Soundcards in MSX (november 00-march 01)
The MSX is without doubts a multimedia computer. Long time before PC had its first soundcard, the MSX added a new Philips creation between the big number of pheriphericals and expansions: the Music Module, it was a revolutionary soundcard, compatible with all the MSX generations, presented in 1986 and comercialized at the start of 1987, this cartridge offered an overwhelming sound in that age and nowadays this cartridge is very appreciated between the users.
The Philips Music Module became a new sound standard also adopted by the japanese company Toshiba (MSX Audio), it is based on a OPL1 soundchip of Yamaha, a powerful 9 FM channels synthetizer capable of generating AM voices, it also has an ADPCM proccesor with 8 bits and 16 khz of sampling, the own cartridge has 32 Kb of internal sampling memory (256 Kb expandable), this sound samples can be used for special sounds and effects.
This expansion was destined to a semiprofessional use, an evidence is the presence of many external connectors, the Music Module has two RCA connectors for sound out, one line in RCA connector and a microphone connector. Not only this, it also has a Philips musical keyboard connector and the ever useful MIDI connections (IN, OUT y THRU) that let to any professional to have a powerful edition tool.
Althought it has a great music capacity, the Music Module never was too expensive, being selled even with a price of 42 euros in some shops, it is possible that if you want to get one now, you have to pay a minimum price of 72 euros, this can show how fashionated are the MSX users with this card.
As we are used to with MSX hardware, this cartridge needed a lot of years for having a suitable soft acording to its capacities, so it was not exploded until the start of the 90īs, having only some editors and sequencers avaliable (MIDItracker performer, Music creator...), almost of them unuseful for musicians.
But this is an excellent acquisition, because this cartridge has been revelated as a second sound standard after FM PAC (MSX Music), used by dozens of games and demos, it offers nowadays a new possibilites like the internal ROM sustitution (it has a little music program) with an own saved ROM.