Interview Martin de Jong from Aackosoft and MT

I think he said "Video Generator"
And although Philips is Dutch, the P2000 was (partially) developed in Austria if I remember correctly?

For those of us that don't speak dutch, we can enable subtitles and automatic translation in the options of the video player.
Thansk for the interview!

Great interview. Would love to see some more! Perhaps for example more people of Aackosoft are prepaired to do an interview like this!

I guess its his voice then, Martin wrote the speech routine.

Really cool interview! Thx Bas ..and Martin ofcourse!

Nice interview, thanks for sharing.

Yeah, game development with large companies still is like that today ... it pays a bit better I guess, but you still pay dearly with your time & stress-levels as a developer. And as bonus you get fired before launch-date in many cases ...

And I used to have MT-Debug on a cartridge; it was great for it's time. And I still love my proper debuggers to this day

100% correct!

Hello MSX.ORG

If you correct your article, I would be willing to conduct an interview with you. During the interview, I can share details about my career at Aackosoft, including how I was hired, my initial role as a Master-creator, the individuals who taught me Z80, the in-depth details of Wordstore, the floppy disk protection mechanism, games i was involved with, and the occasional three-day work week.

-Ronald

Hai Ronald, welcome to MRC and thank you for you input. Like Thom said, it's been a while for most people and human memory is a funny thing when getting older

I'll contact you further via other channels.

- would you visit MSX fair Nijmegen 2023?

I got answers... perhaps not all, but answers I have.

Yes, please do.

I would add one more question: Who is Dave?

I remember that If you press CTR+SHIFT+GRAPH+CODE in some games, you can hear a voice saying: "Hi Dave !"

Dave is still a good friend of mine

Maybe you and Dave like to come to Nijmegen at 23 March 2023 to pick up some more good memories? (free for visitors)
LINK
or
LINK2

I saw the Nijmegen announcement is off the spotlight at msx.org :-(

The guy is about 38 years older I figure... I'm not sure his vocal cords are still as "ohshitty" as in '85... ;-)

Would see that indeed, because I have played most of your games back then (from the famous 30 MSX Hits on cassettes, etc. There was Master Voice too, nice piece of software!) but I guess that is not going to happen? I have watch the interview with Martin from MT, looks to me he is struggling with his memory & thinking because you see that he have some trouble and is slow sometime. But maybe you where both at the same time working on that without knowing it from each other? Could be.

Well done Bas, it was fun to watch this video

Nice, i'm very curious. I hope this is not being a book only about the "scene" members or photo's from them, but about the real pioneers like Martin was, like Kees Folst was, you name it. Real people who contribute something. There was also an company in The Netherlands around 1990 who import the Arabic MSX computers. There was such a history, like MSX Centrum (Jaap Boomsma) at the Witte de Witstraat in Amsterdam (Albert Buurmeijer was there the technician). Sparrowsoft and his history, also the story about H.S.H from Germany who promised the MSX3 at that time, but never came. And so much more.... The start of MCM with Wammes Witkop, the Belgium magazine with Frank H. Druijf.... MSX Mozaik (Stefan van t Goor). MSX Gids.

What's his last name?

okay, I have logged in, I didn't know it but it seems I already had an account here.

Wat betreft de verwarring over wie nu de spraak recoring routine die gebruikt is in o.a. Oh Shit (oh No voor de gecensureerde versie) geschreven heeft....
Ik heb al die jaren (bijna veertig nu) gedacht dat ikzelf die geschreven had, maar mijn herinneringen eraan zijn vaag, en als beelddenker heb ik soms dat ik denk dat ik iets gedaan heb omdat ik me visualiseer dat ik iets moet doen en dan denk dat ik dat al gedaan heb.
Maar goed de waarheid is dat ik in die tijd bedacht had hoe je op een efficiënte manier spraak kon opslaan, en ik weet bijna zeker dat ik een circuitje gebouwd had dat een analoog spraaksignaal efficient in een bitstroom kon omzetten, en ik heb dat getest, en het werkte prima. maar of ik dat ook als product aan van Aacken heb gegeven dat weet ik niet meer zeker. Ik had het met andere dingen te druk. Wel weet ik dat ik op een gegeven moment (lang nadat ik weg was bij aackosoft) tegen oh shit aanliep, en ik weet nog dat ik dacht, "dat is wel een lullige toepassing van mijn spraakgenerator". maar heb er niet langer over nagedacht, Ik had het druk bij MT (en later MTD).
dus wat is nu waar?

en ja, ik ben dus van plan om in december naar MSXGOTO40 te komen, ik heb een werkende NABU (omgebouwd naar 220V) en zal die daar tonen.

Martin - welcome! Luckily Oh Shit was not the only sample that was put in Aackosoft products... Just the funniest one!

I guess the routines were commercialised in Mastervoice/Wordstore. Can you tell us more about that @rvanderputten?

@The Apeman
About the P2000 and my dislike for it, it partially stems from this:
in the time we launched our computer (the computer made by the company MCP, for which I worked at the time) the Aster-CT80, a clone of the Tandy TRS-80, which I mostly re-designed as the boss wanted a more professional design and the first designer ran away. the Dutch state tried to find a computer for Dutch education, similar to the BBC computer, and distribute these computers to over 100 schools in the Netherland. to be admissible the computer needed to have some prerequisites (as far as I remember it was like this):

• It needed to be a Dutch design, made in the Netherlands (very important to be admitted)
• it needed to have a network, so the teacher could send software from his disk drive system, to eight pupil systems
• the teacher should be able to see any of his teachers screens on his monitor
• The computer needed the ability to run BASIC, so teaching could be done in BASIC (we had BASIC built into the machines)
• It needed to have at minimum 32K of RAM (our system had 48K of RAM)

and half a dozen similar demands

The name for the project was "het honderd scholen project".

We designed hardware and software for a (serial based) networking system, and be designed a switch box so the teacher could see the pupils monitors.

We received the bid, actually we were the only company that met all the requirements, so we started building 900 computers, one hundred of them with floppy disk drives.

We were halfway ready when, out of the blue, the unexpected news came that the state had "changed its mind" and that 50 of these schools would receive not our Asters, but Philips P2000's instead.
Despite the fact that these did not come from the Netherlands or were built in the Netherlands, they did not have a network system nor that the teacher could remotely view the students' screens.
The "network" solution was just that the teacher could walk past the computers with a cassette tape and load the tape there.
We call this a "flat-footed" network.
It seemed that Philips was late, but had lobbied effectively nonetheless.

This later destroyed our company, due to cash flow problems.

So let's just say i'm disenfranchised with the P2000, or rather with Philips.

I researched where P2000 computers actually came from and discovered they came from Philips Austrian branch, and were actually modified airport terminals (specifically the keyboard came from there. With the addition of a Philips dictaphone mechanism, a Z80 CPU, and a modified teletext video generator from a TV added. A ROM cartridge added BASIC.

I have a P2000 myself now, I repaired the keyboard as this copy had been sitting in a barn somewhere and coffee was spilled all over it. I managed to get the keyboard working, but only barely. I discovered it was interrupt driven and very timing critical, not ideal if the keyboard matrix had to be reconstructed because it was mostly disintegrated.

I do have to say that the remote operated microcassette system and the software for it was nice (but made buying commercial software, and more importantly uploading it to an archive, almost impossible). but the microcassete system was almost the only nice thing I can say about this homecomputer. But then as I said I'm a bit prejudiced. LOL

This was actually also my first impression: very cool tape system (but impossible to use nowadays), but otherwise no added value at the time.

Ehmm, Ik wil geen mieren n**ker zijn, maar jij zegt toch echt in het interview dat jij de "oh shit" geschreven hebt... wat dus niet waar is... Je kan allerlei technical reden aanvoeren... maar uiteindelijk... Ik heb het geschreven... en ik neem 100% verantwoordelijkheid voor alle Aackosoft software dat spraak bevat... Niet jij, en geen interview met wie dat ook verandered dat.
Ik ben redelijk geweest... Ik hoop dat jij dat ook kan zijn.

But Ronald, the interview can't be changed, can it? And Martin has admitted he was wrong and gave you the credits after all. Both here and in a comment on the on Youtube posted interview. Sounds reasonable.

I can e-mail bas Kornalijnslijper and ask if he can do something to clear up this issue, as I made clear I'm not that invested in who wrote the speech routines, I just had a reasonable assumption it was my work, but all the new (for me) facts point to Ronald as the author, which is fine by me.
I will go and write that e-mail to bas now. I'm sure he already knows the facts in this case, but will plead with him to try to make it more obvious that I was mistaken when I said this.

It is not possible to change it now. I make a notice, so everybody can read it. Hope everthing is solved and everybody happy. It is almost 40 years ago, so this kind of errors happens sometimes. I will change the video later with some help.