Hi All !

First of all - I must thank SANDER for sending me the 48k Cartridge ! THANK YOU !

As you saw in the topic - I have a Philips VG8010 MSX computer - it has 48k RAM in total (which leaves 32k to the games and 16k for the video) - for this reason almost NO games work on it. Sander was so generous to send me one of his 48k Addram cartridges. It is labelled like this :

Addcom MSX Accesories EXPANSION 3 RAM Cartridge 48k

Anyway, if I plug it into SLOT 1 (Philips has 2 slots - 1 and 2) I could get Head Over Heels (original Casette version) to load... but not much else. If I plug it into slot 2 - I could get some games to load the initial loading screen (Batman the movie, etc.) but none of the games would play (only Knightmare, but after the reset and the graphics are bugged).

Is there an instruction on how to use this 48k Addram cartridge on my computer - i.e. I have some 60 or so original casettes which work fine in emulators. I tried the POKE -1,170 thingy and it doesn't make any difference.

Any help would be greatly appretiated.

Best regards,
Tom_Cat

Apart from your problem: there is also an official 16KB ram cardridge from Philips for this system called VU-0031.

Unfortunately, that is the problem with many british games, they don't work on more exotic memory configurations.

Found out what was wrong. The contacts on the expansion connector needed cleaning - I took a normal pencil eraser and cleaned them with that and then also with alchohol.
Now almost everything loads and runs fine. I can load around 95% of tapes and they work (even stuff like BatMan, Head Over Heels, etc.).

Thanx for everything again... really nice stuff.

btw. which games (unique to the MSX) would you recomend me trying - must be casette and MSX1 (48k) ofcourse.

another thing : my Philips VG8010 seems to have the picture verticall squashed. i.e. there are no borders on left/right side but HUGE borders on upper/lower side. This means the aspect ratio of the picture is not correct and the games look squashed vertically. This happens in all games, but I mostly noticed it on the games which are converted from the spectrum. Is this normal ?

Best regards,
Tomaz

I don't know how HUGE you think the borders are, but indeed on a 50Hz MSX the borders are quite a large part of the screen

Well, they are quite large yes I would say they take up about 1/4 or even 1/3 of the screen....

TC

That sounds a bit too much.

Use this program:

10 SCREEN2
20 CIRCLE(128,96),80,15,,,1.19
30 GOTO 30

This should draw a perfect circle on your VG8010. If it's still elliptical there's something wrong.

Thanx!

Yes, it is eliptical - vertically smashed . It is visible... kinda a lot. So what could be wrong ? Is there a vertical size thingy inside my Philips ?

Tomaz

If you use a monitor it probably has a vertical size knob on the back. Even a lot of TV's have vertical size knobs, but they're usually internal.

Thanx for the ideas

I am using a TV ... which is also used for normal TV watching and four other computers... so won't be changing that. I would rather change something inside Philips to get the picture to correct aspect.

Any HW experts out there who could advise me on what to do ?

Tomaz

I just remembered one more nasty thing (apart from vertical squeeze of the picture) that this Philips VG8010 seems to have :

In basic I can normally type in stuff, everything works as it should - all keystrokes produce proper letters on the screen.
BUT - in MOST games they keyboard doesn't work properly. Normally I have to press totally different keys to what the game says to select options, start the game, etc... This is visible in the games that have configurable keys - keys produce totally different actions than they should ("," produces 2, "P" produces 0, etc.). Is this normal ?

Also in most games the joystick(s) work fine. But in some (namely Head over Heels and Batman) when I move the joystick the whole computer locks up.

Man, this is getting stranger and stranger

Tomaz

I'm pretty sure you can't change anything inside to get the picture better. For some reason your TV doesn't seem to like the MSX output signal. (Probably because it's non-interlaced)
Unless ofcourse, the video encoder in the VG8010 is malfunctioning somehow...

Sounds like the VG8010 has a different keyboard layout (internally) than most other machines. That means if a game is directly reading the keyboard matrix (in stead of going through the BIOS), that it will register keys wrong. Compare this with connecting a USA-style keyboard to your PC and selecting German-style in Windows. Keys will be all over the place.

Locking up the computer when moving the joystick may be because of some english games don't write the correct bits to the PSG input/output ports, causing a short-circuit. This is not good ^^; If it works fine in BASIC, then that's probably the reason.

Thanx for the info.

So basically... what I have is what I have... nothing to change to make things better

Anyway, when I have some spare time I will make a SCART lead for VG8010 ... been searching for the pinout and cannot find a description of a cable... i.e. which pin of the Philips Video Out connector to connect to which on the SCART ... but I did find a pinout of it, altough not all signals are present on Scart. If any1 has direct cable schematics I would be most gratefull.

Tomaz

Try Bas Kornalijnslijper.
I bought a "turboR RGB->SCART TV" cable from him.

I could be mistaken (I'm not at home now, I can't check it), but I think that is the cable you need.

Or you could do it yourself. Check the MSX FAQ