disclaimer: I am no expert on the Japanese FMP music scene. If you are please correct whatever mistakes you find below and add whatever information might be useful. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "FM sound driver (FMP)" is a PC98 era music file format originally created by Guu. The format targets the Yamaha OPN and OPNA sound chip based audio hardware used in respective PC88/PC98 home computers. The files in the "FMP" folder here are limited to the older variants of the format that can be recognized by the following file name extensions: .OPI Song data for OPN .OVI Song data for OPNA .OZI Song data for PPZ8 (OPN or OPNA) Separate sample data (ADPCM) files used by this format use the ".PVI" filename extension. side note: There is a more recent FMPv7 version of the format (which uses a totally different file format - and file name extensions like "MWI", "OWI" and "PWI" for separate sample data). There seem to be few files available in that newer format and these should NOT be mixed with the older format used here. It seems that there was (maybe still is) a composer/arranger scene in Japan that used this format (see http://archive.fmp.jp/ where the newer v7 format variant still seems to have been used as late as 2017). Back in the days various "FMP Music Disk" collections seem to have been a popular means to distribute respective songs. Unfortunately it seems (judging by the files available here) that the FMP scene was quite different from the Amiga MOD scene and there seem to be relatively few original FMP format compositions. Most of the songs seem to be hobbyist re-makes of well known game music. (Example: There are 15 versions of the song "Ice Ridge of Noltia" from the game "Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished".. and songs from game families like Final Fantasy, Gradius, Dragon Quest, Romancing Saga, Street Fighter (etc) just repeat and repeat and repeat... it get old real quick. It is unclear how many of the files might also just be conversions from other formats and where original composers might actually have been involved. (Example: The PC98 game "YUNO" originally used a stripped down variant of the FMP format that it called "PLAY6". When comparing the respective original "PLAY6" format files to the "FMP" format variants that can be found in the "Ryu Umemoto" sub-folder, it is obvious that a large portion of the FMP file data is identical to the original data from the PLAY6 files - with minor tweaks regarding the used sample data. It is unclear if somebody else converted the original PLAY6 files or if Ryu Umemoto released these FMP versions of his work himself. Credits in another songs suggest that it was created based on a MIDI file that somebody else had created based on some game's music.) The cleaned up "FMP" files here originate from the mess that people had originally uploaded to https://modland.com/incoming/laboratory/FMPMD/ (A large part of that data comes from an archive that had been published on a now defunct Japanese web site which can still be found in older snapshots of archive.org, or here: https://nfggames.com/PC98/index.php/Music/ ). Below the list of the performed "cleanups": 1) Separate FMP format files from the PMD format files that were mixed into the same "FMPMD" folder 2) Use upper-case naming convention for all filename extensions 3) Ditch all "exact duplicate" music files (there still are "minor variation" files left which may not be worth keeping - but did not want spend time to find which of the respective variants might be the "best" one, so I just kept them all) 4) Replace Kanji format (and DOS 8-char gibberish) filenames and with plain ASCII ones based on (Google translated) song information found within the music files (occasionally I manually used an AI based translation when Google's result was just too bad) 5) Fix sample-file upper/lower case names to match references used in music file. 6) Sort/group all music files by "composer" (which in many cases is the "arranger" rather than the "composer") 7) Put used sample files into the same folder as the music file that uses it. (Add "close enough" placeholder sample files where original sample files are missing.) 8) Flatten composer specific sub-folders - avoiding "per-song" folders. (Occasionally use "album" sub-folders if author has very many songs and album is large - or does not require the duplication of sample files.) For browsing purposes it seems more convenient to have larger folders rather than very small ones. Known limitations: - Songs may refer to Japanese games that were never published with an english name. Consequently translated game names may be strange and/or inconsistent. (example: Google translated the same song name sometimes as "Ice Ridge.." and sometimes as "Ice Wall..".. not all similar inconsistencies were manually cleaned up.) Some input files/folders already used translations, others used Romaji spelling of original game names (e.g. "Dokyuusei 2" vs "Classmate 2"). Respective naming used across different folders may be inconsistent. - "Google translate" results leave a lot to be desired, sometimes resulting in different handles for the same "composer" (additional consolidation may be needed). Some of the used "composer names" may just be bad. - Some of the music files contain trailing "Karaoke" texts. As test cases some of these files names where ammended with "(karaoke)" - but only some. (I found no modern player that actually handles these texts.)