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I've been collecting MSX computers & games for maybe 10-15 yikes years. My MSX1 is a Toshiba HX-10D, you see these everywhere usually in black or silver. I think it looks cool as heck and it has nice clunky keys. Usually describe this one as "kind of a Japanese Commodore 64."  My 'daily driver' is an MSX2, the Sony HB-F900. Mine is a little finnicky due to the disk drive being PC replacement; MSX drives have a 'ready' signal that you can fudge on some PC drives, but it gets really messy if you try and have multiples. At release, the HB-F900 was originally a business/editing model, coming with 256k main RAM, 2 disk drives, a mechanical keyboard, PC Speaker, and interconnects for video titling machines  Panasonic MSX2s, the FS-A1MkII and FS-A1F. The FS-A1F is a FS-A1MkII but boosted to include an underslung disk drive.    This was my first MSX, a Sony F1XDJ MSX2+. The disk drive was long gone when I bought it, so I eventually frankenstein'd a ribbon cable and power connector to a Lotharek disk drive emulator.  Here's a Panasonic FA-A1WX MSX2+ and FS-A1ST TurboR. Panasonic was the only company that made TurboRs, essentially an MSX2+ with a pseudo-16-bit R800 CPU replacing the 8-bit Z80. The R800 can be downclocked to match Z80 speeds and is theoretically (but not really) backwards compatible with the Z80 instruction set. These were released in 1990 and sold incredibly poorly due to the huge array of way more powerful machines for businesses and growing console scene. During it's lifetime, there were maybe 10 Turbo-R programs and games, but a lot of indie games take advantage of the faster speed either natively or with a CPU mode toggle.  Games are organized mostly by company with a couple leftover shelves that I need to get around to sorting. MSX has a ton of Konami, Falcom, and early arcade ports if you're into that sort of thing.  I have a thing for collecting ports & I'm 4 games short of a cRPG port full house. Only missing Ultima 1&2, the 'real' Ultima 3, and Wizardry 3.  Some of the weirder things I have are this port of the last part of Snatcher. Snatcher on MSX2 ends earlier than other versions, so Delta Soft digitized and ported the last bit from the SegaCD version and put it on 5 floppies because ???  Ports of some popular C64/CPC/ZX Spectrum games. Druid and Knight Lore are contemporary Japanese releases, Head Over Heels and Batman are indie ports from a Spanish company.  This is a MSX1 tape to MSX2 disk upscale port of a UK adventure game called Zakil Wood. Came in a weird bespoke box that got little fake grass everywhere.  And a few expansion cards with a slot expander to let you plug more than 2 things in. The OPL4 Shockwave is a soundcard, the PowerGraph Light is a video card, and the CF640 is a CF-HDD thing. The Playsoniq lets me play Sega Master System games in theory, but I've not had a chance to test it as I need to build the video cable for it.  Money shotz Boot screen  Unlike other 8-bits, programs on MSX tend to auto-boot, often including an MSX-DOS kernel and autoexec.bat if they're fancy enough.  This is Graph Saurus, a drawing program that lets you select different MSX screen modes to draw in. Each has different properties and color specs, Screen 5 was apparently used in most games due to sprite and scrolling capability.  It features really zippy fill and circle tools for an 8-bit, as well as adjustable windows.   Don't know where I got this MSX game, but she's really good at waiting for treats. 
Nancy fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 01:34
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That Yamaha setup with the keyboard is on my list of stuff I'd like to have, but doesn't seem reasonable from a space or cost perspective. I think I'm pretty close to "done" collecting for MSX, really only interested in stuff I'd play or use and I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze to fill in those gaps. I like the VHS-style boxes a lot, but most of the later library is just the PC-98 or PC-88 box & manual with different disks and a paper insert titled "MSX version." The most egregious one I've seen is a space 4x game where the insert details all of the features gutted for the MSX port.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:29
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Dignity Van Houten posted:Odd question but... was that plastic always that shade of yellow or was it white / light gray when originally manufactured? If it's discoloration, how much more will it discolor in 10 years? 50 years? Are there any organizations preserving the hardware in a cool, dark, dry space? Western computer stuff was usually off-white/gray, Apple included. Most old plastic used in retro computers and consoles will discolor like this to some extent, gray or white makes this more noticeable. It seems to have to do with heat and UV light, but it's not consistent, e.g. in 10 years it may or may not have gotten more yellow. A lot of people have gotten into "retrobrighting" discolored plastic, which is a term for a huge number of ways to smear hydrogen peroxide on the plastic and expose it to UV light for a period of time. Depending on the time of day, products used, astrological sign, windspeed, dew point, and/or whether Hecate smiles on you, this can move the color back towards it's original shade. Consensus is that the plastic will usually re-yellow after some indefinite period of time. Adrian's Digital Basement uses a couple methods in this video with differing results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtH8IhudWMI Pablo Nergigante posted:
MSX computers just have that je ne sais quoi to me. I see the giant big box version with the keyboard in auctions occasionally, but always for quite a bit. Get your setup going! Play some Penguin Adventure!
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Oct 24, 2021 16:49
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