Bussum 2004 fair & marathon

Bussum 2004 fair preparations

Ninth of October, 2004 - As usual, I got up early, starting to feel lucky that I had packed my bags the day before the fair. One of the things MRC was planning to do an MSX EVA video demonstration, so I had to take my own MSX with me, accompanied by a CD-ROM with about 10 EVA movies, mainly trailers of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Ys 6.

Bussum MSX Fair 2004

I really got into the mood by playing Space Manbow on NLMSX while traveling by train. I was really looking forward to meeting up with the good old MSX-scene again! Being the first MRC member to arrive, I installed my stuff after a short walk over the fair. The MRC booth was next to the openMSX booth, of which the booth holders were a little bit annoyed by the volume of the EVA movies I had turned on. Needless to say: a quick punch at the volume slider put an end to this . By 11:30AM almost all of the MRC crew was complete: Bart, Rikusu and his girlfriend, Yum, RemcoZ and Latok were there, they had brought pie with them to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the MSX Resource Center. Somewhat later we got balloons and stuff to decorate our booth. Snout reported that he got off his bed really late (about 9:30AM) and that he wasn’t able to arrive before 1PM. Too bad for us (and the fair's attenders), because snout kept all our presents . Like several cool MSX buttons and the MSX Magazines. Sander van Nunen was sick and wouldn’t come to Bussum. He proved otherwise later on .

A short but decent walk, whilst armed with a notepad, delivered the following boothlist:

Room no.: 1

MRC
MRC was having its 10th anniversary party. And it really was party all along! Ever seen a MSX.ORG in chocolate letters? This is your chance, a look at the Bussum MSX Fair 2004 photoshoot will give you a good impression how cosy things were at our booth! Pie was given to the booth’s visitors and balloons were all over the place... It was a nice happening ;). All visitors received MRC buttons as well. At 1PM Near Dark came along to sell their latest product: Soepfiskje. In the other corner my A1ST was playbacking some EVA movies, like several MGS3 trailers and Neo Contra trailers, which were particular attractive for some of the fair's attenders. Some Japanese MSX Magazines were among the products MRC showed.

openMSX team
Next to us was the openMSX development team. They promoted their new openMSX v0.5.0 and showed it to people interested in openMSX.

TNI
Also in our room was TNI. Patriek seemed to have taken over the business of ‘MSX Club de Amsterdammer’, as he sold DD-disks :). Patriek and Laurens promoted the MAP (MSX Assembly Page) as well and they brought a PS2 dance pad with them (with the appropriate PS2 to MSX converter). People could play Quarth on it (I’d better say, people could not play Quarth on it :)). Especially the well-known David Heremans seemed to be good at... saying to other people how to do it :D!

Room no.: 2

Darkstone
Darkstone promoted and sold their new BASIC game Bounce Mania, an addictive ball bouncing game.

FiXato & X-Cite
Filip Slagter (FiXato) and Dominic Hoogendijk (X-Cite) promoted openMSX and MSX Worldwide (the revival of the Dutch MSX Info Blad). MSX Worldwide is still under active development, good news is that Totally Chaos and FiXato will release the new #2 at the MSX fair in Oss, January 2005. As with the previous version, this one will be released in both English and Dutch.
Both X-Cite and FiXato were very actively taking photoshoots. As soon as they put it online somewhere, you are the first to know!

Sjoerd Lammertsma
Sjoerd promoted his MSX Battle Opera, which will be held this evening, during the MSX marathon. The visitors were able to sign up for this opera at his booth.

Room no.: 3

rklok
Ronnie van der Kolk had again an impressive collection of Japanese (rare and non-rare) MSX stuff with him. He also sold quite a lot of Japanese MSX machines.

Sunrise for MSX
This was the place where the new one-chip-MSX was being demonstrated. The USB game reader was there as well. Furthermore they sold their MSX hardware (ATA-IDE, RS232c, etc.) and software (Bombaman, Moon Light Saga). Among the fair's visitors was the almost legendary Peter Meulendijks, who gave a little demonstration of his level editor of Realms of Adventure. More on that subject later!

The corridor:

Deltasoft
Apart from some ‘old’ products, like their XAK1 English translation, they now sold their new English Translation of Feedback and a pirated Hydlide 3. This game was originally bought by a member of Deltasoft all the way from Japan, and it was so incredibly expensive, that they decided to release a pirated version for the MSX Hydlide fans. The game was packed in a CD-ROM case, so I guess it must have been a PC-version.

MCWF
MSX Club West Friesland did their usual hardware and software resales. They even had an 1MB external Memory Mapper and a Gouda Slotexpander v5.0 (too bad it was broken). A MSX hand scanner was amongst their products as well!

HCC MSX GG
The MSX division of the HCC promoted mainly HCC and their own user group. They had a couple of lovely young kids with them who constantly distributed leaflets to the fair's visitors and boothholders.

Initially Totally Chaos would attend the fair as well, but Rinus Stoker (the main man behind TC) decided not to come, presumably for health reasons. At approximately 2PM Sander van Nunen surprised us by appearing at the fair, despite his illness :) Guess that he felt missing out on something special, which he would have done otherwise :)!

Back to the subject of Realms of Adventure: during the fair yours truly had a nice conversation with Maarten van Strien (wolf_ around here) and Peter Meulendijks (Umax). It was about Realms of Adventure, the Umax RPG which was never completed. It seems it's going the right way now, as wolf_ will develop a level editor for PC and me drawing maps for it... That's where the main bottleneck for finishing the game lies. You can read more on this development in this forum topic.

3PM – Sander Zuidema, Rieks Warendorp Torringa en Bart Schouten gave a presentation about Bazix. You’ve probably read all about it in this newspost. Basically, all comes down to this: a Dutch company called Bazix was born, of which all three mentioned are director. Bazix will start an online purchase system called Woomb, similar to the Japanese Project EGG. Now European (quality) MSX games (which can also be amateur games, as long as they have some kind of quality) will be sold via EGG in Japan, while Japanese games will be sold by Bazix in Europe. Since Woomb is PayPal-based, non-European countries can use the purchase system as well.
Bazix will maintain close contacts with Japan, so this means the MSX Revival is seriously coming to the rest of the world! This can be marked as the step for globalizing the MSX Revival!

The fair ended at 5PM. We can look back at a very fruitful day, concerning the MSX Revival in particular. New developments have been developed and shown/sold, it was really a huge success for the MSX community! As for the number of visitors: it exceeded the number of last year big time!

The MSX Marathon

It all began with a communitive dinner: the local Pizza deliverer did his job right. After this real MSX dinner, some people decided to leave. Snout was about to leave as well, but he immersed himself in a nice discussion with the German Marathon attender Tanni. Later on, Tanni shared his ideas with Rudi ‘Lord Zett’ Westerhof and his girlfriend and Sjoerd ‘BodyHammeR’ Lammertsma. The MSX Marathon wasn’t that crowded, about thirteen people stayed during the night. Some spent the night singing and dancing in some kind of PS2 game (including yours truly). Those games were Sing Star and Dance, Dance Revolution!. Others were wondering when the anime show would start. Scarr (from the IRC channel #msxdev) was busy with his MRC Bounce Challenge entry from time to time. I had already given up the hope ;).
It was quite the quiet evening: Peter (who came along with FiXato/X-Cite) is enjoying some PC game, Zett, Tanni, Debby and Latok were still having a vivid discussion on the design specifications of the upcoming MSX, Medusa (Zett’s girlfriend) and GuyveR800 were watching some kind of film, whilst I discovered our beer (our, as in [D-Tail]’s, FiXato’s, X-Cite’s, Peter’s and BodyHammeR’s) had been dispensed on persons of the likes of GuyveR800 and Scarr :), well, that was perhaps because we offered it to them.
Later on we heard BodyHammeR would cancel his so-called "ultimate MSX Battle Opera", because the number of participants was lacking. There would have been three of them. Later on, we were driven crazy by the voices of Latok and Grauw (didn't know Grauw was so talented!), and I battled against FiXato. Yes, it was Sing Star again. I even had the honour of doing a duet with Latok himself! :). The night flew by... and it was morning again. After a decent breakfast (GuyveR800, Debby and Scarr decided to leave earlier) we got our stuff together and helped Grauw with cleaning up the mess. Latok and I tried to catch our trains, his to Amsterdam (in which he succeeded) and mine to Hilversum/Amersfoort/Apeldoorn (in which I didn’t succeed, had to wait for about half an hour...). Whilst fighting against my sleepyness, I travelled home, exhausted from all things that happened throughout the day.

By this MRC would like to express their thanks to the TNI team for organising the MSX Fair and Marathon, and we are definately looking forward to participating next year!

And if you're wondering what on earth you've been missing out on, or if you'd like to see all of it at a glance, don't forget to look at the Bussum 2004 photoshoot!