FM2612

Three hardware tone channels play fixed 50% duty square waves. New notes rotate through them. PSG has no hardware ADSR. Low notes clamp at the 10-bit tone-period limit.

Attenuation changes in 2 dB steps: 0 is loudest, 15 is silent. Master volume is shared with the other editors.

Noise has one channel. Clock / 512, / 1024 and / 2048 use fixed clocks; keys retrigger the noise without changing its pitch. Tone 3 links its clock to the keyboard and Pitch. The Tone 3 square-wave output stays silent.

Software Envelope is an added software feature, not a hardware PSG envelope. It moves each voice's real attenuation in 2 dB steps. Attack, Decay and Release are milliseconds; Sustain is a level percentage. ADSR edits apply to new notes. Changing On / Off stops held notes and release tails.

In Synth mode, eight PCM voices share one sample in 64 KiB RAM. Volume is 8-bit; left and right Pan each have 16 levels. New keys use round robin.

Software release smoothing lowers only the released voice's Volume over 4 ms before stopping it. This is a Synth software feature, shared by keyboard audition, Event Rec and Looper; the RF5C164 has no hardware ADSR envelope. Held voices keep their original sound. Stop and sample changes stop voices immediately.

WAV decoding, mono mixing and 8-bit conversion are software operations. Long samples are resampled to fit RAM, preserving duration with reduced bandwidth. Guard bytes reserve safe loop / stop markers.

Root note plays at the original sample speed. Loop Start and End can change while notes are held. End moves a marker in shared RAM without restarting the voices. Changing the sample stops held notes. Loop Off plays once and then loops silence; extending End can expose more audio to a held voice.

Sample view starts in Range mode. Choose Draw to paint the source waveform on the same canvas. This is software PCM editing: a stroke previews while dragging and applies when released, stopping held notes. Escape, pointer cancellation or leaving the editor discards the unfinished stroke. Drawing keeps the sample length, rate, Root and Loop settings; save it with the existing PCM preset or Files / Cassette controls. Waveform and Spectrum show output only; VGM Live is read-only.

VGM Live shows the selected PCM channel's written settings and sample RAM at the audible position. Pause to play that sample on the selected channel; Copy creates a new Synth instrument. C4 is the captured playback speed, not an inferred original note. A snapshot cannot preserve later RAM edits or a game's software envelope.

Wrapped samples, unknown RAM or unsafe end markers cannot be copied or auditioned.

Software Event Rec records notes, Pitch, PCM settings and sample changes into self-contained JSON. Start Event Rec, then use Record / Stop or Space. Stopping a take starts loop playback on a separate PCM chip. Use current sound captures your current sample and settings when playback starts; later edits do not change that playback. Original note and stop timing is retained. Export / import takes from Menu.

Software Looper adds independent recorded layers. Start Looper, then Record / Stop or Space; the first take sets the period. Later takes join at their recorded position. Each layer keeps its samples and settings when you edit the Synth. Undo removes the latest layer; Stop / Start keeps layers, while Clear removes them. Up to 16 layers / 120 seconds / 128 MiB of rendered audio stay in this session's memory; they are not saved in Cassette. Layer mixing is software, beyond one chip's eight voices.