Japanese FM-synth home computers in 2026 - what the X68000 / PC-88 / MSX music software actually costs out of Japan, and the three format walls

[RenSynthJp]

If you care about FM synthesis, the Japanese home-computer market of 1985-1995 is an odd blind spot: those machines were sound-hardware platforms first and computers second, and almost none of them were sold outside Japan. I spent this morning pricing the domestic secondhand market rather than guessing, so here are real numbers from 4 September 2026 and the practical traps.

The chips, briefly, because that is why this is on-topic here.
The Sharp X68000 shipped with a Yamaha YM2151 (OPM) plus ADPCM - the same OPM family that turns up in a lot of 1980s arcade hardware, which is exactly why its game soundtracks sound the way they do. NEC's PC-88 and PC-98 lines got their FM from add-in boards: YM2203 (OPN) on the early ones, YM2608 (OPNA) with rhythm and ADPCM on the later boards. On MSX the FM-PAC cartridge carried a YM2413 (OPLL). Different chips, genuinely different voices, and all of them still have active tracker and driver scenes.

What the software costs, live listings, 4 September 2026.
- X68000 game disks (5-inch), 2,800-4,800 yen. "Zan" was 2,800 yen (US$19.32).
- Z-MUSIC system - the X68000 music driver a lot of the platform's music was written on - 2,000 yen for a floppy set with manual, 11,600 yen for the v3.0 CD-ROM+FD package.
- Dennou Club (the X68000 disk magazine, a huge source of user music data) around 3,800 yen an issue.
- MSX2 floppies from about 1,500 yen; FM TOWNS CD-ROM titles around 4,500 yen.
- The technical mooks - "Katsuyou Kenkyuu", the Micom BASIC Magazine compilations - 1,990-6,500 yen. On the PC-8801 side there is literally a book called "machine-language sound programming, HIT-88 FM source" at 6,500 yen. Nobody has scanned most of this.

The three walls, in the order they bite.
1. Mains. These are 100 V machines with 1980s power supplies. 120 V runs them 20% over; 230 V ends the conversation. Step-down transformer or don't import the machine.
2. Video. PC-98 outputs analogue RGB at roughly 24 kHz horizontal - between console 15 kHz and VGA 31 kHz, so no ordinary monitor syncs to it. The X68000 can output 15, 24 or 31 kHz depending on the software, so a single fixed-frequency display will show part of your library and refuse the rest.
3. Media. Japanese 3.5-inch disks in this era are usually 2HD at 1.2 MB, not 1.44 MB, and a lot of the catalogue is 5.25-inch. A USB floppy drive will not read them; you want a flux-level reader.

The conclusion I did not expect.
Hardware is the bad buy and software is the good one. Searching for MSX2 machines that day returned exactly three working units across the whole domestic auction market - 28,900 yen, 42,000 yen and 51,000 yen - and any of them is a heavy box billed on volume. The disks and the documentation are 2,000-6,000 yen, weigh nothing, and are the part that genuinely never left Japan. If your goal is the music rather than the plastic, buy the software and the driver disks now and solve the machine problem later, or run it in emulation, which is what most of the tracker scene does anyway.

Sharp's X68000 Z reissue is worth knowing about too - it was 43,000 yen at a Japanese used-goods chain that day, and its SD-card packs are the only new software anyone is producing for the platform.

Disclosure so it is on the table: I priced all of this through OneMall, a Japan proxy-buying and forwarding service, and the full write-up with the rest of the numbers is here; the live X68000 listings I was reading are here. Treat that as one source rather than a neutral one - the voltage, scan-rate and disk-format facts are physics and standards, not vendor spin.

If anyone here is chasing a specific driver disk or a particular OPNA board, say which and I will look at what is actually listed.