The history of MSX computers [video] | Hacker News Reader

The history of MSX computers [video]

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62 pointsskibz19 comments

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.

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.

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.

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 As soon as something hit the market, it was already superseded by something better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

V9958. Which also added some high color modes.

Looked very impressive back then. But technically a V9958 is best regarded as a V9938 with some cosmetic tweaks.

> and supported a light pen and mouse.

Mice are supported through the joystick ports which are standard across MSX models (so eg. MSX1 + mouse = just plug in & write software to use it).

V9938's light pen support was used in a few rare MSX2 machines. And yes V9958 removed this function.

Sure, you can do a mouse on anything but the V9938 had support for it.

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.

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.

The Radarsoft one? There was a much slower free version around on BBSs/viditel as well.

Yes! Dat is ‘m :-)

I think last week, a new version of a fan-made Gradius/Nemesis was released - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BTSBfVCxEY

Take a look at the new MSX releases: USAS2 and Pampas & Selene

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.

In the nineties, there was one of the Yamaha machines in the window of a music store I used to walk by. What a pretty computer. Many of the Japanese MSX machines hit a real "cyberdeck" nerve in retrospect but I remember it looking better than the pictures I can find online. I vaguely recall they were asking way too much.

#nostalgia - damn. i had one of these when i was ~ 8 enjoyed many fun days playing "sky-jaguar" and other cartridge-based games.

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