Retro Yamaha Music Computer - Testing out the CX5M

when you think of an 80s computer geared towards making music specifically with midi capabilities most of us will immediately think of the atari sd i'm quite right too it's a legend of the recording studio but it is far from the only example of a machine with musical capabilities baked right in out of the box and today i've got some interesting examples of an earlier machine that does just that hello cave dwellers yes what i've got to show you today is uh from music maestros motorbike maestros as well i guess yamaha and they pose something of a problem for me because i'll be honest i've got the musical capabilities of a banana i absolutely love music i even brought out a record this year with the help of musician hoffman but i didn't make the music that's far beyond my capabilities so quite how i'm gonna demonstrate these to you today i don't know if you promise not to laugh at me i'll do my very best and the machines in question are the yamaha cx-5m range introduced to the world in 1984. the ones i've got are in varying conditions i've got some as minty and fresh as the day they were created still in the box so i know that i've got some that work so we can demonstrate it the others need a really good clean and we'll find out if they work as we go along but the first thing we need to know about these is that they are msx computers they conform to the msx standard and in case any of us need a refresher as to what that is let's find out very briefly just what the msx is and before we go into that msx history i must say a big thank you to our sponsor today pcbway.com if you have any interest whatsoever in creating pcbs in looking at community projects for retro systems with which you can just click a button and print out as many as you like for you and your friends then they are the people to check out pcbway.com their services include basic pcb printing services design services and you can even order boards fully populated with all the components ready to go you can print as few as five or five million pcbs the sky really is the limit and a special thank you to pcbway.com for supporting the channel because it's with their support that i can afford to get things like this and make videos like we've got today and now on with the show [Music] msx was an attempt to standardize home computers in 1983 this a time when the ibm pc was an expensive business tool and the ibm xt had just arrived on the scene and home computers were a melting pot of different architectures which meant software was incompatible across platforms even those platforms from the same manufacturer two companies microsoft and ascii corporation a company in japan had teamed up in 1979 to sell microsoft's basic in eastern regions and it was tremendously successful accounting for 40 of microsoft sales at its peak microsoft basic was adapted for pretty much every 8-bit microcomputer going but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't need to adapt it to port it to different machines if all micros could run the same software wouldn't that save everyone a lot of pain so that's what they set out to do with the msx standard a name which means well nobody quite seems to remember what it stands for there are reports that it's named after a missile that it means microsoft extended that it means machines with software exchange ability we're not entirely sure but no matter the goal was to create a standard architecture kazuhiko nishi a director at ascii corporation had been inspired by the success of the vhs videotape standard and wanted to recreate that in the japanese home computer landscape microsoft wanted the same but of course world domination was in their minds the machine selected for the rough basis of the standard was the spectra video sv 328 a rather good looking machine sporting a zylog z80 cpu 64k of usable ram 32k of rom and a texas instruments tms 9918 video chip and also a general instruments ay38910 sound chip remember that one that one's important and various other chips for the logic which were selected due to their mass availability and therefore low price japanese manufacturers such as sony yamaha cannon and sharp got on board and their range of msx machines would become the most popular 8-bit micros of the 80s in japan south korea and brazil and argentina down in south america it didn't take off in north america where commodore dominated with the commodore 64 but it performed admirably in those other regions selling a reported 5 million machines overall to put that into some context the apple ii managed six million sales the zx spectrum 5 million sales and the mighty commodore 64. 17 million sales so it's a worthy contender in the sales books it's mixing it up with all of the big names there is a lot more to learn about the msx machines particularly those that strayed from the standard cartridges that included additional chips to expand capabilities all sorts of fun to explore but in the context of our yamaha machines today that's what we need to know our yamaha is part of the msx family and that movement to try and standardize 8-bit computing [Music] yes the msx computer and you're probably wondering what is it about these yamaha msx computers that make them different from any other msx computer and we'll start with the cx-5m the other machine i've got is the cx-5m2 we'll come on to that a little bit later so i've got two examples of the cx-5m we'll start with this one i've had this one for quite some time and it is filthy this will get a cleanup i may do an extra video for this on my second channel just to clean it up but i do know it works and i know it works because that didn't have a power supply and i got hold of this this is a really lovely minty fresh example which you can see here i bought from ebay it came beautifully boxed and it's a complete inbox i think it's in pretty good condition considering its age now for a start this was officially released in the uk msx computers weren't popular here but we did get this one and on the face of it yes it's not so different to any other msx it's clearly based on yamaha's bog standard yis 503 model msx with which it shares the same decent keyboard which is pretty standard on msx machines you did get some with chiclet keyboards but very few most of them went for a more expensive proper keyboard which pushed the price of the systems up but not so much that they were unaffordable and like any other msx it supports loading from cassette tapes you can buy a floppy disk interface for it and use three and a half or five and a quarter inch floppies and it has a cartridge slot which can be used to load software from it doesn't have to be yamaha published software like this cartridge here of course it's compatible with all msx software and if we look around the back it has an expansion slot again compatible with all the regular msx add-ons like a floppy disk controller and there are also four slot expanders so you could split out those slots into four slots in total if you really wanted to load it out so that doesn't make it any different really to any other msx computer the first difference that we see is when we flip it over and take a look on the bottom here yes this is the key difference here this is an fm synth module from yamaha as found in musical keyboard synth from the same era fm or frequency modulation is a way of describing sounds mathematically rather than storing recorded samples of sounds which would take up much more memory and one of the most famous examples of this is in the musical keyboards of the era such as the yamaha dx7 which was a staple of pop music in the 80s along with other keyboards from the likes of korg the dx7 is really distinctive and you will recognize it in a lot of popular tunes now what's in here is not exactly the same as what was in the dx7 it is cut down but it is pretty close and you're likely more familiar with the sounds it produces than you might realize the key chip inside here is the ym 2151 that's the same sound chip used in arcade games including marble madness [Music] the absolutely glorious tunes in outrun and many more family tunes from the likes of konami capcom and namco all of the big hitters who made arcade games in the 80s so above and beyond the ay sound chip which had to be in here to maintain compatibility and to stick to that msx standard we've got that fm synth but yamaha did have to include the ay chip in fact they actually knock together their own ay chip because they're yamaha they can do that kind of thing of course they can so this was released in the uk but japan of course was having the fun a good year before us as they always did because you could buy the yamaha yes model msx and then the sound module the sfg01 which you would then plug into it so you bought the parts separately to effectively make up the same machine yamaha then took those things which sold at a retail price of 300 pounds combined repackaged them as the cx-5m as we see it on the desk here and sold it in the uk for 599 pounds double the price yes i'm sure there were import duties and shipping costs to cover but i think double the price is pretty indefensible however back to the good stuff what the fm module also brings us is stereo audio output with the left and right audio jack here midi in and out and a 20 pin jack for the keyboard the musical keyboard it doesn't use a standard midi plug unfortunately so the keyboard is only usable on this machine and it's those midi ports which make it so attractive out of the box just like our atari st it gives the musician the ability to plug into all of their devices and perhaps make this the centerpiece of their studio controlling everything and creating their music and music i expect is exactly what you want to hear coming out this thing but that's where my shortcomings are you know i can't play music whatsoever but we're going to get this thing wired in now i'll grab a monitor and plug it in and we'll go through the instruments and at least hear what they sound like and you make connections when you hear the instruments at least i did immediately my mind wanders to various games that use these instruments either in the arcade or on the sega mega drive for example so we'll try and get some noises that resemble things that we're familiar with and you can make those connections between the fm synth and the games and the machines of the period let's get it plugged in [Music] so if i was a professional musician i would imagine the most important thing is the method of input the keyboard that you use to make your music as standard this system came with the yamaha yk01 which is a mini keyboard with 44 keys it looks like every first keyboard we ever had as kids and it wasn't an option it had to come with that but if you wanted to upgrade you could get something like this the yk10 which is a 48 key keyboard with full size keys much nicer to my non-musical hands and then there was also the yk20 which was exactly the same it just i think it just had a sheet holder for your sheet music so this is probably the one that you want to have the only disappointing thing about this is that the connector is not a standard midi connector if we look at the one on here it's a 20 pin connector as you can see so you can only really use it on this computer you can't plug it into any other midi devices which is a bit disappointing likewise the midi ports on the size side of the cx-5m here they can't be used to control any midi devices seems like a massive oversight doesn't it in the first year at least this was the case when this came out it was marketed heavily as being a system to use with your dx7 synth to download voice patches to edit i think i'm using the correct terminology there voice patches correct me if i'm wrong download the voices or the patches edit them and upload them to your synth that's all the midi ports were used for it wasn't until a year after release that the sound module was upgraded so the initial machines came with an sfg01 model sound module and then a year later an upgraded sfg05 module came as standard which allowed you to use external midi devices so if you bought this in the first year if you're an early adopter you had to pay for whack again for another sound module which came with another mini keyboard as standard so you had keyboards coming out of your ears but a huge oversight and it's not the only one that we found so far on this machine however they got there in the end and another important thing that they would introduce that wasn't a part of its standard was velocity sensitive keys the harder you hit a key the louder the noise it makes or the slightly different noise it makes that didn't come until later so it was slightly limited in its original iteration but this was 1983 1984 so i think we can allow it some leeway and i'll put my headphones on and this basically puts it into synth mode you've got various things on the screen here two voices polly and mono they're labeled rhythm so you can introduce a beat and then volumes of different things and an lfo so you can get that nice wobbly sound so we're just here on its own that's a voice named brass and we can change the voice trumpets strings piano and you'll notice as i've played it there it's changed because the keyboard is split because you've got two voices at once so we've got e piano on one side and brass on the other side and you can change that split just by pressing key choosing another point and put it all the way up there and then we've got e piano all the way or you can put it back in the middle [Music] pretty cool if you can use two hands at once let's just listen to some of those voices then i'll put the split back up here [Music] we've got an ambulance [Music] we're getting into the silly sounds now that's quite fun raindrops [Music] that sounds familiar [Music] i mean we haven't been using this for long and already you've got an instant um recognizable sound from those games that use fm synthesis and what a great bass line it was in that game so in the rhythm section we've got a selection of beats swing 16b s rock waltz [Music] bit of swing [Music] 16b or i can hear a bit of outrun in that one [Music] and that's pretty much it in its most basic form it's just operating as a basic synth with access to the voices things like the lfo are quite fun and you can just play with that wave get that wobble going on it [Music] so as a basic 1983 synth it's pretty fun to play with but to unlock more power from it you really need to use some of the cartridges that come with it these include the voicing programs i mentioned earlier which allow you to tinker with your dx synth patches there was a music composer cartridge which lets you compose in a traditional manner drawing notes on the screen across eight available simultaneous music tracks and they also have the ability to print hard copies of your musical notation these are msx computers after all with a printer port and it makes full use of it there was also a music macro cartridge which gives you access to the fm module within basics so you could program up a basic game and give it an epic fm synth soundtrack and if you have the later sfg05 music module as i do you can use the midi sequencer cartridge to make better use of the midi ports but even that had its shortcomings it would allow you to play external midi devices using the midi sequencer software but you couldn't use the internal fm sounds with it those were now inaccessible and it became a midi only setup yet another oversight from yamaha but everything did come together in the end thanks to a british company called digital music systems limited who released the dms one cartridge this gave you the ability to record your performance in real time to use built-in fm voices and to control external media equipment so those shortfalls by yamaha were overcome and as a result for about a thousand pound all in with the accessories and the software which is at least a third of the price you would have spent on an ibm pc midi sequencing setup at the time and with some perseverance your efforts would be rewarded and the story of yamaha's adventures in music computers doesn't end there with the cx-5m because next they came up with the cx-5m2 slash one two way to the follow-up machine which means you lucky lot get to hear more of my musical abilities you lucky people [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm not for a second claiming that's clean but it's clean enough for me to be able to touch it without feeling the worst because it was disgusting it will get a deep clean as i mentioned earlier but it's fine for demonstrating there are some quite noticeable changes apart from the changing shape to it we've got two cartridge slots here where before we only had one but we have lost the expansion slot at the back so they've effectively just moved it around here and turned it into a cartridge slot not unusual on mx computers lots of them did have two slots at the front we've got another slot here pop that open and there's a mini cartridge in there it's the yamaha fm voicing program too which um well i've got a full size cartridge here as well it was available in both but just neater i guess permanently tucked away in here and the biggest clue to changes in here is in the name 128 it's got 128k of ram usable ram instead of the 32k in the older cx-5m so that's a significant bump in memory and the big advantage of that is that much longer sequences of music can be made in one session [Music] on the face of it then when we start it up it looks extremely familiar we do cool music again to put it into that basic synth mode and while it's called the cx-5 m2 it's not to be confused with the msx2 range of computers it's still the original msx1 standard the interface is completely different to the first one [Music] no ambulances but we've got a storm this time but the beautiful thing about this one is its ability to control midi instruments and to be controlled by midi instruments so i've got this roland sound canvas sc88 and vl plugged in and if i knock up the volume on that we get both the instrument i've selected on the sound canvas and this mixed in i can bring the volume down on this so it's just the midi device i'll bring it back up again and turn it down there again so i can use all of those lovely sounds from that and if we go all the way down to the bottom here you can see we've got sustain we've got all of the same options as the previous one but we've got the midi channels so we can use the internal clock or the midi clock and we can do everything we need to we can control multiple midi devices and this really can be now the center of a studio for some music creation so it just takes everything up to the level where honestly the machine probably should have been when it was first released it should have had all of these features but it got there eventually and still this was under 500 pounds yes more if you wanted the bigger keyboard and the software and all the rest of it but still a hell of a lot cheaper than anything else on the market unless you already owned an apple macintosh a few years later or an amiga 1000 or an ibm pc and you just needed to buy the extra bits to allow it to use midi instruments out of the box i think that's a pretty good price okay we've established i cannot play music whatsoever so what i've done is i've grabbed my laptop i've got a usb to midi cable so that's going to be triggering the computer over here the sound canvas is just passive that's not doing anything whatsoever and finally hopefully it'll do some justice we can hear this thing at its best or perhaps discover some more shortcomings along the way so let's play some tunes and we'll see what we discover [Music] do [Music] so i'm really enjoying the sound that this is putting out but as we get into this this is toto's africa there are many many more channels in the midi file we can have up to four midi channels on this with a single channel this machine allows eight simultaneous notes but as you bring more channels in up to four you still have a hard limit of eight notes it just splits them across the channel so at its limit you have four channels and two notes per channel which is nowhere near enough for this song and many others that i tried but you can still recognize it at least [Music] so i hope that gives you a better demonstration of what this thing is capable of yes it's got its limitations with those eight simultaneous tracks as we discovered but for 1983 1984 i'd be pretty happy with that and as a i was going to say as an amateur musician as somebody with absolutely no musical skills whatsoever there's no way i'm going to fill eight tracks that's more than enough for me in the modern day but anyone that wants to do something more complex will soon fill that up and you can absolutely see how if somebody had this in their studio and discovered the advantages of having the built-in midi ports and everything that you can do with it when the atari st came along it would have been a perfect drop-in replacement to take everything up a notch so i can see why that was so popular there was a follow-up to this the cx-7m which was based on the msx2 architecture and if i ever managed to get my hands on that i'll certainly give you a demonstration or maybe i'll just plug the laptop in again if we can just hear what it does um but i hope you've enjoyed today's demonstration that's that's pretty much all i've got for you today so as always thank you very much for taking the time to watch and take care everyone i'll play you out [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 57,305

Keywords: computer history, nostalgia, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, yamaha, msx computer, yamaha msx, cx5m, music computer, midi music, midi computer, cx5m ii, sort after keyboards, home music studio, fm synthesis, yamaha cx5m, electronic music, fm synthesis dx7, yamaha dx7

Id: qlu4Lcpq4GM

Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020