Introduction

Professional Music Driver (PMD) is a driver used for making music for the PC-98, PC-88, X68000, FM Towns and IBM PC families. Being a consumer-grade driver allowed it to be used for many games, becoming one of the most popular drivers at the time, along with FMP. Notable examples of games using it are Touhou Project and Grounseed.

Developed by Masahiro Kajihara in 1989, PMD was developed and improved as he made his carreer programming and writing music for games, including its ports to different platforms. Development stopped around the year 2000 with the transition to modern computers, but in 2019, for the celebration of its 30th anniversary, KAJA not only updated it with support for new commands, but also released its source code to the public.

With its latter updates being mostly focused on PC-98 music, there are features explained in this guide that the other versions might not support, so this guide is focused on that platform.

I'm planning on add info explaining usage and differences for the other formats going forward. But for now the guide will only focus on the PC-98 driver.

Special Thanks

This guide to PMD would not have been possible without the help of altiami, who went out of their way to proofread this guide and help solving many problems I faced during documentation.

Pigu-A did god's work in translating the PMD MML documentation, which I wouldn't be able to write this guide without. Also opna2608 and their own documentation provided some really helpful information that helped me understand some things better. Huge thanks to both of them.

Thank you KAJA, c60, Myon98, kuma4649, TAN-Y and RerrahK and every dev who worked in PMD or tools related to it.

Also thanks to every western artist keeping the MML scene alive.