I will probably visit the Finnish MSX collectors meeting on the last weekend of the month. There will people there who can take pictures of this weirdness so the whole world can see that MSX can even be used as a bingo machine!
The machine has now been photographed. The pictures can be found here together with other pictures of many great machines from this weekends MSX meeting here in Finland.
Nice fotosession.
Who is the owner of these russian Yamaha MSX1 and MSX2 machines I saw in the following files ?
Both of them have network module that looks similar, but you cannot transfer data between them because they are very different - the only similarity is casing and plugs.
msxparty1/MVC-027F.JPG
msxparty1/MVC-028F.JPG
Micro Technology is a well known company in the 80's. They made mostly modems and some famous soft like MT-Base, MT-Debug. The modems were teh famous MT-Telcom ones, having MT-Term software in them.
It seems they also made a Bingo system for MSX, probably ordered by HOlland-Bingo. I guess it got into Scandinivia via the Scandinavion daughters HOlland-Bingo Norge etc.
Anyway, a really fun discovery! I think it's an extremely rare thing...
Nice fotosession.
Who is the owner of these russian Yamaha MSX1 and MSX2 machines I saw in the following files ?
Both of them have network module that looks similar, but you cannot transfer data between them because they are very different - the only similarity is casing and plugs.
msxparty1/MVC-027F.JPG
msxparty1/MVC-028F.JPG
I can't remember his name. He is not originally from Finland, speaks English and works for F-Secure. Saku/Stt would probably know. He also had a cable that enabled him to load MSX programs from a portable CD-player through the cassette port. The cable is on the net somewhere, but can't remember the address. He said that he still didn't have the Russian teachers machine that controls the whole network.
The Bingo MSX is really something that comes along once in a lifetime. I will probably never sell or trade it away.
The Bingo program is a VERY shitty basic program with a few parts written in machine code. Lots of completely useless lines and garbage code that doesn't do anything. When we saw the code we tried to think that on what kind of medication the programmer was on when he wrote this. We dumped the ROM, but couldn't get it working properly. We realized that there is some special hardware, maybe S-RAM, inside the module and so the program will only run partially from the dumped ROM. We don't really know what this special hardware is as opening the module would require some heavy violence and nobody wants to do that when there is only one known to excist.
There will be a full article with text and pictures+the ROM on www.pelikonepeijoonit.net later, i will let you know when it's done.
The page has been done, that was fast!
http://www.pelikonepeijoonit.net/articles/bingomsx.html
There ROM is not available there yet, don't know if it will be. It's pretty useless anyway as it won't run properly or at all.
Gorgane, I'm one of the blueMSX co-developers. You can contact me if you want that I make some tests with this rom.
By the way, the format of this cartridge looks like .... the Music Module.
So, the extra-hardware could be MSX-AUDIO with his extra RAM.
I don't have the ROM myself, it was dumped by a fellow Finnish MSX collector and he is currently the only who has it, i think. It will be available at some time, but can't be sure when. I couldn't get one myself as i don't have a working disk drive or Sunrise IDE/Flash for my MSX2.
Well, we'll wait ... but it should be funny to emulate this rare thing !