it’s like saying soccer never was populair because all YOU do is look at borring football & baseball… you really are tooo full of yourself….

anyway, all my friends and me had MSX computers for about 10 years. many of the developers today learnd programming on a MSX. i know this is true for about 2/5th of my (ex-)coworkers. another 1/5th learned it on another system like the c64, trs-80, amiga, etc. then finally about 2/5th learned it at school. tell me where the MSX was such a mistake in that story?

In the 80’s I had an MSX1, and a friend of mine, had a PC-XT. While the XT had a monochrome monitor and 4 colors (well, four shades of green) – the MSX had amazing 16 colors; while XT had only the speaker to play music, MSX had PSG with 3 channels…

As a learning machine, and as a gaming machine, MSX was one of the best at it’s time…

MSX was a landmark in computers, but just because it never took off on USA, it’s often ignored everywhere.

Look a little bit further as the U.S. and see that msx is one hell of a system!
As Manuel said: at the release of msx2 in 1985 it was the most powerfull 8-bit computer!

Regards Eric

Nice analysis. The names of the standards you mentioned aren’t entirely accurate though. After MSX which was introduced in 1983, MSX2 followed in 1985. A bit late, but at that time it was the most powerful 8-bit computer available. MSX2 was very popular in the Netherlands, were a couple of hundred-thousand machines were sold, more than MSX.
In the US, it indeed never took off; mostly the Yamaha CX5M was sold there, as a musical instrument. And maybe a few Spectravideo MSX machines were sold there as well. But in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil it was popular for a long time!

In 1988 the MSX2+ standard was introduced, however, only a handful of models were released and only officially in Japan. The last incarnation of MSX is the MSXturboR, which was solely made by Panasonic in two models. This one uses the R800 CPU. The two models were released in 1990 and 1992. After that, MSX was commercially dead. (But an active hobby scene remained, even today!)

Until D4E Enterprises, ASCII and the Dutch company Bazix started to sell MSX games again on emulators… Also, a new one-chip MSX (OCM) was introduced: a small MSX machine based on FPGA technology…

OK, that was the small update. You might want to Google a bit to find out more details Starting points: http://www.msx.org/ and http://faq.msxnet.org/

The hardware manuals were all in Japanese, and they were being very hastily translated for me while I worked, by a guy we found who could read “some” Japanese.

Matsushita provided only the vaguest specs for the product, and were surprised when some features weren’t what they were expecting. The vagaries of collaborating with a Japanese company in those days could be hilarious and frustrating, though I suppose things haven’t changed that much.

Howard, you coul dhave been a famous musician!

The MIDI standard was created around 1984. I actually had two MSX computers. I bought them because they were the first computer to have a MIDI interface and a Yamaha 4-operator FM music synthesizer either built-in or available as a cartridge you could plug in (I forget which). That was the only thing I used them for. It was a bit crude but it did enable me to make multi-timbral MIDI music very early on — and at a relatively reasonable price. I sold them after I bought a stand-alone MIDI synthesizer and an Atari ST which had built-in MIDI capability, along with a disk drive and a variety of music software.