[HN Gopher] The history of MSX computers [video] ___________________________________________________________________ The history of MSX computers [video] Author : skibz Score : 48 points Date : 2023-12-30 10:44 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com) | nhggfu wrote: | #nostalgia - damn. i had one of these when i was ~ 8 enjoyed many | fun days playing "sky-jaguar" and other cartridge-based games. | arp242 wrote: | A lot of the games can be played online at https://www.file- | hunter.com/MSX/ - I found a lot of the games a lot more janky and | awkward than I remember them to be, and also quite repetitive. | YMMV. | | All editions of the (Dutch language) MSX Magazine are online at: | https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/ - I guess it's of limited | interest because it's in Dutch, but I had great fun reading | through them a while ago. | bane wrote: | I believe the MSX 2 or 2+ added hardware support for scrolling | which made many games much better. It's weird playing old MSX-1 | games and having the background lurch across the screen while | single-color sprites move around in offset smoothness. | | A few of the more popular games have smooth scrolling patches I | believe to take advantage of the later hardware scrolling | support. | | I'd say that the MSX-2 and beyond games easily achieve a level | somewhere between the NES and the Turbografx-16 when the | hardware was really in full swing. | timbit42 wrote: | MSX 2 had the Yamaha V9938 which added vertical hardware | scrolling and supported a light pen and mouse. | | MSX 2+ had the Yamaha V9957 which added horizontal hardware | scrolling but didn't support a light pen or mouse. | buescher wrote: | MSX was really a little too little too late. The BASIC | interpreter looks nice and MSX-DOS was CP/M compatible. I can | almost imagine a past where something more like MSX2+ came out | much sooner and you could program it with Turbo Pascal. That | would have kept me occupied for a long while. The problem is you | have to square that with a world where the Macintosh came out in | 1984 and the Amiga in 1985. | forinti wrote: | It had a nice architecture for an 8 bit machine, though. You | could add a ton of RAM even to an MSX1. And you could get 80 | columns cards too. | | The first MSX was sold in 1983. It couldn't realistically have | been made much earlier. You must take into account that the 80s | had an explosion of technology. As soon as something hit the | market, it was already superseded by something better. | buescher wrote: | The Colecovision, which is similar, came out a year earlier. | The Z80 (1976) and the TI graphics chip (1979) were old news | by that point. I could almost imagine an MSX standard a year | earlier, with a fast Z80 (i.e. the 8 MHz Z80H, 1982) and an | iteration on the TMS9918. | wk_end wrote: | Technically I guess "too little too late" is a way to describe | it, but the MSX was a pretty big success in its home country - | and at least as big a success worldwide as the Amiga was - so | you might alternatively describe it as "just enough at just the | right time". For your average Japanese consumer, a commodity | MSX machine was dirt-cheap and had an absolute murderer's row | of high-quality games available for it. The Amiga and Mac were | comparatively expensive and software starved for most of the | MSX architecture's life...and then the PC came along and ate | everything anyway. | squarefoot wrote: | My only experience with MSX has been the Yamaha CX5 M2 I bought | used in the mid 80s to be used as synthesizer. Thanks to its | internal synthesizer chipset, it had similar functionality to the | poor man's DX7s of that time, that is, the DX9 and later the | DX21, but being able to edit patches on a monitor rather than on | a small character display was extremely useful. I found it at a | significant lower price than a full keyboard and used it for some | years with my Amiga as a sequencer and a couple other keyboards. | Was a pretty little machine which sounded good, but was also | pretty much single purpose as there was not much other software | to use it with. | sdk77 wrote: | What a coincidence, I first saw this video in my YouTube | recommends and now here. I used to have an MSX-2, a Philips. It | had a double sided 720K 3.5" floppy drive, fhe file system is | FAT12 and the disks were compatible with PC's. I learned Z80 | assembler on the MSX and had a lot of fun with it both with | playing games and making it do cool stuff. This computer was | quite popular in the Netherlands as well as Spain. | louwrentius wrote: | We played a helicopter topology game in school on our MSX in | the 80s (The Netherlands). | | It was fun and you learned where Dutch cities are located. | anonzzzies wrote: | The Radarsoft one? There was a much slower free version | around on BBSs/viditel as well. | bane wrote: | What a world it would have been if the MSX had made it in the | U.S. There's an interview somewhere with Jack Trameil talking | about how his plan to keep the MSX out of the U.S. and parts of | Europe was to just undercut the hell out of the platform. | | Imagine if that had failed and we'd maybe be using the | descendants of the original MSX-line. | anonzzzies wrote: | Lovely machines. Learned programming basic and asm and after | pascal and c on it when I was a little kid begin 80s. Knowing | everything about a computer, hardware and software, is a very | nice thing. A thing no human in modern computing (well, with | modern computers that is) will ever have/feel anymore. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-30 23:00 UTC)