Thursday, July 17, 2008

Sega YM2413 Action!



I have added very rudimentary support for the Yamaha YM2413 FM sound chip an add-on (top right brown PCB) for my Sega Master System MIDI Interface.

Here you can hear a very basic example. This is a dry recording from the Master System 1 PAL hardware. The SN76489 built-in sound chip is panned to the left and the YM2413 add-on sound chip is panned to the right.

The YM2413 FM add-on board was made by Tim Worthington, and can be obtained by contacting him via his site.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

This just evolved from "Hey, cool project" to "I NEED ONE NOW!!!".

Anonymous said...

very cool Seb. i wrote Tim an email so hopefully i'll here back from him soon. now we don't have to be so jealous of the Japanese SMS!!

Sebastian Tomczak said...

Athleos: It is amazing and very bizarre (for me at least) to hear some classic Sega Master System sound tracks played back on the YM instead of the SN. :-)

Anonymous said...

hey there Seb! i just got my SMS FM board from Tim but i was curious how you wired it in so you could have the YM and the SN as separate channels... is it completely necessary to run the SN signal back through the YM? i guess i'm just a little lazy in wanting to figure this out... :)

Sebastian Tomczak said...

Awesome.

So, what I did is I added an RCA jack on the back of my SMS1, and then soldered the red wire to signal and the copper braiding to ground.

This way I have separation for the YM and the SN.

My SN signal is coming out of the AV jack at the moment, so there were no hassles with me routing the signal into the YM2413 board and then getting the mixed together signal out again.

Plus, for our purposes, it would be really handy to have separate outputs for the YM and the SN...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reply Seb! i have it all hooked up.. blah blah blah but i can't seem to get a peep out of it! do the NTSC games i have support FM sound or should it come on no matter what? i'm really bummed! i hope it's not broken! :(

Anonymous said...

upon further investigation... i got this from someone on the SMSPower forums: http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8714 i don't own any of these games so i would assume that was my problem! sorry for using your comment space as a troubleshooting guide!! feel free to delete some of this!

Sebastian Tomczak said...

athleos, have you seen this page? http://www.smspower.org/music/vgm/index.shtml it's very useful!

Also -- do you want me to either make for you a test cart that checks the Ym2413 (ie. plays some sound etc) or one of the games that do support the chip, that way you can double check?

:)

Anonymous said...

Oh man! a custom cart from Little-scale would be great! whatever is easier for you man! that's awesome. i really need to spend more time on my machine language studies so i can dev. my own apps for reasons such as this... anyhow, thanks for the offer and the link Seb! i'll see if i can dig up your email address so i can send you my info and some moolah!

Sebastian Tomczak said...

Athleos, give me a week or so to work on this. I will let you know how it goes - so lets keep in touch over email regarding this. My email is seb dot tomczak at gmail dot com

Kind regards,

Seb