Whatever Happened to MSX Computers?

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-msx-computers/

by bane • 12 years ago

58 56 12 years ago

gandalfu2• 12 years ago

Both my secondary and high schools had labs filled with MSX keyboards, B/W TVs and tape recorders. My intro to programming came from Joe Pritchard books "MSX Exposed" and "Machine Language for MSX"... and I still have notebooks full of hand written programs... and a fully functional DAEWO MSX keyboard in the closet.

Happy poking!

smsm42• 12 years ago

My school had MSX comps too, the Yamaha MSX (probably ones mentioned in the article that were sold to Soviet Union). A lot of experiments with low-level programming were done on them. Most docs were not available then (it was time before the Internet :) so it was a lot of piecing together random info and lots of trial and error. Also, it had a bunch of very addictive games (ah, King's Valley)...

gandalfu2• 12 years ago

I was never any good, but what about nemesis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_2_(1987_video_game)

ciclista• 12 years ago

My very first programming experience was on an MSX. At least in my small circle, MSX (and the MSX-2) were at least as popular as Spectrum or the Commodore 64 in Europe. In the 90s (not sure what the current status is) the retro scene interest for MSX computers was quite active as well.

Ecio78• 12 years ago

Me too. We had a MSX II (with tape drive, Floppy disk, green monitor etc.) I suppose it was the mid/late 80s, I was just a kid and I was using it to play games, use some programs (and MSX-DOS) and also do some experiments with MSX BASIC. I remember it as a nice machine, and I was sad that it was not as popular as Commodore 64

pbiggar2• 12 years ago

Boring story time!

I grew up on the MSX. My dad bought two of them in around 1985 or so. At school we were taught Logo on BBC Micros, but we didnt have a BBC micro at home, so my dad sourced MSX Logo [1].

Unfortunately, it was localized in dutch, so instead of the "forward" command, there was the "vooruit" command. So to make it the same as we learned in school, my dad made a set of English functions which wrapped all the Dutch functions. He is an economist/diplomat, not a programmer, and it was quite a few years until I realized what he had done and how impressive that was.

[1] http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/philips/msx-logo/relea...

herokusaki• 12 years ago

How did he make the wrapper functions persist between sessions?

keithpeter• 12 years ago

Some LOGOs allow you to save and load a default workspace, complete with words you have taught LOGO. Google has failed me with MSX Logo however.

pbiggar2• 12 years ago

They were saved to disk. I'm not sure if he overwrote the disk logo came on, or we used a different disk. It was 25 years ago :)

DanBC2• 12 years ago

This isn't a boring story!

I wish there was a site where this kind of information could be collected. Personal history of computing is important and a lot of it is being lost.

rocky1138• 12 years ago

There is one for Apple.

http://www.folklore.org/index.py

tim_m_locke• 12 years ago

Apple 1 and Apple ][ history http://apple2history.org/history/ah01/

bane6• 12 years ago

Actually, old-computers.com lets people post personal stories about the machines they have in their museum.

example: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=90

I wish it was used more/better known though.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

I had a Commodore 64, but my best friend (we were 10 yo) got an MSX. I still remember how he repeated the sales pitch that "it was far superior to the Commodore 64". It's the first time I remember questioning a computer salesman pitch. But it was just the start of a long career helping friends to defuse all their bullshit.

gillianseed3• 12 years ago

Heh, I was so proud of my Amiga which was the best thing here in europe at the time, I had a buddy over who's parents were from Japan and tried to impress him with the quality of the graphics and sound, he was like 'yeah it's ok but my machine is much better'.

I remember scoffing at his statement saying something like 'dude, only the arcades are better than this', he then invited me to his place where he had a Sharp X68000, I remember being totally stunned.

This was a home computer with arcade perfect ports, he showed me ghouls'n ghosts, gradius, space harrier, r-type, they looked (and to my ears sounded) exactly like their arcade counterparts, it was apparently never sold outside of Japan.

bane6• 12 years ago

Not only were they arcade perfect ports, many arcade games coming from Japan used the Sharp as a dev environment...so they pretty much were the arcade games.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

Ok, but that was much later! :)

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

The case design is timeless http://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/307077SHAx68000XVI1D.jpg

bane6• 12 years ago

Fun fact, the Sega SG-1000 (precursor to the Sega Master System which is almost the same hardware), Colecovision and the original MSX are almost the same hardware. So close that porting software between the systems (so long as it fits in RAM) is pretty trivial.

In some markets, porting games provided much of the libraries. It's interesting that so many NES games, a different architecture all together, started on the MSX.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365887

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

Only slightly related, but the Nintendo AVS (unreleased) has a design similar to many MSX models http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071214134519/nintendo/e...

DanBC2• 12 years ago

The article doesn't mention that MSX computers had little to differentiate themselves from each other. Er, so a Panasonic MSX was very similar to a Sony MSX. This is great if you like standards but makes it hard to chose one machine over another. I beleive some people were paralysed by that choice and took a different computer instead. Also, individual makers within MSX had profits diluted by all the other MSX builders.

rbanffy• 12 years ago

That was the whole idea. Microsoft would license BASIC and MSX-DOS for whatever they felt like while computer makers, unable to differentiate on features, would compete on price alone and grow the market for Microsoft.

I'm quite surprised clever execs bought that...

Also, the fact MSX was obsolete when compared to similarly priced Commodore and Atari machines of the time didn't really help. Also, MSX2 and 2+ were still 8-bit designs, Trbu-R being the first and only major overhaul, far too late to really matter.

rglullis3• 12 years ago

But why wouldn't the clever execs buy it? They are consumer electronics companies. The TVs they manufactured followed standards (PAL/NTSC), their videocassetes were all VHS... why should it be different for home computers?

doelie_• 12 years ago

They were quite popular in Belgium as well. I got a Philips VG8020 in '87 at age 12, a bit after my uncle got one cheap as a Philips employee. I remember spending almost every evening at his place before my parents got me my own :)

minikomi2• 12 years ago

The msx is pretty insane for creating music even today. This album was created using a Sharp x68000 http://cheapbeatsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/new-power

ZenoArrow2• 12 years ago

Thank you for the link, some amazing sounds, but the Sharp x68000 wasn't an MSX machine, it was pretty much the most powerful home computer available at the time of release (1987, IIRC).

minikomi2• 12 years ago

Oops, bit of a mix up! Can confirm the guy uses MML to create the music though.

Theodores• 12 years ago

Windows Phone is the new MSX!

MSX came along in the UK when the home computing market was well established. We all knew 'network effects' even of we did not know the phrase, hence, if you were in the Sinclair ecosystem and only owned a ZX81 you wanted either a ZX Spectrum (48K) so you could play the same games as your friends or a BBC Micro like what the school had. Similarly, if you owned a Commodore Vic20 then a Commodore 64 was the way to go. Beyond these few brands there were plenty of Ataris (400/800), Ti/994a's, Dragon 32's and so on, none of which had 'network effects'.

The UK home computing market morphed into Amigas, Acorn Risc machines, Ataris and the Amstrad versions of the Sinclair machines, at which time Microsoft were still trying to foist a tarted up version of MSX onto the marketplace, but nobody was buying even if the MSX machines were very nice. They just never managed the 'network effects' that the popular machines had.

History is rhyming with itself as far as Microsoft is concerned, their Windows Phone is entering a crowded marketplace that is settled. People with old Android phones go for new Android phones, people with old Apple phones go for new Apple phones. It is that simple. Regardless of the benefits of Windows Phone it just does not matter. They can tart it up all they like but nobody cares.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

Oh the MSX was great, for an 8-bit computer.

And yes, there were drives for it, but maybe if they "didn't bundle" that was the issue

The MSX II was an 8 bit computer though, only the "Turbo" was 16-bit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX2#MSX2 (The 2+ added even more capabilities, and more important, most of them were accessible from Basic)

And it could do a lot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY

jamesbrownuhh• 12 years ago

Atari ST introduced in 1984 while Commodore released the C128? Er... No?

boomlinde• 12 years ago

The MSX scene is alive and kicking. Compared to the C64, there isn't that much of a demoscene presence, but a lot of original games and tools are released every year.

I have a soft spot for these scenes that cater only to its insiders. Outside reactions and impressions are secondary.

bane6• 12 years ago

This appears to be the center of the MSX scene http://www.msx.org/

But I'd add there's also a /r/msx on reddit that has a little life amazingly enough.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Too bad 3DO (or was it 3D0) didn't learn from this mistake ten years later.

ZenoArrow2• 12 years ago

In my opinion the 3DO was a great idea, but the execution was poor. Valve are attempting something very similar with the Steam Machines, perhaps this is the time it'll succeed (Oculus Rift being a 'killer app' of sorts).

Interesting that both the 3DO and Atari Lynx were designed by ex Amiga engineers.

saljam• 12 years ago

Guess I'll join in. My first computer was also an MSX. They were very popular in the Arab World because of an Arabic branded version made by (for?) a company called Sakhr. It played all the MSX games and that's what mattered. I'm pretty sure there's still a Metal Gear cartridge in my parents house somewhere.

I wonder what Sakhr is up to now, if they're still around...

obeid• 12 years ago

A whole lot of Arabic Language technologies; machine translation, OCR and a bunch of government-scale contracts. http://www.sakhr.com/index.php/en/

Being from Kuwait, Sakhr was the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of the post.

cscheid• 12 years ago

If you can get your hands on an emulator, you owe it to yourself to try "The Castle" and "Castle Excellent", two of the best puzzle games ever created.

But do play them on an MSX; the NES version is nowhere near as good.

anon4• 12 years ago

Also Metal Gear!

chongli• 12 years ago

And Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious! Very good early Metroidvania game (only a year after Metroid) with a novel character-switching mechanic (later seen in The Lost Vikings, Trine and various Castlevania iterations).

emeraldd• 12 years ago

It's interesting to note that the image at the top of the article is a wikipedia hotlink:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/Msx.png

Ah well ...

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

Dvorak is an asshole, what else is new?

ANTSANTS• 12 years ago

Was MSX really a failure, or just a failure outside of Japan? I was under the impression that MSX was the 8-bit micro in 80s Japan. I don't know too much about it's history, but given that so many important game series got their start on MSX (including Metal Gear and Bomberman), it doesn't seem right to call it a failure. It sounds like when people say the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was a failure because it bombed in America, when it was more popular than the Genesis/Megadrive in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX#Franchises_established_on_...

bane6• 12 years ago

Dvorak has lots of little factual errors in the article. I posted it hoping for a good discussion.

It was a pretty big success in Japan indeed and did respectable numbers in other world markets outside of the U.S. (and was eventually released in the U.S. but was DOA).

There's a few interesting variants of the hardware too, like dedicated MIDI composers, and a version that let's you do video compositing (display MSX graphics over top of video using a dedicated "transparent" color) like an early video toaster.

There's still a surprisingly active scene for it (unlike the Amstrad or Atari 8-bit machines). Nowhere near the C64, ZX, or Apple II levels.

I think one of the problems was that the architecture was dated when it started, and relied on an architecture that wasn't going to go anywhere (Z80). So building a cheap 8-bit machine at the beginning wasn't hard. And in the later years building the most powerful 8-bit machines imaginable became easy as well. But the move to bigger bit architectures was very hard. The Turbo-R spec tried, but the market had already moved on.

In Japan, other PC standards caught on and lasted longer. The NEC PC-88 line for example, was a business oriented 8-bit computer that was Z80 also. But when the market clearly needed a 16-bit upgrade, they simply moved to the 8086 line. Which as you can guess gave them a core architecture that lasted well into the 80386 days...but was not entirely IBM PC compatible.

Other Japanese PC standards like the Sharp X1 were also Z80 based. But when they jumped to 16-bit they went with the Motorola 68k architecture and produced the X68000 which also got it up through the 32-bit 68030 days. Despite being fantastic hardware (much more capable than the comparable Amiga), Sharp never released the line outside of Japan.

Well after the IBM PC standard had won the battle for PCs (with Apple hanging on), Japan still tried to produce non-PC compatible systems. Fujitsu's FM Towns is the most well known. Basically a 32-bit super desktop PC built around the 80386SX (and went up to the Pentium line) with lots of custom, Amiga like, hardware to support an a CD-ROM drive as standard. It had great graphics and audio capability for the time. The system was designed to boot to live software from CDs, so users wouldn't have to muck around in DOS or Windows to launch software. It worked great, but the fact of the matter is that most of the software on the FM Towns are just ports of PC software with small upgrades in graphics or sound. You could also boot direct to "Towns OS" in 1989 2 years before anything else could boot to an OS from an optical disk. There was a brief play to try to "consolize" the FM Towns and a variant called the "FM Towns Marty" was released which was the first 32-bit console ever released.

If you ever get a chance the FM Towns ports of LucasArts games are generally superior to the PC releases and ScummVM supports them.

googamooga• 12 years ago

I was born in USSR and my first computer in 1985 was YAMAHA MSX II with external floppy drive and great color monitor. I still own a class of MSX II KYBT: teacher's computer with two floppy drives and color monitor plus eight students' computers daisy-chained to each other via RS-232 network. Everything is still in pretty much decent condition and can't resist to play Knightsmare or nostalgically run Turbo Pascal. :)

greatsuccess• 12 years ago

I remember having one of these. But I had completely forgotten about it until I read the article. Logo, wow.

ralphc• 12 years ago

I remember reading about MSX in Creative Computing magazine, there's also 4 pages devoted to it in the book Digital Retro.

In addition to the reasons listed here I'd say that what killed MSX is what killed everything else back then, the rise of the PC compatibles. In the early 80's there were "personal computers" based on 8-bit processors that were for the home hobbyist, and the IBM PC-type computers that were so expensive that they were mainly owned by businesses. Basically everyone wanted the PC compatibles to run all the available software, so when prices came down no one wanted the 8-bit Z80 and 6502 machines anymore.

Whatever Happened to MSX Computers?

Related Stories