X68000

The YMF278B was made by Yamaha in 1995 and is used in the MSX Moonsound Sound Card aswell as several Arcade Games, mostly from Psikyo. It’s also known as the OPL4 (FM Operator Type-L 4) and is backwards compatible to the YMF262 (OPL3), with the FM portion being the same.

Technical Specifications

• Channels: 43
• Channel 1-6: FM Sound Synthesis with 4 Operators per Voice, or:
• Channel 1-19: FM Sound Synthesis with 2 Operators per Voice
• Channel 20-43 / 7-31: 8- 12- or 16-bit Waveform Playback
• Stereo: Hard left, center, hard right – 16 step Stereo for the Waveforms
• DAC: External YAC513 DAC by Yamaha
• 128 KB SRAM for user defined samples, expandable to 2 MB
• 2 MB Wavetable ROM with approx. 330 Samples, GM compatible
• 8 Waveforms are available for FM Synthesis
• Datasheet for the YMF278B is available here (PDF).

Used in

Sound Cards

• Logitech Soundman Wave (IBM-PC)
• Logitech Soundman Wave 16 (IBM-PC)
• Mediatrix Audio Trix Pro (IBM-PC)
• Moonsound (MSX), supported by 5 Games: Bombaman, Coral 2, Pumpkin Adventure III, Sonyc and The Lost World
• Yamaha Sound Edge SW20-98 (PC98)
• Yamaha Sound Edge SW20-PC (IBM-PC, ISA)

Arcade Games

• Many, for example: Gunbird 2, Sengoku Blade, Sol Divide, Taisen Hot Gimmick or Tetris the Absolute Grand Master 2.

All the sounds from Gunbird 2 are coming from the YMF278B (OPL4)

Special Applications

• Yamaha Sound Edge | The two soundcards come together with the YM2608 (OPNA), an AD1848KP and a YSS205.

Variants

• YMF262 | This is where the FM part of this Chip comes from.

Emulation

• Arcade | Since the YMF278B is used in many Arcade Systems, its working fine in M1. M1 is a music player which is based on MAME and thus supports a lot of Arcade Games. More about M1 can be found here.

Music Creation

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