Thanks to the efforts os many respectful MSX community members, these days we have a lot more MSX documentation in English at our hands than we ever had back in the 80s/90s.
But there are still some areas of the MSX system that are completely obscure, with only the few documentation available still in japanese. All the music-related BIOS documentation are inside this sea of lost knowledge. This include:
- MSX-Audio BIOS
- MSX-Music BIOS
- MSX-MIDI BIOS
The lack of this important information hindered the MSX-Audio BIOS enhancement project.
Not being able to read Japanese, I tried everything I could do at my reach to try to translate the MSX datapack, even resorting to OCR and and automatic translators. The results were awful, like this first page of the MSX-Music chapter:
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244
And so, that nice window with free time I had to develop was lost. These days I'm terribly busy with RealLife (TM) issues and I'm not being able to focus on MSX development, since it requires a lot of sweat and inspiration. But I refuse to give up that easily. The idea is then to do some kind of work that can be even done on a smartphone while commuting. And translating the needed the docs seems doable.
The process would be similar to the one used to translate Psycho World to English. I will post here a set of some pages that need translation, then the awesome guys that can read Japanese can post the translated text on the forum, without worrying about anything else than the text content. I'll take care to paste it, format and compose a nice document to be published later. Of course the credits will be given to anyone that helps.
Even if I'm never able to return to coding the MSX-Audio BIOS, the resulting document will without any doubt still be useful for those who want to program the already existing versions of the MSX-Audio, MSX-Music and MSX-MIDI BIOSes.


