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A very limited animation can be done using the programmable page seap of the VDP but you have only two alternate pages....

Sorry for the typos, but this is what I was meaning when I said that.

Two pages can be used for a blinking title, e.g. a LOADING screen with pulsing heart or moving flames or whatever….
And you can play sample with the SCC or some very limited
sound effect using envelops of the PSG

NYYRIKKI... Wasn't R#12 for TEXT80 mode only?

There're a number of different things to do when loading from tape. About what to do when loading from disk, I cannot say.

Loading from tape is less CPU intensive than we usually think. An example of this are my experiments about hyper-loading (aprox 8500 real bauds vs. 1200/2400 bauds of the standard loader). Of course, I'd suggest to be very cautious about this, but I guess than one could easily do something like the "Technician Ted" loader for Sinclair Spectrum (the one with all the little Ted sprites moving from side to side of the screen).

Other "easy" manipulations for MSX1 include the typical "colour bars" for turbo loaders (just writing to VDP register 7 random values), sound using envelopes (as Nyyrikki said) or direct-sampling using the cassette bit (again, contributed by Nyyrikki).

If you code your own loading routine, accessing directly to the cassette sample bit from the PSG, you can do almost anything you want. It would be very easy -even with the standard cassette routines- to make a line-by-line screen loading, like in the Spectrum: read byte, write byte to VRAM (out).

But once again, the question is who could be interested in such things. I love to load from cassette or CD, but my main interest is to make it as fast as possible. Any additional effect would reduce this speed.

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Only problem after makeing your loader is, how to copy it to your friends, and how in earth you get anyone to load a game from cassette in 2005 :-9

Indeed. My OCM doesn't have a cassette port!

^_^

then fix that?

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And here we have the power of the Commodore Amiga.

Well, let's make that "Behold the power of DMA!".

Snout, try nagging ASCII so long, so they build in a casport support

Forget that insane casport! 4MB out of the box, and +/-12V .. that's what we want ^_^

4MB+12v/-12v+cpu @ 40mhz thats what i want a faster cpu
fast loading during 512KB wave kits

Well. A PSP out-of-the-box beats that and has a lower price. And there is software. And support in Europe. And it comes from Sony. And...

...and it's not an MSX, and it's got static hardware?

Well, of course there's no way MSX could beat PSP when it comes down to specs only. But MSX has something PSP has not (or a little maybe, at that). Which is, ultimate coolness[tm].

And even more important:

There are no Fony Demo's for the PSP, so it's a worthless piece of junk anyway!

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NYYRIKKI... Wasn't R#12 for TEXT80 mode only?

Sorry, my mistake...

...configure the OCM to replay movies and I'll agree with you

Powerful static hardware > Crappy configurable hardware.