Erhm, isn't it a bit odd Konami decided to implement a soundchip in many games they released for MSX? What kind of commercial corporation decides to higher the production costs just because of the sound of a game. The PSG wasn't THAT bad.......

Suddenly crossed my mind

Well, maybe they just did it as a try-out at first (Nemesis 2), and liked the results (or the sales) so much that they decided to continue with it. Hmm... IIRC, Nemesis 2 is from 1986, the first game with SCC. Games like Usas and Metal Gear are from 1987, without SCC, so apparently there was some decision making about what games to ship with SCC.

Makes you wonder: why didn't Konami ship games with a graphic enhancement in stead?

Well, if such a graphic enhancement chip was available at that time against a low cost, comparable to the SCC, they could even have done it! Don't you think?

shame Usas isn't for SCC ._.

What is the first MSX2 game with SCC anyway? I mean, most SCC games at the beginning were MSX1 games, whereas MSX2 games from the same period had to make do with the humble PSG. Maybe coding/pixeling for MSX2 was more expensive (more work) and there was no money left to the sound bit?

KV2 perhaps?

other msx2-scc games: quarth, sd-snatcher, snatcher, space manbow, baseball2, pennant race 2, contra,

ey people,listened to kohina,heard the famicom version of salamander...did konami implement the SCC on some of their famicom games too?

Pennant Race 1 was the first released MSX2 game with SCC... and Nemesis 2 is from 1987. Nemesis 1 was released in 1986.

The possibility of using the SCC as a form of copy-protection crossed my mind...

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ey people,listened to kohina,heard the famicom version of salamander...did konami implement the SCC on some of their famicom games too?

No, but they used their custom soundchips VRC6 (pulse/sawtooth generator) and VRC7 (OPL2 clone) in some of their games, Salamander not being one of them.

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Makes you wonder: why didn't Konami ship games with a graphic enhancement in stead?

A (hardware) graphic enhancement is much harder to integrate into a game than a bit of extra sound. For sound, you just tie the sound outputs of all available sound chips together and you're done.

For video it's not that simple. The cartridge connector doesn't provide for it - no video lines, no DMA-like VRAM access (which would be useful for some graphic co-processor, eg.) ...
That implies that a video enhancement has to be provided as an extra VDP in the cartridge with its own video output connector on the cartridge (think Gfx9000). That is (1) costly and (2) poses the problem of the video output type and connector to choose. Any decision you'd make on number (2) would cut down the possible user base of your game in half. At least.

This can be an extra for aboid the people to buy pirated games in disk... (The genuine sounds better)

Well, it DID ensure Konami the fact that every pirate freak indeed had ONE original SCC cartridge. To have proper sounds.

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Pennant Race 1 was the first released MSX2 game with SCC... and Nemesis 2 is from 1987. Nemesis 1 was released in 1986.

Don't know why, but I thought that Nemesis was published in 1985 (still uses the "old" Konami logo) and Nemesis 2 in 1986 (uses the "new" Konami logo in white/blue, like Q-Bert).

Nemesis 1 is the last title using that 'old' logo... but it really was released in 1986... Nemesis 2 is really released in 1987. Just boot the game and see the release year in the intro screens.