Fagear wrote:

That card alone is in size like the whole FMonster. 🤣

Yea, it's made by Yamaha for IBM, and is basically their version of the Roland LAPC-I: it's a MIDI interface combined with a Yamaha FB-01 sound module. It contains a Z80 CPU to process the MIDI and control the YM2164 chip.

When and where can I buy such a FMonster?
I have a FSC D1026 motherboard and it has a great Onboard-Sound-Compatibility for the SBpro/WSS-Part (CS432) but FM is not so good.
I think I am able to deactivate only the FM of the Onboard and use this FMonster instead. Would be a

Is it possible to add a "intelligent MPU 401 Interface" on the FMonster?

dr.zeissler wrote:

Is it possible to add a "intelligent MPU 401 Interface" on the FMonster?

It'd be great if he did. Would probably save a lot of us yet another precious ISA slot. Then again, with as much as this has it might end up stealing two slots using a daughterboard 😜

Just adding I'm optimistic about this project and very much interested.

dr.zeissler wrote:

When and where can I buy such a FMonster?

Not known yet. The project is in early development state.

dr.zeissler wrote:

Is it possible to add a "intelligent MPU 401 Interface" on the FMonster?

Yes it is. I doubt that such a controller could be added onto the main board, but it certainly can be added as a daughterboard.
For the moment there is a debug board with HardMPU implementation that will be attached above one of the "main" debug boards for testing.

Thx for the Updates! Great to hear 😀

I'll have to post twice because of attachment limit...
For the moment ALL of the debug boards are assembled. But neither of those is tested.

...second part.

Even without understanding the impressive feat of making these protos, these pictures are astonishly pretty ! Keep up the good work

I agree all these look great!

Neat work, Fagear, with true russian spread 😳

Wonderful ! looking forward to further progress!

ik777 wrote:

As a eastern, wish OPM or OPN also applied in your FMonster.
Ah, just a dream.

As you (and I) wish. I've made a debug block with OPN2 chip that was used in Sega Mega Drive/Genesis - YM2612/YM3438.
It can be set to 0x2A0/0x2B0/0x2D0/0x2E0 base address and covers 4 ports. It supports writes to all 4 ports and read from base port, no interrupt (as is in SMD).

Most work was done while streaming the process and I've managed to squeeze everything into 26 mm width! 😲 The only one block that is smaller is PSG at 25.5 mm.

Talking about PSG... Take PSG, OPN2 and good 8-bit stereo PCM, put them on one board... and you, basically, have complete Sega MD sound system: 🙄

As of composition of all the blocks... Everything will not fit onto main board of FMonster.
What I plan to put onto main board of FMonter at the moment:
= clock generator
= DuoSID (2xSSI = 2xMOS6581) + address selector
= CMS (Creative Music System = 2xSAA1099)
= OPL3 (1xYMF262)
= Tandy PSG (1xSN76489)
= Stereo OPL2 (2xAdLib/SB = 2xYM3812)
= CSM (Covox Sound Master = 1xAY8930)
= mixer/filter

And there will be an optional daughterboard, which for the moment is planned to host:
= MIDI host controller (HardMPU-compatible)
= Stereo 8-bit DAC (2xCovox Speech Thing = 2xADAD7524)
= OPN2 (Sega MD = 1xYM2612)

It should be noted that TI's PSG is not 100% compatible with VDP PSG used in SMS and MD, noise register is 15bits on TI while 16bits on VDP and LFSR taps are also different. End result is that noise sounds different and alternate duty cycle mode has 6.666...% TI vs 6.25% VDP while also being out of tune compared to one another. Luckily most of it can be compensated for in software.
In any case, very awesome ~

Seeing that Sega MD card makes me go back to the YM2151 and IMFC/FB-01 mentioned earlier...
We're currently working on reverse-engineering the FB-01 Z80 firmware and making a reimplementation in regular C, to be used for emulation in DOSBox or as a standalone Windows MIDI device.
Now I wonder... if you would put a YM2151 and some modern microcontroller on an ISA card (such as an Atmel, like the HardMPU), you could run the new firmware on there, and create an IMFC clone.
Might have to revisit that idea once the reimplementation works in software.
Also, it would be interesting if we'd add a 'bypass' option to the firmware, so you can send commands directly to the YM2151 (not possible on a real IMFC). Then it'd also be a great card for playing VGM tunes (and it could be combined with a PSG and DAC for certain arcade machines).

I wonder how different the YM2612 (OPN2) is from the YM2164 (OPP), then there would be FB-01/IMFC functionality as well.

As far as FM part goes, OPN vs. OPM/OPP
Second detune parameter : no, yes
SSG-EG : yes, no
Additional LFO waveforms : no, yes
Most instruments will sound same on both families, exceptions being things relying on those features one side lacks compared to other.
Clock differences can play a factor too, most hardware uses these chips at NTSC derived freqs (3.579545MHz).

Most OPN family chips have additional things such as AY and (AD)PCM channel(s) aswell.

Tiido wrote:

SSG-EG : yes, no

What exactly is this?
Because other than that, it seems that the OPM/OPP is a superset of the OPN.
In this particular case it may not matter that the OPM/OPP does not have a built-in AY, because an 8930 will be on the card anyway. Same with (AD)PCM.

SSG-EG allows to repeat ADSR phases in similar fashion to AY envelopes, allowing for *very cool* souns to be created. Unfortunately most emulation cores never got it right and official documentation didn't really elaborate on it and as far as Sega's docs went "please keep these at zero, we don't know what they do" essentially 🤣. (and it has nothing to do with AY itself)
I would have loved the second detune on OPN, it would have allowed for a bit more fuller sounds to be created with less effort. LFO is mostly useless since it is global to all channels, I have only successfully used it with SFX (but in a monotimbral environment it makes more sense).

If the OPP features weren't used by games' FB-01/IMFC support, could emulate them as they were used with the OPN.