Professional Music Driver PMD

Professional Music Driver (PMD) is a music macro language format by Masahiro Kajihara. PMD was popular on Japanese PC-98 games, targeting Yamaha FM sound chips, and also supported Adlib/Soundblaster FM, as used by a few games localised for the western market. The format has a human-readable macro language for writing music, which compiles into .m and .m2 binary files.

Identification
Files don't have clear identification, but usually begin with a mode byte (0, 1, or 2) followed by 12 or 13 sequential word offsets into the file.

Specifications

 * PMD English Documentation Translated documentation of the macro language
 * PMD .M files Technical description of the binary file format

Software

 * Ｃ６０のページ FM-PMD music player for Windows, FMPMD2000 has an English interface
 * Battle of the bits: Professional Music Driver (PMD) Description, guides, and tools
 * pmdplay

Sample files

 * Hoot Archive The PC-98 game music list includes many PMD soundtracks, eg. diesirae_98, eve_98, and inma_sei_98