MoonBlaster Mania

Project sheet

Year

1993

Type

Music disk

Status

RELEASED

Platforms

MSX2
MSX2+
MSX turbo R

License

Freeware (public domain)

Media

3.5" 1DD floppy disk

Language

MSX-BASIC with 3rd party routines for music playback

Summary

Music disk for MSX2 computers, supporting both the FM-PAC and Music Module sound cartridges.

Description

This is a simple music disk for MSX computers that I released in 1993.

My cousin Carlos García composed all the songs, except for the first one. I wrote the program, "designed" the title and menu screens, and composed the first song (Exodus from destruction).

Technical details

It runs on MSX2 computers and up, and it requires at least one of the MSX-MUSIC (Yamaha YM-2413) or MSX-Audio (Yamaha Y8950) hardware extensions. If both are installed then the program will use both and the sound quality will be better, besides becoming stereo.

If neither MSX-MUSIC nor MSX-Audio are installed then the program will still run, but there will be no sound.

I used to give it away on a single-sided 3.5" floppy disk.

Usage

Insert the disk in your MSX computer (or the disk image in your MSX emulator) and start the computer.

The title screen appears and the Arale song starts playing
Press SPACE to go to the menu screen
In the menu, use the UP/DOWN cursor keys to select a song
Press SPACE to play the selected song. The song will take a couple seconds to load from disk and then it will start playing.

License and download

This software is public domain. Feel free to redistribute.

Download disk image: MoonBlaster_Mania_1993.fixed.dsk (360Kb)

This disk image is based on the copy that's circulating online, because I lost the original many years ago. That copy had an issue with the colors in the title and menu screens. I've fixed those in this version.

In the disk image I uploaded earlier today (September 30th 2025) the MSX-Audio samples for the drumkits for the last song in the disk were corrupted. I have been able to restore these from a copy of the song in a different disk image. The sound will now play properly in an emulator that supports MSX-Audio, such as openMSX. If you're playing the music disk in your web browser then you won't notice anything different, since there's no MSX-Audio support anyway.

You can use this disk image directly on an emulator, or save it to a physical disk to use in a real MSX (recommended).

Online version

MoonBlaster Mania runs on the WebMSX emulator. It should be running in the window below this paragraph, as long as you're using a modern web browser with Javascript enabled.

Note that even though the emulation is pretty good, there will always be differences from using it on a real MSX computer:

Emulation accuracy and performance will depend on your computer's performance and operating system load
Sound emulation isn't 100% accurate
WebMSX doesn't support the MSX-Audio chip (at least not at the time of this writing), so you will only hear the MSX-MUSIC part