My quest in the world of MSX started two weeks ago when i bought a SVI-728+tape drive+some games on tapes and carts from a recycling center here in Finland. I paid 5 euros for the whole bunch. I had been aware of the existence of MSX machines for only a few years as my main activity during the late 1980's was to make a lot of dirty dipers.

My good mood got some beating when my Commodore 1084S monitor blew up after only 4 hours of use. Of course it was the only suitable monitor i had so now my machine is hooked up to my Sony TV with way too short sound cables taken from Amiga TV-modulator. This makes using the keyboard, which is bad anyway, a pain in the ass. And i'm very much affraid that somebody is going to step on it someday.

I have a big collection of games and machines (about 20 diffirent consoles and computers and around 400 games) so MSX was a nice addition.

Only really bad thing is that Spectravideo made machines are of very low quality and have problems with Konami's SCC and MegaROM games. Why must this piece of shit be the most common MSX in Finland?!! Hopefully i can replace it with a Toshiba HX-10 or even with a MSX2 someday.

Welcome to the MSX scene!

Quote:

Hopefully i can replace it with a Toshiba HX-10 or even with a MSX2 someday.

I have both available, I'd like to trade for a computer I don't own already. Please visit www.mellema.net to see which machines I have. If you wnat to make an offer, please send me an email at info@mellema.net.

Thanks for the offer, but i will try to get by with what i have for now. I also don't have any extra money to spend and my stocks of tradeable/sellable machines are severely depleted at the moment.

I have my hands full trying to buy a game for my recently purchased PC Engine console. The problem is quite big as there seems to be very few people on eBay selling PC Engine games who would accept cash as payment. Why, oh why, can't my banks Visa Electron work with PayPal?!! (Way offtopic, but i just had to say that )

Does anyone else have a cool story on how he started with MSX?

We went to Amsterdam, to the 'Funtronics', and I saw the MSX. I had to make a choise between C-64 and MSX, and he salesman said (god he was right!..) that the MSX was easier to program. So we bought the MSX there. It was a cool JVC !!!

Hey,

Sander Zuidema asked me to say hello on this forum. My English isn't that good but I will try to tell something about my MSX time. I bought an MSX in the middle eighties. The reason was that my Commodore VIC20 had died a week earlier. I run the MSX Club Alphen a/d Rijn with Ed Heyn and a couple of years later we merge with Genic to start Stichting Sunrise. I've signed the official papers. I don't know the year but is was in the early ninetees. I've had an Toshiba HX-10, An Philips NMS8250 with 512Kbram and 7Mhz expansion.

Some names I remember:

Harry Dechering
Marcel Berkhout
Flip IJkel
Loek van Kooten
Sander van Nunen
Bas Kornalijnslijper
Wammes Witkop
Frank Druiff (nice person, I remember that I was one of the first dutch persons who saw an Turbo R ST, when I was in Rotterdam visiting Frank this computer had just arrived :-))

If you want a chat just enter my e-mailadres in MSN (rcwisse@wanadoo.nl).

For now, enjoy your MSX!!

Well, I have my HB10P in 1986 (I was 8 years old), when my father won it in some kind of xmas lottery at his work. My parents didn't like computers at all, moreover if we are mixing kids with computers, so they didn't let me buy any game... my parents would never buy a computer, I had it just becouse it was a prize...

I just use the MSX for typing BASIC programs ... one day, my parents bought us (my brothers and I) three games!. They were "Army Moves", "Abu Simbel Profanation" and "Soul of a Robot"!... and that's the story. Ah, I had my first PC in 1997 (when I started working and I was capable to afford it) , since then I used MSX computers only

ohhhhh!!! i remeber when my mother bought my msx1 ....

one time, we were at the MSX store (telemática), a store only dedicated for MSX stuff. like in middle of 86.

As the msx was too expensive and my mother needed to get a financing, we not take the msx that day, but the salesperson giveme the manual, with the explanation of all the BASIC language plus hardware/software stuff in its apendixes.

I remember all the night of that week readed the whole manual and understanding it without experience typing.

That weekend when my mother brought the msx at my house.... i was very happy.

the first problem was how to connect it to the TV because that model has 3 rca plug (RF, video, audio)... and i finally were able to use it when my phather comes to home. Also looking for the frequency at a germany TV was hard.

The nexts weeks/years was a constantly fight for : when is my turn to use the TV?..... do you cleaned the kitchen / bathroom/ bedroom? or what has come out you to clean in the raffle?....

thinks like that were part of my young life.!

PD: my firsts games were
ROAD FIGHTER
MONKEY ACADEMY
PIPPOLS

Here is my background information: I remeber my first contact with MSX-Home computers at the age of 14 yo. It turns out everybody in Madrid had a Sinclair Spectrum except me. Therefore, I started to work behind the scenes to make my parents understand the importance of a computer at home.
I really had the time of my life when my father brougth a Philips VG-8020. At that time I couldn´t tell the diference between a MSX standard specification and an Amstrad to say something, but I´m proud to have started with a MSX microcomputer that satands for compatibility, both in hardware and in software. I used it to learn and write my own simplest programs...

MSX.Great home computers.

Cheers from Madrid!.

Almost noone had his own MSX machine in Russia - but we used Yamaha MSX1/2 machines in schools and universities. For the first time I saw MSX in a computers circle (study group) of The Palace of the Pioneers (yeah, those nice places for children in the USSR where you can choose anything you want to do: singing, playing chess, mastering small airplanes or boats, sports , etc.)
We started with Basic and made a number of educational programs for MSX1. Gaming was rare and prohibited most of the time (remember - those MSXes were for common use). Nobody knew that popular Konami games spread on cassetes were ripped from cartridges - because nobody ever saw a cartridge (but I had a chance to see Vampire Killer, Darwin and MSX Soccer cartridges in a house of someone who bought his MSX2 in Japan).
Then I became a laborant in 2 classes of networked MSX2 machines, copied a lot of games on computer olympiads - and , of course, played them all on the main machine with a color monitor.

So, that's how all this started...

I don`t remember the exact year, but it should be between 87-89. I was 4-5 years old when my cousin bought a Sharp Epcom Hotbit 1.2 (black edition) MSX1. When I saw that blue color of Basic background, I was completely amazed. In my home, father had a computer DGT-1000 (TRS-80 48kB RAM clone) that his own company "developed" and sold here in Brazil. As most of you know, TRS-80 has Atari 2600 graphics like, without colors, only black and that ugly green-yellow'ish thing.

Then my cousin loaded The Goonies and let me play (with imortality cheat). I remember I stayed playing the game for more than 5 hours straight. So I started to go to my cousin`s house a lot to see every new game he got, Until some day that I accidentally spilled a cup of coca-cola on the keyboard. Hopefully it didn`t break, but my cousin (that was 18yo at that time) told me that it did.

Then I started asking father to give me a MSX, but instead he gave me a MasterSystem and on 91 a PC 386 DX. Despite I never forgot The Goonies, I completely forgot MSX (Prince of Persia made me stun also).

Lots of time later, in 98 I downloaded some MSX emulator, but could not get it to work, making me forget even The Goonies. After some more time, until 2003, I finally could play goonies again on a emulator, but that time what really caught my interest was the Basic. I wanted to program something on it, so I searched for something on the net about MSX and found an excelent article on www.guiadohardware.net and a somewhat good at www.outerspace.com.br. Then found MSXBR-L and finally finished here in MRC.

So I read lots of texts, forum posts and finally decided to learn Z80 ML, MSX assembly and MasterSystem asm also, specially because I wanted to program on some low level lenguage (I study Computer Science, and love to program, but Java and C some times gets boring).

This year I could get some job and get the money to import my Panasonic FSA1 WSX from Japan, buy some books (as MSX Top Secret 2 by Edison, MSX - Linguagem de Máquina, and some others) and studied a lot the MSX hardware (it is simple, but quite hard for some one that never studied low level hardware and programming, and was completely biased by IBM-PCs architecture).

My family thinks I am a little crazy to pay ~180$ dollars for a completely outdated console/computer and even wants to program for it and also for reading 500+ pages book only of hardcore hardware information ^.^ They don`t understand the "magic" that MSX had on my life and how it introduced me to computers. They don`t even know what is to be a "fudeba".

Hope it was not all that boring.

Really, I *love* to read that kind of stuff!

Read my story over here .

Great stories indeed. Keep them coming, guyz! And euhm.. welcome to the MRC, Chardson!

Thanks snout! As you guys, I like reading this kind of stuff too and read every post here.

Nice, story D-Tail. And you are about my age ^^

Nice stories...

My father had an MSX 1, almost from the start. It worked on tapes. One of my clearest childhood memories.
From then on, I wanted to have one too, and one day, he got me an MSX 2 for my birthday.
I started trying to make music and games for myself, but only until my father wasn't so interested in MSX anymore and I got his MSX 2+, things started to get shape.

I made the music for some software (Sargon, Umax) and wrote some stuff for DISK. After that, for quite a few years, I didn't have the time or circumstances to be fooling around with computers, but now I'm back!

This is the short version.