It's haunting, like a sad wasp stuck inside a coke can on a hot day, aware of the rising afternoon sun and the coming heat, but lacking the evolutionary apparatus to escape.
18:55 For the curious, the chips are: HG62E11: probably a relabeled Hitachi OTP gate array for glue logic YMW258-F: a Yamaha OPL4 with the FM synth removed, originally designed for Sega YGV606B: the video display processor, normally found in TVs and VCRs YM3413: delay/reverb, found in a lot of Yamaha effects processors PCM69AP: your common-or-garden DAC H8/510, H8/520: Hitachi H8 16bit microcontrollers YM7128B: a surround sound processor, as found on the AdLib Gold. Thing's basically a Portasound with echo and a video card.
I knew I recognised that beautiful fm synthesis Could be a really interesting option for circuit bending Love the opl4 sound and master systems are getting a little pricy now for attaching scratchy pots and jabbing hot irons into
For Japanese middle age old man, this song line-ups is very nostalgic. I remembered when I was young student. I didn't know about this device, but I think this is what 80-90s Japanese used to develop. Nice video as always.
@@ddegn it's more of a tradition thing (as Japan's introduction to electronics was through English-speaking countries, iirc) with a pinch of "It's just easier to use English for the button labels than trying to fit hiragana or katakana in the same spaces". Basically, a lot of people just associate the words the same way you'd associate the play/pause symbol, though some Japanese do at least know what "Purae" is
Some Japanese people seem to use a mixture of both. You will get a wall of Japanese text with the odd English word just scattered about in there. Also its a phonetic language so you can get stuff written in English letters which is Japanese but you can also get actual English written in Japanese letters. Very confusing. (Just in the very earliest stages of trying to learn Japanese - don't know if I'll ever succeed.)
In the catalogue listing of all the cassette cartridges, the last ones labeled "英語曲リクエストBOX" are all English language songs! Might be worth picking up a couple of they're available?! (Cartridge numbers HKS-W01 to 04)
This thing is a treasure of the early 90s in Japan!, it has some jewels like: - Won't be long: by the Bubblegum Brothers, this was No.1 on Japanese lists in 1991 or so. If you gotta sing 90s hits you can't forget this song. - Zero by B'z , another huge No. 1. In fact there's a lot from B'z like: Runaway of Solitude, track 1 from MARS the same album that had Lady Navigation. They're like the...Wham!? Extreme? AC/DC? Guns And Roses? of their time. - A lot form Chage&Aska, like: "with this eyes I lie to you" from the album "Tree". This was a peculiar duo of guys that gave shape to some part of the sound of the 90s in Japan. - A freaking lot from "Tube", like the song numbered 001 in the first tape: "ah! summer break!", there was a time in terms of music in Japan when if you said summer that meant Tube. -And some of Mariya Takeuchi, the same lady singing the famous "Plastic Love". Well you can sing along other hits like ''Tomorrow's me" from the 1994 compilation album "Impressions" and the third column after the name of the artists are the first words of the lyrics of each song.
Karaoke and bingo are both staples of work/company parties in Japan (particularly the end-of-year party), so there's a 'natural' association between the two. (Of course the culture is always changing, but year-end party + karaoke + bingo is a modern tradition that everyone here is aware of.)
The Yahaha handheld has a real early-90s Apple Powerbook aesthetic to it. If Apple had made a portable music player in 1993 that *wasn't* the Apple Power CD, it might have looked a lot like this.
Never thought I'd hear X Japan on a Techmoan video, even if it was just a Karaoke MIDI rendition! 🤘 Along those same lines, I actually did get to see Galneryus at ProgPower USA in Atlanta in 2019.
The music on these are actually MIDI files played by an internal OPL synthesiser. It is based on the mid-90's Yamaha PSR entry/mid-level keyboard series (I remember the PSR-x20 in particular) which had Music Cartridge System ports on them and the PSR-620 even had a floppy drive! You could get cartridges for these in the UK, but the number of tracks on western cartridges were often as little as 6 and as many as 15. There is very little information online regarding this format, as it was only used on 7 or 8 Yamaha keyboards before floppy disk and later USB took over as the storage for the later model keyboards. The format was called "Yamaha Music Cartridge System". Some of the cartridges didn't contain songs, but additional style data for the keyboard.
no techmoan like yet?, could the midi be simply accessed to say turn it into midi box's like the one' popular with retro PC gaming for class like doom and such,?
@@dh2032 It has no external MIDI interface and the Yamaha Cartridge Format was proprietary. If you were determined, and knew enough, you could probably patch into the OPL4 chip directly, but what would be the point? The Adlib and Soundblaster synthesis expected by Doom used the older OPL2/3 chips and the by this point so many wavetable synthesis cards were available for the PC, you would almost definitely have one of those available.
If this is FM based it's got to be some very well tuned patches for later hardware with more operators than ye olde OPL2. Almost sounds like some of their XG hardware in some places. edit: OPL4 makes sense
The synth in this is pretty similar to the TG100, and is basically an OPL4 without the FM synth. It's sample based only. Marketing back then called these types of synths "wavetable" even though it's not that. Musicians derided these as "ROMplers" because they can only produce a fixed set of sounds, but that's also not really accurate since you could modify many parameters of the synth engine. It#s a shame Yamaha didn't put a MIDI port on these karaoke machines, but I guess they did it because that would have cut into their cartridge market
10:53 the advantage of using TV out is that lyrics are displayed in normal format, including furigana explanations on top of rare kanji. The character LCD probably compatible with Hitachi HD44780 controller only displays katakana.
The ANRI one was a treat. The quintessential City Pop song. Thank you random stranger for suggesting that one to Matt; you have a good eye and a good taste! And how I wish I could get my hands of the midi file(s) directly off that/ose cartridges.
Whoever did the MIDI arrangement on that one knew their craft. For all that General MIDI synths can sound toy-like when fed bare sheet music, most can turn in a surprisingly decent performance given effort. This was a good example of that.
1:20 - My brother lived in Japan and he said that a lot of products were sold in limited quantities through certain stores to test how the products worked for consumers. It was a testing ground for new technology. He had bought a Panasonic portable CD player that was one of the thinnest on the market at the time, but it had an issue where if the CD was too long (74mins+) the mechanism was so tightly packed that it would actually start to scratch the CD when it got to the outer edges. It was discontinued quite quickly after that issue was discovered.
This is true, they would just put together machines with surplus components in order to get rid of them and to try to keep open certain component lines they needed for other products.
That "Zingen Vlinders" thing at 8:04 is the opening tune to a popular Japanese cartoon from the 70s named "A Dog of Flanders", based on the British novel with the same title. When it aired here in Spain for the first time on our public television, the episodes used to include that song (in Japanese).
8:08 TECHMOAN! YOU SANG IN DUTCH! Zingen Vlinders means, singing butterfly's and kleine vlinders means, little butterfly's. So not all songs are Japanese, i guess that this device came to the eu as well then or maybe was planned.
I was curious about this as well. So I looked it up. Apparently it's the main opening theme song of a Japanese animation called the 'A Dog of Flanders'.
The radio in our '66 Coronet lets you choose between different countries' radio ranges (e.g. USA, RUS, JPN), so I just imagine me flicking through the settings and hearing your GLORIOUS karaoke pop up
As a huge Kylie Minogue fan, I literally had tears streaming down my face with the rendition of Turn It Into Love! I do think a call to Stock Aitken Waterman is the next step Mat. After all, they made a pop star out of Mandy Smith…😂
calling Mandy Smith a pop star is a bit of an exaggeration. Sure they made her sing pop, but don't think anyone's ever credited her as a star, at least not in relation to pop
@Pixie Pete You have to give little miss Minogue some credit to be fair, she's been around longer than many, many other pop stars and is still producing albums that chart. She has sung pop, country, indie/rock and had some pretty decent duets over the years so I think she doesn't get the credit she deserves sometimes.
Anime fans of the 1990s who were online will remember MIDI-karaoke. There were software players and MIDI files with lyrics, singing along to anime theme songs. We had those along with our KISS dolls and software. Fun times.
19:00 - Turn It Into Love was also sung by Hazell Dean - part of the SAW Hit Factory. Useless pop fact for the pub quiz there, Mat! I shall hang my head in shame now 😂
Everytime you're exploring the cartridge, I was just hoping that one of the 80s essentials City Pop song would appear... and then you played Can't Stop the Loneliness by Anri at 18:12 made my day XD, one of my favorite City Pop music! Please give us the song list for that cartridge :)))
I'm sure there's got to be a trove of citypop on there. If Anri is there, there's got to be some Tatsuro Yamashita, Chisato Moritaka, Toshiki Kadomatsu, ...
It's so cute how the display is just all katakana and ro-maji. Probably because that's about what you can fit in an 8bit encoding of text, but perhaps more importantly what that sort of display can show while still being readable. EDIT: I see it can actually display full fledged Japanese text (including furigana/ruby text) in the TV mode, so definitely probably just a case of making it readable on that little display.
The multiline LCD modules had a very limited character set, so if you got hiragana as well as katakana you could count yourself lucky. Some modules featured 8 programmable character cells, so that’s how the “animation” was done - the character codes on the screen don’t change, the definition of the character shapes do.
The song at 8:00 is the theme from the 1975 anime TV series adaptation of "A Dog of Flanders" (フランダースの犬 / Furandāsu no Inu). The "BAN BAN BAN" song at 12:30 is by the Kuwata Band (or the Southern All Stars?) from 1986. The Santa Claus song at about 16:00 is "Scatterbrained Santa Claus," (あわてんぼうのサンタクロース / Awatenbou no Santakuroosu) a children's Christmas song with some onomatopoeias in it. It's apparently from or by NHK, the Japanese public TV station. Wild industrial design of the handheld version, and I was very surprised to see the quality of the built-in video output and animations. Seems like Yamaha put a lot of effort into these, and they cost a small fortune when brand new - Thanks for sharing them!
Yes, my daughter has just confirmed the Santa Claus song has broadly the same content as "When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney", and is known by pretty much everyone in Japan!
Techmoan and Anri? Hell yeah, always love it when my interests intersect. A bit sad we couldn't hear the full song. The song at 19:45 sounds like Wink, a singing duo. The song is "Turn it Into Love". You singing it was awesome. Aside from the knowledge and looking at old tech, this is why I love this channel.
The Yamaha QY70/QY100 are probably the closest yammy gear that's easily available. They do use a different chip, but a lot of the sounds are very similar.
That song at 8:05 is in dutch. zingen = singing vlinders=butterflies and kleine=little... so the song goes "Little butterflies are singing lalala lalala" :) I wonder what market this was meant for, cos I can't imagine Japanese customers understand dutch. ps: the singing at 20:20 voids the warranty of my speakers :p
@@Code7Unltd Yeah, I remember! 😅 Nearly bought one of those a few years ago. But then I decided for a much more expensive boombox from Panasonic. I'm still happy with that decision. Techmoan's videos were reassuring me that I was lucky to get that boombox back then. Now it isn't even available anymore or you'll get only for a much higher price. So Techmoan is at least three things in one: tech guru, comedic genius and money saver! 😍 Greetings from Germany
Was expecting a perfect sung Japanese song, and we do get a perfect rendition of the Dutch song Kleine Vlinders (never heard of it). The production value of this video goes just above and beyond. Silliness aside, love the video and thank you for making me laugh.
Now this is weird… Yesterday I watched Big Car’s video on the Smart ForTwo, which had Techmoan in it. Today, I watch ONE Techmoan video and there’s the same Smart car! It’s like TH-cam inception…
It's absolutely believable that people would believe that singing in the car would be great considering the exceptional engineering that went into making the car cabin a good acoustic space with only two or at most four speakers
That's a problem given that the acoustics were mostly meant to exclude outside noise, but not at all to help sound from within the car outside the speakers
"At most"... Actually, there are many cars with more than 4. Not sure which cars have only 2, unless you actually are referring to the number of *channels*.
@@caramelldansen2204 No one gives a flying rat's ass about your financial status. Just about any car that has more than the standard stereo option is going to have four to six speakers. For your level of car knowledge, you can just call them all Mercedes.
This makes me sing along to songs i've never even heard before, never thought out of all the stuff i've seen on your channel over the years this would be the thing i'd 100% want to get one of.
Linda Linda is actually a somewhat common song to see covered or sung along to, I've noticed. It was used as one of the "Character Songs" for the main characters in the Durarara!! anime series. I imagine at least one or two more of those Character Songs were also released on the ING'S. Linda Linda itself appears in a number of places too, including covered by American rock artist Andrew W.K
there's also a quite good Japanese film from 2005 called Linda Linda Linda about a school band practising the song for their school festival, starring Korean actress Doona Bae of The Host/Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Cloud Atlas fame.
@@zappi The film's final concert scene was also an inspiration for the concert scene in the famous 2006 anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I've long been a Haruhi fan, and I actually discovered The Blue Hearts by backtracking on those references.
There's a cover of it in Rolling Girls too, and the OP and ED are also covers of Blue Hearts songs. Whoever made that show really seemed to like The Blue Hearts. Unfortunately it's not very good.
Mat, I want to go to karaoke with you! You're the epitome of amateur karaoke... Every time I go to a karaoke night, "semi professionals" sing. You never hear the like of yourself anymore give karaoke a crack, which is why I love karaoke, to hear amateurs sing and get out of their comfort zone and give something a go
The "Rusty nails" version here sounded even funnier than I expected. When it comes to X Japan I usually think of thundering drums, screaming, high pitched vocals and shrieking guitars, but here it sounds like an exceptionally busy pawnshop in an SNES Zelda clone (that said, it sounds as good as it possibly can on this device).
I am a bit of a nerd and love me some anime, and my favorite part is when they sing in English. RARELY does it make sense, but there's a 50/50 chance you kind of get what they're going for. I don't know if sometimes it's a Japanese idiom that doesn't translate well into English, or what. BUT it's fun.
Sometimes there’s an attempt to translate into English, but a lot of the time the lyrics chosen are purely for aesthetics and syllabic pattern. Especially when it’s just an exclamation of one or two English words in a Japanese sentence (though it also happens with German in some songs), the point is exoticism, aesthetics, and trendiness; though usually some effort is also made to pick a word that fits with the themes of the song. When you get one or two entire lines in English, that’s usually when they try to fit grammar into the lyric. Otherwise it’s just simple affirmations for flavour, like BELIEVE! or DON’T STOP!
@@kaitlyn__L INTERESTING, huh. I wonder if there are English songs that do that... I'd have to look into Kero Kero Bonito more, but... I'm pretty sure that singer is PROPER Japanese and BRITISH, and is fluent in both, so... she probably is more conscious of what she's saying. The one song that came to mind just now was "That's Amore", and there is a line in that that can be accused of doing just that with the "PIZZA PIE" line, being redundant since Pizza means Pie in italian.
As someone who grew up in Ireland I was expecting Big Tom to start warbling at 16:12. How amazing that Country & Irish made it to Japan! There’s a TH-cam channel dedicated to him. Have a listen, if you’re not squeamish, and you’ll see what I mean.
With “melody assist” on, it sounds identical to a lot of muzak currently played (loudly) in many Japanese supermarkets. How the staff endure that all day long is testament to Japanese stoicism.
The 'Only You' is likely the, "The Platters" version, was very popular in Karaoke! They also seem to be MIDI reproductions of tracks, hence being able to 'mute' the tune track, and change speed/key etc...
When you said you were going to sing in the car with your friends I thought to myself, "He's got the puppets strapped into the seats, I know it", was slightly disappointed that wasn't the case lol
The sound and look of the cartridges sparks a memory i have of an old Yamaha PSR keyboard I had with a cartridge system that had 5 popular songs on them per cartridge. I remember a friend of mine used to like singing along to One Moment in Time where I liked Your Song by Elton John on it. It was most certainly all GM MIDI data on the carts but they were very well written and sounded very good despite most Yamaha keyboards all having the same sounds and instruments on them. The carts came with a book that had the musical score and the words in so I am guessing that keyboard was not just a teaching aid but also a crude karaoke machine
I found it interesting that when you were playing Rusty Nail, the "Oh Rusty Nail" was in English tect on the screen, but everything else was in Japanese text I guess that means it could play english cartridges if they were ever produced.
Love MIDI karaoke (KAR) because you can change key and tempo without distorting the audio. You can also mute and unmute the leading melody because each music instrument can be stored on separrate track.
Impressive sound! It sounds a lot like the Yamaha XG Sound Cards that were available for computers in the late 90's. Love the way 90's electronics looked, I've got a Magnavox alarm clock with a cassette player that has this same exact design language.
76.3MHz in the UK is allocated to the Ministry Of Defence. We can only live in hope that Matt didn’t accidentally sing the Nuclear Launch Codes at them… 💥
I assume you put "sing" in quotation marks to refer to the video style of singing right? Why would you assume japanese music would summon demons kind of a weird joke. Westerners also believe in demons but not gonna make that joke see what I mean
I started wondering which synth chip this device has at 6:51 because we can recognize that typical FM sound from the SEGA Megadrive that includes a Yamaha FM chip. Glad you show it at 19:02. The YMW258-F is a multi PCM chip with FM capabilities that was used in SEGA arcade machines as well. The other YM chips are used for echo/reverb effects and surround.
@@SproutyPottedPlant It depends of the soundcard you had back in the day. Most of the soundcards in the 90's had an FM synth such as the Yamaha OPL3 that was merly more advanced than the one on the Megadrive and sounded quite similar but more advanced cards already had wavetable such as the AWE32.
@@mesicek7 of course.. what i mean is so few other countries tried to do anything similar, considering singing to backing tracks is a universal form of entertainment.. there were multiplex/minus 1 cassetes in the philippines and 'magic mics' were also popular in SE asian countries..
I'd take a guess it's playing karaoke format midi files. You can recognise that Yamaha opl FM sound from soundcards and Yamaha expanders for midi synths .
That last bit where you’re singing in the car by yourself is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. BRILLIANT!!!
Should've brought the puppets.
that's where i hope to see myself in the future. alone in my car sitting there and singing karaoke.
It's haunting, like a sad wasp stuck inside a coke can on a hot day, aware of the rising afternoon sun and the coming heat, but lacking the evolutionary apparatus to escape.
I was hoping for puppets at that point :)
@@kodinamsinh1267 It's always helpful to set yourself achievable goals
18:55 For the curious, the chips are:
HG62E11: probably a relabeled Hitachi OTP gate array for glue logic
YMW258-F: a Yamaha OPL4 with the FM synth removed, originally designed for Sega
YGV606B: the video display processor, normally found in TVs and VCRs
YM3413: delay/reverb, found in a lot of Yamaha effects processors
PCM69AP: your common-or-garden DAC
H8/510, H8/520: Hitachi H8 16bit microcontrollers
YM7128B: a surround sound processor, as found on the AdLib Gold.
Thing's basically a Portasound with echo and a video card.
"Hey, we have these piles of chips left around, what can we do with them??"
The LCD screen is most likely based on HD44780.
The moment I saw it, "portasound" came to mind. It makes sense for Yamaha to make such a machine based on essentially their synth tech and mid files.
I knew I recognised that beautiful fm synthesis
Could be a really interesting option for circuit bending
Love the opl4 sound and master systems are getting a little pricy now for attaching scratchy pots and jabbing hot irons into
No wonder it sounds like the music from Sonic The Hedgehog!
For Japanese middle age old man,
this song line-ups is very nostalgic.
I remembered when I was young student.
I didn't know about this device,
but I think this is what 80-90s Japanese used to develop.
Nice video as always.
At least with you singing along there's no chance of a content match 😂
Maybe to the video where Photoinduction throws a breeze block into a running washing machine.
Hopefully we can encourage techmoanto do this with all music in the future?🥲
@@chaos.corner 😅
⚠ WARNING ⚠
BURN HAZARD
As a Japanese, I always enjoy techmoan wondering about these Japan domestic models and karaoke things :)
Does everyone in Japan know enough English to read the labels on these devices?
@@ddegn it's more of a tradition thing (as Japan's introduction to electronics was through English-speaking countries, iirc) with a pinch of "It's just easier to use English for the button labels than trying to fit hiragana or katakana in the same spaces".
Basically, a lot of people just associate the words the same way you'd associate the play/pause symbol, though some Japanese do at least know what "Purae" is
max, introduce him to sega saturn karaoke :D
Some Japanese people seem to use a mixture of both. You will get a wall of Japanese text with the odd English word just scattered about in there. Also its a phonetic language so you can get stuff written in English letters which is Japanese but you can also get actual English written in Japanese letters. Very confusing. (Just in the very earliest stages of trying to learn Japanese - don't know if I'll ever succeed.)
@@Lucien86 It's a beautiful language, good luck with it!
In the catalogue listing of all the cassette cartridges, the last ones labeled "英語曲リクエストBOX" are all English language songs! Might be worth picking up a couple of they're available?! (Cartridge numbers HKS-W01 to 04)
He needs to see this! Upvote!
Sad thing if he gets them is that they might all content match on TH-cam, so he might not even be able to share them with us. 🙁
@@frozendude707 Or even worse, he might sing along to them!!😮😂😂
@@frozendude707 I doubt the copyright bots are tuned to MIDI covers!
Definitely one of my favorite startup sequences I’ve heard. It’s more postmodern sound collage than jingle.
There’s a weird juxtaposition between the ‘hi fi’ sound and the ‘lo fi’ screen
They have a full on synthesizer in them, so they ought to flex them.
2:03
It sounds like a Games Console
immediately made me think: gamecube!
I loved that it has a proper GUI when connected to the TV!
This thing is a treasure of the early 90s in Japan!, it has some jewels like:
- Won't be long: by the Bubblegum Brothers, this was No.1 on Japanese lists in 1991 or so. If you gotta sing 90s hits you can't forget this song.
- Zero by B'z , another huge No. 1. In fact there's a lot from B'z like: Runaway of Solitude, track 1 from MARS the same album that had Lady Navigation. They're like the...Wham!? Extreme? AC/DC? Guns And Roses? of their time.
- A lot form Chage&Aska, like: "with this eyes I lie to you" from the album "Tree". This was a peculiar duo of guys that gave shape to some part of the sound of the 90s in Japan.
- A freaking lot from "Tube", like the song numbered 001 in the first tape: "ah! summer break!", there was a time in terms of music in Japan when if you said summer that meant Tube.
-And some of Mariya Takeuchi, the same lady singing the famous "Plastic Love". Well you can sing along other hits like ''Tomorrow's me" from the 1994 compilation album "Impressions"
and the third column after the name of the artists are the first words of the lyrics of each song.
Karaoke and bingo are both staples of work/company parties in Japan (particularly the end-of-year party), so there's a 'natural' association between the two.
(Of course the culture is always changing, but year-end party + karaoke + bingo is a modern tradition that everyone here is aware of.)
I've always heard the Japanese loved karaoke, I didn't know Bingo was a big staple though.
76.5 on your FM dial.
Ridge City FM
The City Is Yours!
The chip p0rn is much appreciated by us hardware nuts. A thoughtful inclusion, Techmoan, thank you.
I look forward to this video every week, in which he explains in detail every time a Japanese gadget that even Japanese people don't know about.
Aaaah man I love "I can't stop the loneliness" i have that playing on work radio and also you should have gotten out the puppets for the ending
Seems to me the car scene at the end was a missed opportunity for the puppets. :) Good show as usual.
The Yahaha handheld has a real early-90s Apple Powerbook aesthetic to it. If Apple had made a portable music player in 1993 that *wasn't* the Apple Power CD, it might have looked a lot like this.
To be honest I was thinking the same thing!
As a fan of XJapan, I died the moment you started that up! What a fantastic MIDI rendition
🙅🏾♂
oh damn, just listen the full song, i like it!!!!
Never thought I'd hear X Japan on a Techmoan video, even if it was just a Karaoke MIDI rendition! 🤘 Along those same lines, I actually did get to see Galneryus at ProgPower USA in Atlanta in 2019.
a MIDI rendition of Rusty Nail by X Japan? That's a very different and unexpected type of nostalgia than what i usually get from Techmoan videos.
The MIDI of Rusty Nail would be right at home on my "music to play Doom II by" playlist.
It’s a Golden Button from me!
*Techmoan historic karaoke performances:*
8:03 LALALA ZINGE VLINDERS
12:16 BAN BAN BAN (Wearin' So Many Wears)
20:08 Turn It Into Love
The "ZINGE VLINDERS" looked Dutch to me. 😁
Zinge vlinders has me in stitches!
@@damnfuckingusername Yes, that's definitely Dutch. "zingen kleine vlinders" means "sing little butterflies" (whatever they mean with that).
LOL yes the Single zinge Vlinders had me laughing loud
The music on these are actually MIDI files played by an internal OPL synthesiser. It is based on the mid-90's Yamaha PSR entry/mid-level keyboard series (I remember the PSR-x20 in particular) which had Music Cartridge System ports on them and the PSR-620 even had a floppy drive! You could get cartridges for these in the UK, but the number of tracks on western cartridges were often as little as 6 and as many as 15. There is very little information online regarding this format, as it was only used on 7 or 8 Yamaha keyboards before floppy disk and later USB took over as the storage for the later model keyboards. The format was called "Yamaha Music Cartridge System". Some of the cartridges didn't contain songs, but additional style data for the keyboard.
no techmoan like yet?, could the midi be simply accessed to say turn it into midi box's like the one' popular with retro PC gaming for class like doom and such,?
@@dh2032 It has no external MIDI interface and the Yamaha Cartridge Format was proprietary. If you were determined, and knew enough, you could probably patch into the OPL4 chip directly, but what would be the point? The Adlib and Soundblaster synthesis expected by Doom used the older OPL2/3 chips and the by this point so many wavetable synthesis cards were available for the PC, you would almost definitely have one of those available.
If this is FM based it's got to be some very well tuned patches for later hardware with more operators than ye olde OPL2. Almost sounds like some of their XG hardware in some places.
edit: OPL4 makes sense
The synth in this is pretty similar to the TG100, and is basically an OPL4 without the FM synth. It's sample based only.
Marketing back then called these types of synths "wavetable" even though it's not that. Musicians derided these as "ROMplers" because they can only produce a fixed set of sounds, but that's also not really accurate since you could modify many parameters of the synth engine. It#s a shame Yamaha didn't put a MIDI port on these karaoke machines, but I guess they did it because that would have cut into their cartridge market
@@stevenclark2188 it sounds like the Advanced Wave Memory keyboards Yamaha made. They're not FM based.
11:55 the penguin rushing to get out of screen before the song starts is hilarious.
10:53 the advantage of using TV out is that lyrics are displayed in normal format, including furigana explanations on top of rare kanji.
The character LCD probably compatible with Hitachi HD44780 controller only displays katakana.
The ANRI one was a treat. The quintessential City Pop song. Thank you random stranger for suggesting that one to Matt; you have a good eye and a good taste!
And how I wish I could get my hands of the midi file(s) directly off that/ose cartridges.
Whoever did the MIDI arrangement on that one knew their craft. For all that General MIDI synths can sound toy-like when fed bare sheet music, most can turn in a surprisingly decent performance given effort. This was a good example of that.
That last section in the car had me in stitches. Techmoan album drop when?
There’s already one full song lol, it’s by 8-bit guy ytp productions, it’s the get lucky song, but he sings parts of it
1:20 - My brother lived in Japan and he said that a lot of products were sold in limited quantities through certain stores to test how the products worked for consumers. It was a testing ground for new technology.
He had bought a Panasonic portable CD player that was one of the thinnest on the market at the time, but it had an issue where if the CD was too long (74mins+) the mechanism was so tightly packed that it would actually start to scratch the CD when it got to the outer edges.
It was discontinued quite quickly after that issue was discovered.
This is true, they would just put together machines with surplus components in order to get rid of them and to try to keep open certain component lines they needed for other products.
Techmoan - The only man in Britain with two Yamaha Handy Karaoke machines.
That "Zingen Vlinders" thing at 8:04 is the opening tune to a popular Japanese cartoon from the 70s named "A Dog of Flanders", based on the British novel with the same title. When it aired here in Spain for the first time on our public television, the episodes used to include that song (in Japanese).
That was supposed to be Dutch it means singing butterflies but they messed it up it should be zingende vlinders.
Oh boy [YTP] Terrible Person and 8 Bit guy [YTP] Productions are gonna have a field day with this video 😂
8:08 TECHMOAN! YOU SANG IN DUTCH! Zingen Vlinders means, singing butterfly's and kleine vlinders means, little butterfly's. So not all songs are Japanese, i guess that this device came to the eu as well then or maybe was planned.
Just a couple of lines in an otherwise Japanese song.
I was curious about this as well. So I looked it up. Apparently it's the main opening theme song of a Japanese animation called the 'A Dog of Flanders'.
@@Techmoan Oh really? But why is that... Now I wonder..
The radio in our '66 Coronet lets you choose between different countries' radio ranges (e.g. USA, RUS, JPN), so I just imagine me flicking through the settings and hearing your GLORIOUS karaoke pop up
As a huge Kylie Minogue fan, I literally had tears streaming down my face with the rendition of Turn It Into Love!
I do think a call to Stock Aitken Waterman is the next step Mat. After all, they made a pop star out of Mandy Smith…😂
calling Mandy Smith a pop star is a bit of an exaggeration. Sure they made her sing pop, but don't think anyone's ever credited her as a star, at least not in relation to pop
@Pixie Pete You have to give little miss Minogue some credit to be fair, she's been around longer than many, many other pop stars and is still producing albums that chart. She has sung pop, country, indie/rock and had some pretty decent duets over the years so I think she doesn't get the credit she deserves sometimes.
@Pixie Pete What a shame…because pleasing you is what I live for 🙄
The ‘singing’ @8:05 finished me 🤣
a MIDI rendition of Rusty Nail by X Japan? That's a very different and unexpected type of nostalgia than what i usually get from Techmoan videos.
Ah yes, a brand-new Techmoan video at 5 in the morning. Just what I needed. ❤
I thought almost the same thing
I guess my new favorite genre of music is "90's Japanese karaoke midi covers".
🎶 On the first day of Christmas, my senpai gave to me a cartridge of karaoke! 🎶
Anime fans of the 1990s who were online will remember MIDI-karaoke. There were software players and MIDI files with lyrics, singing along to anime theme songs. We had those along with our KISS dolls and software. Fun times.
I work for Mike Stock, I'm sure he will be impressed with your version when I play it at the studio on Monday.
When you went to the car for the last scene, I can't be the only one who hoped that the puppets would make an appearance.
The start up jingle reminded me off the start of the Itchy and Scratch theme tune - identical xylophone
19:00 - Turn It Into Love was also sung by Hazell Dean - part of the SAW Hit Factory. Useless pop fact for the pub quiz there, Mat!
I shall hang my head in shame now 😂
Everytime you're exploring the cartridge, I was just hoping that one of the 80s essentials City Pop song would appear... and then you played Can't Stop the Loneliness by Anri at 18:12 made my day XD, one of my favorite City Pop music! Please give us the song list for that cartridge :)))
I'm sure there's got to be a trove of citypop on there. If Anri is there, there's got to be some Tatsuro Yamashita, Chisato Moritaka, Toshiki Kadomatsu, ...
It's so cute how the display is just all katakana and ro-maji.
Probably because that's about what you can fit in an 8bit encoding of text, but perhaps more importantly what that sort of display can show while still being readable.
EDIT: I see it can actually display full fledged Japanese text (including furigana/ruby text) in the TV mode, so definitely probably just a case of making it readable on that little display.
The multiline LCD modules had a very limited character set, so if you got hiragana as well as katakana you could count yourself lucky. Some modules featured 8 programmable character cells, so that’s how the “animation” was done - the character codes on the screen don’t change, the definition of the character shapes do.
Love it, how you have taken all your friends with you in the car for karaoke. Looks like we have friends in common 😀
The song at 8:00 is the theme from the 1975 anime TV series adaptation of "A Dog of Flanders" (フランダースの犬 / Furandāsu no Inu).
The "BAN BAN BAN" song at 12:30 is by the Kuwata Band (or the Southern All Stars?) from 1986.
The Santa Claus song at about 16:00 is "Scatterbrained Santa Claus," (あわてんぼうのサンタクロース / Awatenbou no Santakuroosu) a children's Christmas song with some onomatopoeias in it. It's apparently from or by NHK, the Japanese public TV station.
Wild industrial design of the handheld version, and I was very surprised to see the quality of the built-in video output and animations. Seems like Yamaha put a lot of effort into these, and they cost a small fortune when brand new - Thanks for sharing them!
Ahh....that's why, I was wondering why I saw Dutch in there....
I know the Japanese love their German for things, but Dutch surprised me :)
@@BuzzinsPetRock78 Same here! I've been teaching myself Dutch for a while, and was surprised and confused by the reference to small butterflies.
Thanks! I was confused by the Dutch for a moment. xD
Yes, my daughter has just confirmed the Santa Claus song has broadly the same content as "When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney", and is known by pretty much everyone in Japan!
that BAN BAN BAN song is really good, I went and listened to the kuwata band version and it's gonna be stuck in my head for a while.
Techmoan and Anri? Hell yeah, always love it when my interests intersect. A bit sad we couldn't hear the full song.
The song at 19:45 sounds like Wink, a singing duo. The song is "Turn it Into Love". You singing it was awesome. Aside from the knowledge and looking at old tech, this is why I love this channel.
damn this thing has super interesting voices, the things musicians could do with this
The Yamaha QY70/QY100 are probably the closest yammy gear that's easily available. They do use a different chip, but a lot of the sounds are very similar.
Gotta love Yamaha synthesizers.
I was just thinking how powerful this little device is for mid-90s tech.
singing in the car I was expecting you to do a take in every seat of the car and splice them together
That would require some basic skill…
That song at 8:05 is in dutch. zingen = singing vlinders=butterflies and kleine=little... so the song goes "Little butterflies are singing lalala lalala" :) I wonder what market this was meant for, cos I can't imagine Japanese customers understand dutch.
ps: the singing at 20:20 voids the warranty of my speakers :p
Mr. Techmoan is not only a tech guru, bot also a comedy genius. Fascinating! :)
Greetings from Germany
Well, when the tech isn't being the comedian anyway.
Remember that black Amazon boombox that had an inconsistent casette speed?
@@Code7Unltd
Yeah, I remember! 😅 Nearly bought one of those a few years ago. But then I decided for a much more expensive boombox from Panasonic. I'm still happy with that decision.
Techmoan's videos were reassuring me that I was lucky to get that boombox back then. Now it isn't even available anymore or you'll get only for a much higher price.
So Techmoan is at least three things in one: tech guru, comedic genius and money saver! 😍
Greetings from Germany
He had a cameo on the Big Car channel.
Was expecting a perfect sung Japanese song, and we do get a perfect rendition of the Dutch song Kleine Vlinders (never heard of it). The production value of this video goes just above and beyond.
Silliness aside, love the video and thank you for making me laugh.
Now this is weird… Yesterday I watched Big Car’s video on the Smart ForTwo, which had Techmoan in it. Today, I watch ONE Techmoan video and there’s the same Smart car! It’s like TH-cam inception…
@12:15 Those English lyrics are pure gold! Also great interpretation of a real "classic".
Japans culture is so different to ours 😄
Great little machine though. Sounds like midi audio to me, very good midi though.
of course it would be midi, otherwise it wouldn't be able to change the key or tempo of the song
it's got a nice soundbank though
It's absolutely believable that people would believe that singing in the car would be great considering the exceptional engineering that went into making the car cabin a good acoustic space with only two or at most four speakers
That's a problem given that the acoustics were mostly meant to exclude outside noise, but not at all to help sound from within the car outside the speakers
"At most"... Actually, there are many cars with more than 4. Not sure which cars have only 2, unless you actually are referring to the number of *channels*.
@@nimoy007 Sorry we can't all afford a Mercedes 😭
@@caramelldansen2204 No one gives a flying rat's ass about your financial status.
Just about any car that has more than the standard stereo option is going to have four to six speakers. For your level of car knowledge, you can just call them all Mercedes.
@@nimoy007 I was surprised to learn that my 95 Civic only came with two speakers standard in the doors.
I was just happy to see and hear a mention of X-Japan, possibly the biggest rock band in Japan ever and still going now (r.i.p. hide).
I thought for a second you was going to have all the puppets in the car with you.
This makes me sing along to songs i've never even heard before, never thought out of all the stuff i've seen on your channel over the years this would be the thing i'd 100% want to get one of.
Linda Linda is actually a somewhat common song to see covered or sung along to, I've noticed. It was used as one of the "Character Songs" for the main characters in the Durarara!! anime series. I imagine at least one or two more of those Character Songs were also released on the ING'S. Linda Linda itself appears in a number of places too, including covered by American rock artist Andrew W.K
Continued watching, and at 18:07 Gakuen Tengoku （学園天国） is also shown on-screen, which is another song from the Durarara!! Character Songs.
there's also a quite good Japanese film from 2005 called Linda Linda Linda about a school band practising the song for their school festival, starring Korean actress Doona Bae of The Host/Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Cloud Atlas fame.
It really feels like you could come across Linda Linda almost anywhere related to Japanese media and entertainment
@@zappi The film's final concert scene was also an inspiration for the concert scene in the famous 2006 anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I've long been a Haruhi fan, and I actually discovered The Blue Hearts by backtracking on those references.
There's a cover of it in Rolling Girls too, and the OP and ED are also covers of Blue Hearts songs. Whoever made that show really seemed to like The Blue Hearts. Unfortunately it's not very good.
Mat, I want to go to karaoke with you! You're the epitome of amateur karaoke... Every time I go to a karaoke night, "semi professionals" sing. You never hear the like of yourself anymore give karaoke a crack, which is why I love karaoke, to hear amateurs sing and get out of their comfort zone and give something a go
Your singing is amazing, I was almost rolling on the floor laughing!
I don't care for karaoke at all but you make boring stuff interesting.
The "Rusty nails" version here sounded even funnier than I expected. When it comes to X Japan I usually think of thundering drums, screaming, high pitched vocals and shrieking guitars, but here it sounds like an exceptionally busy pawnshop in an SNES Zelda clone (that said, it sounds as good as it possibly can on this device).
Oh this is awesome! Another installment of Matt sings the Classics! Featuring shots of his on the road tour! Bravo! Encore!
I am a bit of a nerd and love me some anime, and my favorite part is when they sing in English. RARELY does it make sense, but there's a 50/50 chance you kind of get what they're going for. I don't know if sometimes it's a Japanese idiom that doesn't translate well into English, or what. BUT it's fun.
Sometimes there’s an attempt to translate into English, but a lot of the time the lyrics chosen are purely for aesthetics and syllabic pattern.
Especially when it’s just an exclamation of one or two English words in a Japanese sentence (though it also happens with German in some songs), the point is exoticism, aesthetics, and trendiness; though usually some effort is also made to pick a word that fits with the themes of the song.
When you get one or two entire lines in English, that’s usually when they try to fit grammar into the lyric. Otherwise it’s just simple affirmations for flavour, like BELIEVE! or DON’T STOP!
@@kaitlyn__L INTERESTING, huh. I wonder if there are English songs that do that... I'd have to look into Kero Kero Bonito more, but... I'm pretty sure that singer is PROPER Japanese and BRITISH, and is fluent in both, so... she probably is more conscious of what she's saying. The one song that came to mind just now was "That's Amore", and there is a line in that that can be accused of doing just that with the "PIZZA PIE" line, being redundant since Pizza means Pie in italian.
That is my least favourite part.
As someone who grew up in Ireland I was expecting Big Tom to start warbling at 16:12. How amazing that Country & Irish made it to Japan! There’s a TH-cam channel dedicated to him. Have a listen, if you’re not squeamish, and you’ll see what I mean.
Super fun video! And Rusty Nail is such a good song! This vid makes me want more X Japan chiptune adaptations
That’s gold, Jerry! GOLD!
With “melody assist” on, it sounds identical to a lot of muzak currently played (loudly) in many Japanese supermarkets. How the staff endure that all day long is testament to Japanese stoicism.
The 'Only You' is likely the, "The Platters" version, was very popular in Karaoke!
They also seem to be MIDI reproductions of tracks, hence being able to 'mute' the tune track, and change speed/key etc...
When you said you were going to sing in the car with your friends I thought to myself, "He's got the puppets strapped into the seats, I know it", was slightly disappointed that wasn't the case lol
I was so excited to see Techmoan's friends in the car!!
Unfortunately the puppets were on strike that day, demanding higher wages or more stuffing or something.
The sound and look of the cartridges sparks a memory i have of an old Yamaha PSR keyboard I had with a cartridge system that had 5 popular songs on them per cartridge. I remember a friend of mine used to like singing along to One Moment in Time where I liked Your Song by Elton John on it. It was most certainly all GM MIDI data on the carts but they were very well written and sounded very good despite most Yamaha keyboards all having the same sounds and instruments on them. The carts came with a book that had the musical score and the words in so I am guessing that keyboard was not just a teaching aid but also a crude karaoke machine
I found one of those in a thrift store once. I didn't buy it, but I wondered about the cartridge slot.
I found it interesting that when you were playing Rusty Nail, the "Oh Rusty Nail" was in English tect on the screen, but everything else was in Japanese text I guess that means it could play english cartridges if they were ever produced.
I think you you'll soon be getting a call from William Shatner to record a duet album. When that happens, it'll have to be called "Trek Moan"....
Totally expected Big Car to be singing along in the end.
I was dying with laughter at the end. My favorite way to wake up in the morning every Saturday is to Techmoan! What a hilarious machine!!!
The "Game" button should be renamed into "power metal"
Love MIDI karaoke (KAR) because you can change key and tempo without distorting the audio. You can also mute and unmute the leading melody because each music instrument can be stored on separrate track.
"Would bingo be popular?" Oh god yes! Japanese people love a bit of bingo.
11:06 Kanashimi ha yuki no you ni, Sadness Is Like Snow. I haven't heard that song, but boy do I want to from that title alone.
Impressive sound! It sounds a lot like the Yamaha XG Sound Cards that were available for computers in the late 90's. Love the way 90's electronics looked, I've got a Magnavox alarm clock with a cassette player that has this same exact design language.
Thanks much for popping it open and giving us closeups of the chips!
Always enjoy your uploads my friend. Thank you, keep them coming.👍👍
Why didn't you join the karaoke session, though?
I wasn’t expecting to hear an X-Japan song in my Techmoan videos, but here we are.
The original is an absolute banger, btw.
It would be awesome to have a dump of the MIDI files on the cartridge, these songs sound like bangers!
went and searched for that BAN BAN BAN song and now it's gonna be stuck in my head. it's pretty good!
Ah, the classic sound of Yamaha 90's MIDI xD
When you talked about performing the song with family, I fully expected your puppets to be singing along in the back seat.
Would love to see some scans of the track listings.
It’s now included over on the Patreon post.
some say techmoan is still in that car park singing :)
This was so much fun, especially the bit at the end.
As a big fan of X Japan, I was not ready to listen to one of their songs in a Techmoan video! Thank you for the cool surprise!
76.3MHz in the UK is allocated to the Ministry Of Defence. We can only live in hope that Matt didn’t accidentally sing the Nuclear Launch Codes at them… 💥
What is worse: this or summoning demons when "singing" Japanese songs?
I assume you put "sing" in quotation marks to refer to the video style of singing right? Why would you assume japanese music would summon demons kind of a weird joke. Westerners also believe in demons but not gonna make that joke see what I mean
Was totally expecting a puppet karaoke party in the parking lot. lol
I started wondering which synth chip this device has at 6:51 because we can recognize that typical FM sound from the SEGA Megadrive that includes a Yamaha FM chip. Glad you show it at 19:02. The YMW258-F is a multi PCM chip with FM capabilities that was used in SEGA arcade machines as well.
The other YM chips are used for echo/reverb effects and surround.
More Windows 95 than Sega Mega Drive 😟
@@SproutyPottedPlant It depends of the soundcard you had back in the day. Most of the soundcards in the 90's had an FM synth such as the Yamaha OPL3 that was merly more advanced than the one on the Megadrive and sounded quite similar but more advanced cards already had wavetable such as the AWE32.
Real Joy Division / New Order vibes from your musical performance
i love how Japan made these dedicated machines just for singing
I mean they literally invented Karaoke
@@mesicek7 of course.. what i mean is so few other countries tried to do anything similar, considering singing to backing tracks is a universal form of entertainment.. there were multiplex/minus 1 cassetes in the philippines and 'magic mics' were also popular in SE asian countries..
There are Karaoke machines on Korean trains if I remember correctly
@@cmdraftbrn Karaoke is and has been massive in Japan
I'd take a guess it's playing karaoke format midi files.
You can recognise that Yamaha opl FM sound from soundcards and Yamaha expanders for midi synths .
Pretty cool how it's rendering everything at 16:9.
I was surprised by that too!
It was amazing seeing X Japan come up in one of your videos! As you can probably tell I'm a big fan