Retro Yamaha Music Computer - Testing out the CX5M

Thanks for watching the show! Did anyone out there have one of these? Did you make a hit record? Let me know! A special thank you to the Museum of Computing (www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/) for loaning the CX5M II machine to make this a more complete video. Neil - RMC

That outro: "I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order."

My middle school in South London had one of the CX5M MSX computers in the music room. about 1984 ish. We used it a lot and I learned to play the piano on it with the piano teacher.

"I've got the musical ability of a banana", before proceeding to blast out a recognisable tune on the keyboard. I want the kinds of bananas Neil eats.

With my software VGMPlay for MSX you can play VGM recordings from many of the arcade games you mentioned straight on the CX5M! (You do need a SD / CF / HDD interface cartridge with extra memory.) Actually the CX5MII that I bought off eBay from an Italian person was the machine that brought me back into the MSX scene after several years of inactivity, and its YM2151 sound chip prompted me to make VGMPlay, so I hold it dear to my heart :). The CX5MII is almost an MSX2 by the way: it has the MSX2 VDP and a 128K memory mapper. But it lacks sufficient Video RAM, the RTC and the MSX2 BIOS. The CX7M is its full MSX2 successor, but it was only released in Japan.

Nishi told us that MSX stood for "Machines with Software eXchangeability" at a European computer conference in the early 2000's

OMG, the Outrun music! Takes me back to skipping college to go to the arcade in 1988...

I had the pleasure several years back of meeting Dr. John Chowning, originator of FM Synthesis, which all of the chips (particularly Yamaha's) you mentioned use. He was the proverbial father of the DX line of synthesizers, and therefore 80s pop and beyond. My mint condition DX7 Mk I, purchased for $1650 US in Nov. 1985, just sold for $500 last year.

This made my day. 😂 loved your playing us out! Another top notch, fascinating, informative, but not too heavy, humorous look at past tech. Thanks Neil. BRILLIANT!

Super interesting video. The FM module in these has more in common with the DX21, DX27, and DX100 synths. The DX7 has more envelopes and algorithms and 16-voice polyphony. I own an DX21 and absolutely love its nostalgia stirring sound.

Great video, I still have my old cx5m 2 up in the loft, I may just get it down to have a mess with 😀

Really enjoyed the synth sounds. You could really imagine this being used for grand external shots in a scifi movie.

Notice that in European philips provided the same. In my time we had our own software to write music. We could combine FM sounds with samples which made the possibilities endless. . . Still got my setup.

In the United States MSX standard was never adopted, but you could occasionally find the Yamaha CX5M in music stores sold along side Yamaha synths like the DX7 as a semi-dedicated sequencer computer. Once the Atari ST series came along the CX5M disappeared from music stores as well.

It's basically a Yamaha DX9 in a computer. The DX9 was the little brother to the DX7 and used a 4op FM Synth engine, rather than 6op like in the 7. Even at £599 that's SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than a DX9, and a DX7 cost several grand in 1983 money. Even if you had to replace the voice card for the upgraded capabilities, it's still cheaper than a stand-alone Synthesizer.

My first yamaha keyboad at the age of 6 was a PSS-30 and my Dad had a PSR-36. The last one I had was a PSR-320 in 1995 and it was terrible compared to the older ones. Thanks for all of the reminder sounds, they take me back. 24:05 this is what mario on the MegaDrive would sound like.

The Yamaha YM2151 was also used in most Williams pinball machines from the mid-80's to the MID-90's. It was one of the three sound sources in their games (the others being simple PCM samples via an 8-bit DAC and compressed speech via a Harris CVSD chip). The same with Bally pinballs from the late 80's to mid-90's when Williams acquired Bally.

The very first brass sound you played immediately brought the original Wing Commander to mind.

20:26 must be where Farbrausch got their "world ripping apart" sound for Debris from! Instantly recognizable!

This is so cool! I absolutely love things like this, so many instruments and musicians were very ahead of their time computing-wise in this era. It has never ceased to amaze me how forward thinking MIDI is as a standard. I still use MIDI cables to load patches into my Yamaha SY77, and that thing is from 1989. It's so amazing being able to create patches in a modern desktop environment and seamlessly load them into the synth's memory without even having to use the synth's onboard floppy drive, or use the synth as a virtual instrument in a modern DAW like FL studio.