Highly inspired by damifortune's SNES music guide, and shamelessly ripping off its bulletin title, I have made a guide to making chiptune using MML.

It's available here: https://mml-guide.readthedocs.io/

My goal was to have a guide that covers all the important basics of the sequence format, that anyone could from it understand more easily the basics of any other format they decide to pick up, as well as provide documentation with proper explanations on all the specifics about formats I've been using.

Currently only PMD for PC-x801 is covered, but I plan on covering GBMC for gameboy and SuperC for the SNES in the future.

I also took the opportunity to make an updated list on available MML formats and links to its documentation and/or translations when available (added them to the Lyceum too), since all the current google-able resources on it are super super old or don't provide much information.

I hope it'll be useful!

this is so cool! i hope to give it a shot some time. i didn't realize it shared so much in common conceptually with sheet music. that made it make good sense to me out the gate, since i have that frame of reference. thanks for making this!

This is cool! Not gonna lie, seeing GBMC on that list makes me wanna makes tunes in it again. Even though I would work faster in a tracker, something about producing GB tunes from MML is just satisfying to me.

Looking forward to seeing this develop.

BUMP ! (this is already off the front page somehow and deserves to live there a while)

@Yung Gotenks: YES! GBMC is a lot of fun!

I thought of starting with it but I think going for a simpler format like that after the amount of things i imagined I'd have to write and research for PMD (and it ended up being more than I thought) would be best.


Also I just added the list of MML formats to the Lyceum! After holidays I'm gonna look into more drivers I haven't yet, and link the respective ones in each format's lyceum just to have them as an additional tool.

I've always wanted to learn the differences between ABC and MML. The frustrating part of trying to figure it out on my own was the name collision with a different "MML" that also pertains to music.

ABC is focus around human reading and interpretation, so it limits itself to make it simpler and quicker to read. It does have similarities but MML is much less restricted

Yeah, I've used ABC a bunch, but I didn't know anything about MML other than it's similar. The full ABC specification can do a lot of things that I wouldn't consider restrictive though.

Updated the guide with a resources page for PMD linking other guides instrument packs and etc. Along with other small fixes thanks to people's feedback.

https://mml-guide.readthedocs.io