Ancient 8-Bit-style FM MIDI Synth plays Touhou 08 (IN) MIDIs

you didnt??? lol the psp version is a port of it practically. the first version was dos and then they made a 32bit version for windows.

Oh, I see. I didn't even know Timidity existed for the PC, either. =o

well i have it for the pc and psp. I'm just saying im stuck with using soundfonts that sound like fm synth is all. Oh speaking of psp timidity i can only use pats not sf2 :P

i have to settle with timidity for fm synthesis that isnt real lol

If you're talking about the MIDI synth for the PSP, that's simple wavetable synthesis. o_O

This is MIDI music being played through a card that uses FM Synthesis to render the sound.
Don't confuse that with pure FM Synthesis music.

Go listen to watch?v=-gYlDaYf44Y or any other track from Akyu's Untouched Score.

Firstly, FM refers to the way the sound is generated. You seem to think that because the note data is stored in MIDI format this does not make it "FM music". The soundcard uses solely FM synthesis to make the sound, therefore this is music played by frequency modulation.

Secondly, the music in the PC-98 Touhou games is not "pure" FM music. The PC-98 has 6 FM channels but also 3 SSG channels which are used in music for beats, snares, hihats, triangles and some melodies depending on the theme.

What I meant is that the PC-98 musics are, even if partially, composed using FM Synthesis specifically, whereas these you show here are originally MIDI and are incidentally being rendered using FM Synth.

The big difference resides in the abstraction caused by the MIDI format, in contrast with the lower level nature of direct FM Synthesis composition.

It's like a machine-printed canvas vs a hand painted one.
The support in which it's reproduced is the same, but the way it's created is not.

Well, I suppose it all comes down to what format the FM music was created in (it is probably now compiled into the program, but effectively there will still be note on/off events, for example).
I'm sure ZUN put an awful lot of effort into creating the MIDIs as well, and I doubt he left much more of it to machine than he did in the FM ones. I didn't think it was known exactly what software he used to create the music, but I expect such simple things as copy/paste were possible back then too...

MIDI in the Windows games has always been a fallback in case the PCM files are unavailable, such as with some of the demo versions.
When PCM is available there really is no reason to use anything else, other than saving machine resources.