA-2/3/5 reverse engineering two years ago and need to brush off on it and compare notes.
My goal was also to make new use of those chips (on Famicom carts). So I made a board for it that transforms its pinout to OPN2 pinout..
Just because its easier to integrate in existing setups.

I have a bunch of register dumps of various Samsung phones (booting up+chime, playing some MMF files etc).
It will be a while before I sort all that and publish.
Cheers

LGR did a review of the Retrowave OPL3. It's really cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg33QLkHAu4

Is there anywhere to reliably get a supply of MA-3/5/7 chips from? MA-7 is very poorly documented as well, the document I usually reference for Yamaha FM chip info (https://gist.github.com/bryc/e85315f758ff3ece … 19d2d4fdeef01c5) can't find any detail about them.

I'd also like to add that Deflemask Tracker seems to support (or have previously supported?) the MA-2 YMU759.

Further edits:
https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php? … cker-&styleid=9 (You may want to see if you can get in touch with the Deflemask author, Delek. He wrote a YMU759 emulator for his software, though that was long ago. Deflemask also used to be able to compile its output for the YMU759, I think to SMAF.)
http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=924 More deflemask origins forum posts
Yamaha also has a YMU emulator, for MA7, the "MCP MA7". It may be easier to decompile or otherwise reverse engineer the software and the emulator therein than poke into the hardware black-box. They also have another piece of software which apparently does YMU emulation named MidRadio.
Midradio's emulation does seem only okay but it could illuminate what certain registers are supposed to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr0aMnS3FDI
http://mmfplay.sourceforge.net/ The MMFPlay authors may have some useful documentation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160310003528/ht … at/demo_ma.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150707144616/ht … demo_world.html These two are a variety of YMU SMAF music files direct from an archive of Yamaha's old website.

Also I think our russian opl2-to-MA3 translating friend is here, as kb77: Re: Need a DIY MIDI FM synth module

I would be in favor of a Discord server. That could be very useful, if only as a way to coordinate findings and be more rapid and casual than the "forum post" format. There's a lot of information that needs finding and a lot of potential social contact that needs to be made, say with Delek, kb77, the MMFPlay authors whoever they are, etc.

Error 0x7CF wrote on 2021-07-15, 06:34:

I would be in favor of a Discord server. That could be very useful, if only as a way to coordinate findings and be more rapid and casual than the "forum post" format. There's a lot of information that needs finding and a lot of potential social contact that needs to be made, say with Delek, kb77, the MMFPlay authors whoever they are, etc.

Delek didnt write an MA-2 emulator. He was shipping Yamaha's own win32-only dlls.
That's why it was dropped from Delfemask as it was a great example of painting oneself in a corner port-wise. (not counting legal-wise)
The team's choice on starting focusing on OPN2 and other chips was the way to go.

Ah, I see. That makes sense why it was unportable then. Still, he used them and had enough familiarity with the MA-2 to write a tracker. He might have some insight to the chip anyway, at least at the register level.

Error 0x7CF wrote on 2021-07-15, 06:34:

I would be in favor of a Discord server. That could be very useful, if only as a way to coordinate findings and be more rapid and casual than the "forum post" format. There's a lot of information that needs finding and a lot of potential social contact that needs to be made, say with Delek, kb77, the MMFPlay authors whoever they are, etc.

I've created a server and you can discuss all these in the `chipyard` channel

https://discord.gg/z5a2M6Vx

Thanks for all the helps above!

Guys, why did't you ask me about this directly ? 😉

@plgDavid - nice work, I gave up doing the same (I bought a few old Samsung and Siemens phones, but none of them had pads easily available). I would be interested in seeing your dumps - the board that I use for experiments has MA-3, but my first attempt was with MA-2, the middleware fails initialising it though. I made another board, this time with MA-3. Ah, the phone with MA-2 seems to be using SPI, while MA-3 is no longer supporting serial interface, it is parallel only.

The OPL player is here as well (check the other branch), I have not published the converter though (well... it was based on imfplay, I used it for DRO parsing).
https://github.com/noway2pay/MA3_YMU762_AND_DISCOVERY_F407VG
BTW, Wegi, who put this on Github - did not ask me first if I wish it to be published, he got the code and yet another MA-3 board from me. When I saw he had put it on Github, I decided to push more recent version.

Well, small part of the converter is here, in the Bryc's YamahaFM gist:
https://gist.github.com/bryc/e85315f758ff3ece … comment-3704767
And yes, SD-1 has almost the same register layout as MA-3.

Some other related stuff:
https://github.com/noway2pay/ma3smwemu <- I was trying to see how Yamaha's MA emulation DLL works, but that was only emulating the "SMAF" layer. Only with the MA-5 DLL-s Yamaha decided to split them to "SMAF" and "MA" emulation, but I did not bother digging further.

DRO to MA-3 conversions, how this progressed:
https://gist.github.com/noway2pay/47637e03d2d … e0497eac2618414
https://gist.github.com/noway2pay/d31f20075f9 … 364191f33265194

I also have a bunch of MA-3 middleware dumps from playing various SMAF and SMF files, as well as from my OPL "translator". One of the modifications to the MA-3 SMAF/SMF player (over the original code from Gospodin Riba vel RepStosW, who was the guy that actually made it possible - he ported that leaked MA-3 middleware) was a realtime log over USB (including both the original Yamaha's middleware logs and the ones that I added for register access).
Ah, my OPL to MA-3 converter also outputs the sound bank in the ATS-MA3 format 😀

That was the good news. Now the bad news: MA3 does not seem to be exposing the registers (like e.g. OPL-3), we need to put the sound definitions into the internal RAM (chip also has the internal ROM with GM MIDI sound set definitions, I guess it would be possible to dump them, we can read RAM so maybe we can also read ROM) and then issue commands to start playing the particular sound (really, we provide the RAM address in the command that starts the sound).

Update:
Some more zaks here: https://soundcloud.com/konrad-b-694217055

plgDavid wrote on 2021-07-13, 00:36:

I also did quite a lot of MA-2/3/5 reverse engineering two years ago and need to brush off on it and compare notes. My goal was […]
Show full quote

I also did quite a lot of MA-2/3/5 reverse engineering two years ago and need to brush off on it and compare notes.
My goal was also to make new use of those chips (on Famicom carts). So I made a board for it that transforms its pinout to OPN2 pinout..
Just because its easier to integrate in existing setups.

I have a bunch of register dumps of various Samsung phones (booting up+chime, playing some MMF files etc).
It will be a while before I sort all that and publish.

As I cannot send PM to you - David, would you share your dumps ? While MA-2 is something I was interested in initially (disassembled some of the Samsung or LG phone's firmware to check if it had signs of Yamaha middleware), it would be nice to know why it does not work with MA-3 middleware - it failed initialising the chip. Also - MA5 would be nice to understand, it has the same FM engine as MA3 though.
I have MA3 dumps from middleware, I could even try dumping exactly the same SMAF or SMF you used so we can compare / cross reference.

Error 0x7CF wrote on 2021-07-15, 20:09:

Ah, I see. That makes sense why it was unportable then. Still, he used them and had enough familiarity with the MA-2 to write a tracker. He might have some insight to the chip anyway, at least at the register level.

Not really. The DLL-s that Delek used expose the "SMAF" interface, not the MA registers. Delek had to send SMAF events. Actually he even sent me some code years ago - back then I was thinking about using MA-2.
Only later Yamaha decided to split the emulation into two DLLs - one for SMAF layer, other for register layer. MMFtool mentioned in this thread uses the "new" DLL set, the one that comes from Yamaha's MA-5 authoring tools (still, the MMFtool uses the SMAF layer only - I looked into this already).

I need to work on that, but I dont have the time sorry.
I want to eventually release my notes in a clear manner.

plgDavid wrote on 2021-11-18, 14:35:

I need to work on that, but I dont have the time sorry.
I want to eventually release my notes in a clear manner.

If you just put the raw dumps somewhere we could cross reference them with the logs I got while playing various MMF-s with the MA3 middleware, like this (simple) one:
https://gist.github.com/noway2pay/c0e73b08ad7 … 1d84d3069175c4d
This one was using regular MMF, so I guess the device initialisation would be the same - at least for MA3. For MA2 the phone firmware I looked into did not seem to be based on this kind of middleware.