MSX
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Wikipedia-Article "MSX"
MSX is the name of a standard for home computers in the 1980s (see also 'The Home Computer Era' in the History of computing hardware).
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Overview
MSX was conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi once a Microsoft Japan executive, now ASCII Corporation, who was attempting to create a single standard by which any company could build a compatible computer. Inspired by the success of VHS as a standard for video cassette recorders, many Japanese electronic manufacturers along with Goldstar, Philips and Spectravideo built and promoted MSX computers. Any piece of hardware or software with the MSX logo on it was compatible with MSX products of other manufacturers.
Nishi's standard consisted primarily of several off-the-shelf parts, the main CPU was the Zilog Z80 running at 3.58MHz, graphics were provided by the Texas Instruments TMS9918 with 16 KB of dedicated VRAM in the design, and sound by the AY-3-8910 chip manufactured by Yamaha. All of this alongside Microsoft's MSX BASIC configured a standard arguably superior to the competing Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 of the time, but also at a higher price point. This last factor was probably the main reason for it not to do so well outside of Japan despite all the benefits it brought to the market.
It is worth highlighting that until the appearance and great success of the Nintendo Famicom, it was the platform for which great Japanese game studios, Konami and Hudson Soft among others, produced their titles. Sagas like Metal Gear were born on the MSX.
History
In the 1980s Japan was in the midst of a powerful economic awakening that many in the 'western world' thought unstoppable -- a new yellow peril as it were. The large Japanese electronics firms should have been able to crush the early computer market had they made a concerted effort to do so in the late 1970s. Their combined design and manufacturing power would have allowed them to produce better and cheaper machines than anyone else. But they initially ignored the home computer market and seemed to be very hesitant to do any work where there wasn't some sort of standard in place.
Thus when MSX was announced and a slew of big Japanese firms announced their plans to introduce machines, it set off a wave of panic in the U.S. industry. However, the Japanese companies avoided the intensely competitive U.S. home computer market, which was in the throes of a Commodore-led price war. Only Spectravideo briefly marketed an MSX machine in the U.S., which was not successful.
Consequently, MSX never became the worldwide standard that its makers envisioned, mainly because it never took off in the United States. In Japan and South Korea, MSX was the major home computer system in the 1980s. It was also popular in several European countries (especially in The Netherlands and Spain), Brazil, even in Arab countries and the Soviet Union.
The exact meaning of the 'MSX' abbreviation remains a matter of debate. At the time, most people seemed to agree it meant 'MicroSoft eXtended', referring to the built-in MSX-BASIC programming language, specifically adapted by Microsoft for the MSX system. However, the truth, according to Kazuhiko Nishi during a more recent visit to Tilburg in the Netherlands, MSX stands for 'Machines with Software eXchangeability'. The MSX-DOS disk operating system had file compatibility with CP/M and was similar to MS-DOS. In this way, Microsoft could promote MSX for home use while promoting MS-DOS based personal computers in office environments.
MSX spawned four generations: MSX 1 (1983), MSX 2 (1986), MSX 2+ (1988) and MSX turbo R (1990). The first three were 8-bit computers based on the Z80 microprocessor, while the MSX turbo R was based on an enhanced Zilog Z800 known as the R800. The turbo R was introduced in 1990 but was unsuccessful due to lack of support from any other company. In 1995 the production of this last MSX computer stopped as well. In the end, 5 million MSX computers were sold.
In 2001, Kazuhiko Nishi initiated an 'MSX Revival' around an official MSX emulator called 'MSX PLAYer'. This is the one and only official MSX emulator. All MSX copyrights are maintained by the MSX Association. As the MSX Revival was a Japanese-only event in the beginning, many people didn't really have faith in the MSX Revival. In 2004, the Dutch company Bazix announced they had become the representatives of MSX Association in Europe. Apart from being the English contact for any questions regarding the MSX trademarks and copyrights (licensing) they will also introduce WOOMB.net, a place where MSX games will soon be on sale again. In Japan game sales are already going on, by a company called D4 Enterprise with their Project EGG.
MSX trivia
- The birthday of the MSX Home Computer Standard is June 27th, 1983. On that day it was formally announced during a press-conference.
- MSX 1 computers were very similar to the Colecovision video game system. In common they shared the same CPU and video processors. The sound processor is very similar also. A Colecovision emulator for the MSX exists.
- By far, the most popular and famous MSX games were written by Japanese software-house Konami.
- As the MSX's processor, the Zilog Z80A, could address up to 64 kbytes, the default allocation (used in most, if not all models) was lower 32 kbytes for ROM BASIC and upper 32 kbytes for RAM. Machines intended to run MSX-DOS (a CP/M-like system) had 64 kbytes RAM, but the lower 32 kbytes were disabled in order to the ROM BASIC to function. When the computer booted MSX-DOS, the ROM BASIC was disabled and all the 64-kbyte address space was mapped to RAM.
- Among MSX-DOS compatible software there were dBase II, Turbo Pascal version 3 and Wordstar. Therefore, in the late 80's, several Brazilian companies have used a MSX as their "corporate" computer. As MSX 1 original video could display only 40x25 text, there were expansion kits that upgraded the display to 80x25, giving MSX a more professional appeal. MSX 2 & up were never mainstream in Brazil, and at their time, the IBM PC (mainly in the form of Taiwanese clones) overtook that market completely.
- MSX1 games were published mainly on cartridge and cassette tape. Later in the 1980s the MSX2 was released, most of which had 3.5 inch disk drives, and consequently the popular media for games and other software shifted to diskettes and cartridges.
Franchises established on the MSX
Several popular video game franchises were established on the MSX:
Others got various installments on the MSX, including some titles unique to the system or largely different to the games on other formats:
- Dragon Slayer
- Ys
- Gradius (Nemesis)
- Castlevania (as Vampire Killer)
Manufacturers of MSX computers
- MSX 1: Spectravideo (USA), Philips (the Netherlands), Sony, Sanyo, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Hitachi, National, Canon, Casio, Pioneer, Fujitsu,General, Yamaha, Yashica-Kyocera (Japan), GoldStar, Samsung, Daewoo/Yeno (South Korea), Gradiente, Sharp/Epcom (Brazil)
- MSX 2: Philips (the Netherlands), Sony, Sanyo, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Victor (a.k.a. JVC), National, Panasonic, Canon,Yamaha (Japan), ACVS, DDX (Brazil, upgrade kit), Daewoo/Yeno (South Korea)
- MSX 2+: Sony, Sanyo, Panasonic (Japan), ACVS, DDX (Brazil, upgrade kit)
- MSX turbo R: Panasonic (Japan)
System specs
MSX 1
- Processor: Zilog Z80A running at 3.58 MHz
- ROM: 32 kB
- RAM: 8 kB minimum, up to 64 kB
- Video Display Processor: Texas Instruments TMS9918 family
- Video RAM: 16 kB
- Text modes: 40 x 24 and 32 x 24
- Resolution: 256 x 192 (16 colours)
- Sprites: 32, 1 colour, max 4 per horizontal line
- Sound chip: General Instruments AY-3-8910 (PSG)
- 3 channels + noise
MSX 2
- Processor: Zilog Z80A running at 3.58 MHz
- ROM: 48 kB
- RAM: commonly 128 kB (64 kB on Japanese computers)
- Memory mapped (4 MB/slot max)
- Video Display Processor: Yamaha V9938 (aka MSX-Video)
- Video RAM: 128 kB (sometimes 64 kB or 192 kB)
- Text modes: 80 x 24 and 32 x 24
- Resolution: 512 x 212 (16 colours out of 512) and 256 x 212 (256 colours)
- Sprites: 32, 16 colours, max 8 per horizontal line
- Hardware acceleration for copy, line, fill, etc.
- Interlacing to double vertical resolution
- Vertical scroll register
- Sound chip: General Instruments AY-3-8910 (PSG)
- 3 channels + noise
- Clock chip RP5C01
MSX 2+
- Only officially released in Japan (available in Europe and Brazil via upgrades)
- Processor: Zilog Z80 compatible running at 3.58 MHz or more (5.37 MHz versions were available)
- ROM: 64 kB
- BIOS + Extended BIOS (32 kB)
- MSX BASIC V3.0 (16 kB)
- DiskROM (16 kB)
- Kun-BASIC (16 kB) (optional)
- Kanji ROM (optional)
- RAM: commonly 64 kB (on Japanese computers)
- Memory mapped (4 MB/slot max)
- Video Display Processor: Yamaha V9958 (aka MSX-Video)
- Video RAM: 128 kB
- Text modes: 80 x 24 and 32 x 24
- Resolution: 512 x 212 (16 colours out of 512) and 256 x 212 (19268 colours)
- Sprites: 32, 16 colours, max 8 per horizontal line
- Hardware acceleration for copy, line, fill, etc.
- Interlacing to double vertical resolution
- Horizontal and vertical scroll registers
- Sound chip: General Instruments AY-3-8910 (PSG)
- 3 channels + noise
- Optional sound chip: Yamaha YM2413 (OPLL) (MSX-Music)
- 9 channels FM or 6 channels FM + 5 drums
- 15 pre-set instruments, 1 custom
- Clock chip RP5C01
MSX turbo R
- Only released in Japan
- Processor: R800 running at 7.14 MHz
- Processor: Zilog Z80A running at 3.58 MHz
- ROM: 96 kB
- BIOS + Extended BIOS (48 kB)
- MSX BASIC V4.0 (16 kB)
- DiskROM (16 kB)
- Kun-BASIC (16 kB)
- Kanji ROM (256 kB)
- Firmware (4 MB)
- RAM: 256 kB (FS-A1ST) or 512 kB (FS-A1GT)
- Memory mapped (4 MB/slot max)
- Additionally 16 kB of SRAM (battery-powered)
- Video Display Processor: Yamaha V9958 (aka MSX-Video)
- Video RAM: 128 kB
- Text modes: 80 x 24 and 32 x 24
- Resolution: 512 x 212 (16 colours out of 512) and 256 x 212 (19768 colours)
- Sprites: 32, 16 colours, max 8 per horizontal line
- Hardware acceleration for copy, line, fill, etc.
- Interlacing to double vertical resolution
- Horizontal and vertical scroll registers
- Sound chip: General Instruments AY-3-8910 (PSG)
- 3 channels + noise
- Sound chip: Yamaha YM2413 (OPLL) (MSX-Music)
- 9 channels FM or 6 channels FM + 5 drums
- 15 pre-set instruments, 1 custom
- Sound chip: PCM
- 8-bit single channel (no DMA), 16kHz max
- Microphone built-in
- Sound chip: MIDI in/out (FS-A1GT only)
- Clock chip
Emulators (External Links)
MSX computers are one of the most emulated platforms today. It was emulation of MSX machines that started the current emulation scene, mainly due to the work of Marat Fayzullin on the Z80 emulation.
- fMSX by Marat Fayzullin: Portable MSX Emulator [1]
- The first widespread MSX emulator and the most ported one
- Offers very accurate MSX, MSX 2 and MSX 2+ emulation with sound
- Source is available in a commercially restricted license (free ports are allowed and encouraged)
- The majority of MSX emulators today were more or less based on the fMSX source code
- BlueMSX: Considered by many the best MSX emulator [2]
- A fairly new MSX emulator (development started September 2003) initially based on Marat Fayzullin´s fMSX
- Perfect looking emulation of MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+, MSX turboR, Colecovision and Spectravideo
- Very accurate sound emulation
- Open source since v2.0, which didn´t use Marat Fayzullin code anymore
- BrMSX (discontinued)
- The fastest MSX and MSX 2 emulator ever, written entirely in Assembly for DOS only
- BrMSX author, Ricardo Bittencourt, is now part of the BlueMSX development team
- CJS MSX Emulator [3] (seems discontinued)
- Along with fMSX was one of the very first successfull MSX emulators
- Unlike fMSX the code was not portable and is compatible only with IBM-PC running DOS
- Accurate and fast MSX and MSX 2 emulation with good sound support
- fMSX for Series 60 by Juha Riihimäki [4]
- NLMSX [5]
- A basic, adequate MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and turboR emulator based on fMSX 2.0b
- NO$MSX by Martin Korth [6]
- A decent MSX and MSX 2 emulator aimed to be more of a serious development tool than just an emulator
- Has a very useful and confortable debugger and is written entirely in Assembly language to run smoothly on a 33 MHz PC.
- OpenMSX The MSX emulator that aims for Perfection [7]
- Open source MSX emulator with many unique features (script based operation, command interface via pipes, MSX-MIDI, etc.)
- Very accurate MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and turboR emulation
- paraMSX by Yeongman Seo (fMSX port)
- Was one of the best fMSX ports for Windows in its time
- RuMSX: Turbo-R emulator [8]
- One of the most accurate MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and turboR emulator
- Very good sound support
- Very intuitive user interface
- The first MSX emulator with turboR support
- RedMSX (BlueMSX derivative) [9]
- Started out as a hack on BlueMSX to add zipped ROM support and SCALE2X [10] algorithm
- So far added support for zipped DSK (disk images), lightgun, drag´n´drop of zip files
- Some people call this emulator a rippoff of BlueMSX, but the author always made it clear that RedMSX was in fact BlueMSX with few (useful) tweaks added, and never claimed otherwise
- While the sources of BlueMSX compiles unaltered only with Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, RedMSX sources compiles with Microsoft Visual C/C++ 6.
- RedMSX CPU load is very low (even more than BlueMSX) making it run fast and accurate even in older, inexpensive hardware
The Msx Resource Center Foundation [11] has conducted an extensive emulator comparison [12] which shows the strengths and weeknesses of each emulator. The goal of the test is to aid users in finding the most suitable emulator for their uses.
Peripherals
MSX-Audio
- Yamaha Y8950, also known as:
- Panasonic: MSX-Audio (standard name)
- Philips: Music Module (no MSX-Audio Basic)
- Toshiba: MSX FM-synthesizer Unit (no sample RAM, no MSX-Audio Basic)
- 9 channels FM or 6 channels FM + 5 drums
- ADPCM record and play
- 32 kB of sample RAM, which can be upgraded to 256 kB
MSX-Music
- Yamaha YM2413 (OPLL), also known as:
- MSX-Music (standard name)
- Panasonic: FM-PAC
- Zemina: Music Box
- Checkmark: FM-Stereo-Pak
- 9 channels FM or 6 channels FM + 5 drums
- 15 pre-set instruments, 1 custom
- Built-in in many MSX 2+ computers and the MSX turbo R
See also
- Zemmix MSX compatible console
- List of MSX games
- Canon T90 - this advanced SLR camera had an optional Data Memory Back storing shot data on photos taken. It interfaced only with the MSX, probably because Canon Inc. sold a MSX computer.
External links
- MSX Resource Center
- The MSX Files
- The Ultimate MSX FAQ
- Generation MSX
- MSX Association
- ASCII Corporation
- Sunrise Foundation - The main hardware producer and software distributor for MSX, which amongst others made and sells the famous MoonSound and Graphics9000 boards. Also creator of the popular CompactFlash IDE interface.
- MSX Projetos - Brazilian site (Portuguese language). Still produces MSX hardware, including accelerated MSX 2+ motherboards (ACE001@10 MHz). Has an ongoing project called CIEL 3++ for a new, and far more powerful, generation of MSX hardware.
- HispaMSX BBS - MSX support BBS over TCP/IP. Operate on the BBS from any computer system, even your MSX. Telnet to bbs.hispamsx.org to get access.