This is pretty darn good! XD
I'm very interested in this PMD98-MML, where can I read up on using it and compiling music?
KAJA's website (in Japanese):
http://www5.airnet.ne.jp/kajapon/There go to the link that says [自作ツールのお部屋], and there you'll see a table with a row labeled PMD98. On that row you'll find a link to download MC.EXE (compressed as an LZH archive MC48P.LZH). Extract its contents with the latest version of WinZip to some folder, there you'll see MC.DOC, MC.EXE, PMDMML.MAN, and UPDATE.DOC.
MC.EXE is a PC-98 MS-DOS command-line executable, which means you'll need to run it on a PC-98 computer (or, at least, a PC-98 emulator). So you'll have to copy the EXE into your HDI file (the hard-drive image that is loaded by the PC-98 emulator, be it Anex86, Neko Project, or T98-Next) by either opening the HDI with Disk Explorer or Anex86's own anexdiet.exe disk editor and then dragging MC.EXE into that HDI.
PMDMML.MAN is the PMD98 MML command reference manual (in Japanese!). It is a lengthy plain-text file encoded as Shift-JIS (so you'll have to open it with Microsoft Word and choose Shift-JIS as the character set/encoding in order to properly read it). It lists all the MML commands recognized by the compiler.
MML (Music Macro Language) is a plain-text method of writing music. It is commonly used for composing music for NES, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, and other video-game platforms. You just open a plain-text editor like Notepad and then start typing MML instructions there. A sample string of notes for a certain channel (FM, PSG, etc.) would look like this:
A @124o5l8v14 c d e c+ c16 <b16 >c [...]
B @128o4l4v13 c e c [...]
Once you're done writing your whole MML music, save the text as a .MML file, then compile it with the desired compiler. for the case of MC.EXE, you'll have to copy the finished MML file to the HDI in the same way you copied MC.EXE there. Then from the PC-98 [emulator] prompt, type:
mc /v filename.mmlto compile the MML into filename.M, the PMD98 music file itself which you can then extract from the HDI to a Windows folder and play with FMPMD2000 or Winamp (provided you have the necessary plugin), or even package it into a ZIP along with the COM files required by Hoot, prepare an XML file following the same format as Hoot's doujin.xml, register that XML into hoot.xml, and finally start Hoot to play your compiled music.
There are many different forms of MML recognized by many different compilers, depending on what kind of music you want to compile (NES, Sega Genesis, SNES, etc.). Each compiler might recognize unique MML commands/instructions not available to other compilers, or some instruction may have one meaning to an SNES MML-to-SPC compiler but a different meaning to a Genesis MML-to-GYM compiler, and so on.
Sure, MML is not really a user-friendly form of composing/arranging music, but I am sure this is what ZUN himself used to compose all his PC-98 Touhou music, since the compiler MC.EXE bears the signature of M.Kajihara (a.k.a. KAJA, and that same name appears in the Touhou games' Staff Roll).
It took me about a full month to learn PMD98 MML from whatever I could understand/Google-translate from the PMDMML.MAN manual.
If you want to see some sample MML sources composed by KAJA himself, you can download the PMD98 Ver.4.8o Freeware LZH archive (PMD48O.LZH) from the same link above - the sample files are inside another LZH archive contained within PMD48O.LZH
EDIT: added instructions on how to compile MML with MC.EXE and how to play the compiled M file.
