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Hello everyone. We have a special treat for you: a new blogpost that is a audiovisual whirlwind tour through a neglected era of music technology. It's easily the longest, but also the best-researched and most fun thing we've ever written: https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2025-08-24-around-the-general-midi-world-in-12-pianos.html
There's 187MB of multimedia in that post, including 57 seperate media files. Our web server is very likely going to implode from us publishing this, if a lot of people do end up reading this. We ask for your patience in this matter!
This is, to be absolutely clear, not another one-day unedited manic rant. Writing this took almost 4 days, and we have proofread it more times than we can count, and we have tried our best to trim the fat (even if it's impossible), but it was, effectively, years in the making.
If you only ever read a single piece of long-form writing from us, please let it be this one. And do pace yourselves when reading it, because we had to pace ourselves when writing it.
We hope you enjoy it.
heheh. we have no intention of making any further content changes to the post (just fixing technical issues with the media embeds and misspellings, stuff like that), but last night we remembered we actually do know where people have heard the QY70 before, and it's a doozy:
![Screenshot of the following text in a blog post:
Okay, but where have I heard it before? The “Game Corner” theme [link] from Pokémon Diamond & Pearl is very obviously based on the QY70's EuroBt1 (“Eurobeat 1”) preset pattern (audio [link], MIDI [link]), with the intro in particular being entirely unchanged. (A key selling point of the QY70's MIDI-based pattern/style system is that you can trivially change the tempo, chord root and chord type, so those differences don't count.) We can't be credited with this discovery, but we did go out of our way to help Mudstep [link] when they wondered if someone had a QY70 for this reason. :)](https://social.noyu.me/fileserver/01K5XEEZF4A486Z2PRS7NHG169/attachment/small/01K3G2NGNEJKJ6P1JR512VD9KM.jpg "Screenshot of the following text in a blog post:
Okay, but where have I heard it before? The “Game Corner” theme [link] from Pokémon Diamond & Pearl is very obviously based on the QY70's EuroBt1 (“Eurobeat 1”) preset pattern (audio [link], MIDI [link]), with the intro in particular being entirely unchanged. (A key selling point of the QY70's MIDI-based pattern/style system is that you can trivially change the tempo, chord root and chord type, so those differences don't count.) We can't be credited with this discovery, but we did go out of our way to help Mudstep [link] when they wondered if someone had a QY70 for this reason. :)")
![Screenshot of the following text in a blog post:
Okay, but where have I heard it before? The “Game Corner” theme [link] from Pokémon Diamond & Pearl is very obviously based on the QY70's EuroBt1 (“Eurobeat 1”) preset pattern (audio [link], MIDI [link]), with the intro in particular being entirely unchanged. (A key selling point of the QY70's MIDI-based pattern/style system is that you can trivially change the tempo, chord root and chord type, so those differences don't count.) We can't be credited with this discovery, but we did go out of our way to help Mudstep [link] when they wondered if someone had a QY70 for this reason. :)](https://social.noyu.me/fileserver/01K5XEEZF4A486Z2PRS7NHG169/attachment/original/01K3G2NGNEJKJ6P1JR512VD9KM.png "Screenshot of the following text in a blog post:
Okay, but where have I heard it before? The “Game Corner” theme [link] from Pokémon Diamond & Pearl is very obviously based on the QY70's EuroBt1 (“Eurobeat 1”) preset pattern (audio [link], MIDI [link]), with the intro in particular being entirely unchanged. (A key selling point of the QY70's MIDI-based pattern/style system is that you can trivially change the tempo, chord root and chord type, so those differences don't count.) We can't be credited with this discovery, but we did go out of our way to help Mudstep [link] when they wondered if someone had a QY70 for this reason. :)")
just updated the “Around the General MIDI world in 12 pianos” post again, the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth section has been massively edited because apparently that goddamned about box is still accessible on Windows 10! i also added more links re: the SC-88 Pro EoSD soundtrack
ah right yes, i've also snuck in a mention of Phantasy Star Online now. you can tell we were wearing ourselves out a bit too much writing the original post because “hikari_no_yume passing up a chance to mention the Phantasy Star Online OST” would only happen by accident
@hikari I failed to pace myself (whatever I wanted to pace myself, I'm reading texts really fast, even my brain can't follow it...), but I absolutely enjoyed your post!!
btw, I found some errors:
* some FLAC files returns nginx 403 or 404 error page (e.g. "definitely better than in DirectMusic." part).
* "04PIANO.MID on the SC-8850's Piano 1 patch, as intended." audio file contains some quirks around 0:05, is it recording fault or actual hardware quirks?
@rinsuki The quirk at 0:05 is probably a recording fault, we would guess (it sounds like it, at least).
We fixed the one remaining 403 issue with the FLAC files (it's a very frustrating consequence of how Windows and Unix filesystems interact when copying files between computers… it's bitten us many times before), but we aren't aware of 404's, do you have examples?