Hello. I am in the United States. I was able to Purchase a Panasonic A1 msx2, a joypad, with akumujao dracula and a mahjong game for exactly 50 dollars shipped. Lucky me!

Anyway, I want to know the exact specs of the model I purchased, what's on the inside, and what can and can't be done with my model specifically? Where to buy games, If I can play euro games if they are in english on my system, and what games are best. Also how to navigate my system and change options if the menus are in japanese.

Thank you!

Answers to a lot of starter questions can be found here! And with that: welcome to the MRC forum!

Thank you. I don't see anywhere in that FAQ that gives specifics about my model other than RAM.

Congrats, that was an awesome deal you got there including Vampire Killer too.

That's the Panasonic FS-A1, correct? Well you bought a MSX2 without a disk drive so your limited you to only cartridges now. You can buy an external disk drive but they're expensive and hard to find. For the price to import one, you might as well get a MSX2 with the disk drive built-in.

Your system also has 64kB RAM which isn't a problem for japanese games, but to run european software you need at least 128kB. It isn't a requirement but if want one you can purchase external RAM from Leonardo Padial. I bought a 4MB RAM from him and it becomes useful especially if you're interested in playing SD Snatcher.

Another worthy purchase is a FM-PAC. To hear MSX-Music but also because it has SRAM to save game data (if the game supports it of course).

Are there certain games that I won't hear music from unless I buy additional hardware?

Hi mills, welcome to the MSX world.

old-computers webpage has specs for a lot of MSXzes.


http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=618



But there's two mistakes for yours there:

1) AFAIK it don't have the internal FM-PAC.
2) It will only be able to run MSX-DOS2 if you expand its memory to at least 128KB of RAM. MSX-DOS2 is a must if you plan to use a hard-disk.

With its original specs, you will be able to play any MSX1 and MSX2 cartridge games, including Metal Gear 2.
You can use any MSX-standard expansions with it, including:

- FM-PAC (aka MSX-Music), which is a soudcartridge with 9 FM channels
- Memory mapper. Its the standard memory expansion, having up to 4MB. Connecting more than one at the same time allows your MSX to have up to 16MB of RAM. Not bad for a 1985 8bit machine heh?
- floppy drive interfaces. Once common, has become rare and expensive. Floppies are also a crap currently.
- Hard-disk (and cd-rom) interfaces. Can be either SCSI (expensive and rare nowadays) or IDE (cheapper and available new). SCSI has better floppydisk emulation though.
- Memory-card interfaces. Can be either compactflash or SD/MMC. I personally recommend the SD/MMC card interface from Leonard Padial. Its the better MSX disk interface up to now. Its fast, emulates floppydisks very well, supports MSX-DOS1 and MSX-DOS2. The only drawback is that you'll need to buy a cartridge enclosing separately.

More info on the SD/MMC interface can be found here:

http://www.msx.org/LPE-MMC-V6-and-DRSDMMC-driver.newspost4604.html


> Where to buy games

You can easily find them on ebay. Just search for "MSX game". Try ebay.nl also.

> If I can play euro games if they are in english on my system

Most euro games requires at least 12KB of RAM. The vast majority of them are in english.
Some japanese cartridge games (mostly from konami) will detect you have a japanese MSX and display japanese texts. The only way to circumvent this is to buy a brazilian MegaRAM or a european mega-flash-rom and use the its software to set the desired region when loading the ROM from the disk. Note: both cartridges allows you to load ROM images from cartriges on a real MSX.

> what games are best

Well, this is a loooooong discussion. For my tastes, I can personally recommend you those above. But try them on a emulator (blueMSX or openMSX) before buying to see if you like it:

MSX1 cartridges:
- Penguin Adventure
- F1 Spirit
- Nemesis (aka Gradius)
- Nemesis 2
- Nemesis 3, episode II
- Salamander
- Parodius
- Super Laydock
- Zanac
- Zanac 2
- Knightmare
- Maze of Galious
- The Castle
- The Castle Excellent
- Eggerland Mistery
- Eggerland Mistery 2
- Alpha roid
- Warroid
- Penguin wars
- Konami's ping-pong
- Konami's Soccer
- Road Fighter
- Hyper Rally
- Kings Valley
- Year Kung Fu 2
- Elevator Action
- Rally X
- Kaleidoscope Special
- Pay load
- Bank Panic
- hang on
- Hero
- Moon Patrol
- Hyper sports 1, 2 and 3
- Golvellius
- Galaga
- Bosconian
- The Goonies
- Gyrodine
- Arkanoid
- Star Soldier
- Snake It
- Guardic
- Hyper Olympic 1 and 2
- Kung Fu Master
- Lode Runner I and II
- Magical Tree
- Mopi Ranger
- Konami's Qbert
- Operation Wolf by Toybox
- Pitfall I and II
- Red Zone Enhanced
- River Raid
- Thexder


MSX2 cartridges:
- Space Manbow
- Aleste (best with MSX-Music)
- Mon Mon Monster (best with MSX-Music)
- Mr Ghost
- 1942
- Xevious (best with MSX-Music)
- Arkanoid II
- Lupin in the Castle
- Bubble Bobble
- Contra
- Dragon Slayer IV
- Fantasy Zone II
- Ganbare Goemon
- King Kong 2
- Hinotori
- USAS
- Quarth
- Metal Gear
- Metal Gear 2
- Penguin Wars 2
- Tetris
- Vampire Killer (you already have it)
- King's Valley 2
- Pennant Race 2

MSX2 disk
- Aleste-2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Columns (best with MSX-Music)
- Puyo-puyo (best with MSX-Music)
- Golvellius-2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Herzog
- Super Cookies (best with MSX-Music)
- Runemaster 2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Xak 1 and 2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Xak - Tower of Gazzel (best with MSX-Music)
- Fray (best with MSX-Music)
- Akin (best with MSX-Music)
- YS 1, 2 and 3
- Bank Buster
- The Tenor
- Bombaman
- Breaker
- Bomb Jack
- SD-Snatcher
- Snatcher
- Daiva 5
- Disc Station (any) (best with MSX-Music)
- Dragon Slayer 6 (best with MSX-Music)
- Quinpl (best with MSX-Music)
- Famicle Parodic 2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Nyancle Racing (best with MSX-Music)
- Feedback (best with MSX-Music)
- Psycho World (best with MSX-Music)
- Fire Hawk - Thexder 2 (best with MSX-Music)
- Gorby's Pipeline
- Konami Game Collections
- Pac-Mania (best with MSX-Music)
- Starship Rendvouz (best with MSX-Music)
- Undeadline (best with MSX-Music)
- Youma Korin

>Are there certain games that I won't hear music from unless I buy additional hardware?

You will hear (inferior) PSG music for most commercial products that rely on MSX-Music.
'Modern' European products that rely on MSX-Music and/or MSX-Audio (another external sound device standard) often didn't implement PSG only solutions. Those titles might still generate PSG sound effects or rythmic sounds (drums supported by PSG).

Also note that Konami incorporated and used a soundchip called 'SCC' in most of their games. If you own the original game you will also have that chip - and thus hear proper sounds and music. If you're playing a cracked version (and don't own the SCC hardware) you'll only hear the sound produced by the PSG.

There're numerous MSX sound expansions, which might make things confusing for a newcomer. In a nutshell:

* Your MSX has a PSG chip built in by default (3 square wave channels + 1 noise channel)
* MSX-Audio (OPL1) was released which added 9 FM/AM channels + 1 ADPCM channel (Philips' version only) to the default specification
* Konami used their own SCC chip to spice up sounds in their products (5 extra channels of which 4 can use distinct, simple 32 sample waves)
* Konami improved the SCC and named it SCC+ (4 distinct waves became 5 distinct waves)
* MSX-Music (OPLL/FM-PAC/FM-Ship/FM-PAK) was released which added 6 FM channels + 5 drum channels OR 9 FM channels to the specification (some MSX 2+ computers and all MSX turbo R computers contain this sound chip as part of their spec)
* Moonsound (OPL4) was released which added plenty of FM channels (including 4 operator channels) + 24 PCM wave channels to the standard

( Hopefully I didn't provide false data )

Wow, thank you very much for the information you guys. I highly appreciate it.
I don't plan to do anything beyond playing some good cartridge games on it, enjoy the gameplay, and enjoy the music.
Once i become more comfrotable with using it, I will consider addons and expansions to enhance the experience.

Once again, thank you for a warm welcome and the information!

If you like the Konami SCC ROM games, I suggest you try something like
the Mega Flash SCC (http://www.hansotten.com/msxmega.html).

Instead of an HD, try a card reader, I have a sunrise CF reader with two slots, but maybe there is something more recent.
(eg. LPE-MMC-V6)
Storing the ROM games on the CF and loading them on the the Mega Flash SCC is a true pleasure.

Too bad that all of that is useless with 64k (DOS2, CF-IDE, cracked Konami games, MoonSound)

I may consider trading vampire killer for some amount of MSX games equal to th value of vampire killer, the game is complete and mint!