[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)