Play Retro Video Game Music on Real Hardware with the YM2151 Arcade Classic and Adlib Mini

Modern sound cards can play anything, but that wasn’t always the case. Early computers, video game consoles, and arcade cabinets used hardware synthesizers. Those gave classic games their cool retro sound, because they were limited both in memory and in the tones they were capable of producing. Emulators can reproduce that, but to truly recreate retro video game music you need to do it on real hardware.

To do that, Aidan Lawrence has created two devices: the YM2151 Arcade Classic and the Adlib Mini. As the name suggests, the YM2151 Arcade Classic uses the Yamaha YM2151 sound synthesis chip. That was found in many arcade machines of the ’80s and ’90s. The Adlib Mini uses a Yamaha YM3812, which was used in a lot of home computers in the ‘90s.

Lawrence designed custom PCBs for both devices, and has made the entire project open source so you can build you own. If you head over to the GitHub page you’ll find schematics for the boards, along with the source code to run them. Both play VGM (video game music) files loaded onto SD cards. As you’d expect, they sound great because they use the original sound chips.