Remember.. remember.. the 5th of December. MSX fans will conquer storm, lightning and rain, to visit RU 36a Barcelona, Spain! The place where games, MSX fans and new hardware will blend, and that's where the poetry should end. Jokes aside -the weather is more suitable for The Netherlands at the moment-, this RU in Barcelona is on course of becoming an interesting event once again. The current list of participants:

• AAMSX will inform visitors about last news on the AAMSX affairs, and sell cartridges of Traffic Jam, Perfect Fit, Operation Wolf and Majikazo games. Two new cartridges are for sale, and much more.
  
• Z80ST Software is going to show the latest version of hte (almost finished) game: Qbiqs. Also, the new project KNT may be demonstrated.
  
• Konamito will have MSX T-shirts and 2nd hand games for sale. Also, games of the MSX-BASIC games contest will be demonstrated using a 1chipMSX.
  
• Nerlaska Studio will sell the extended version of Monster Hunter, on a 4Mbit cartridge.
  
• The Pets Mode are going to present a better version of Escape from Dwarves' Goldmine, the game presented in the second MSX basic games contest, organized by Konamito.
  
• RELEVO Videogames and 1BEER MSX will have a booth together. Games that will be on display are La Corona Encantada, Ba-Boon! and more. For free beers and MSX gaming, 1BeerMSX has been sent from heaven to provide you with both.
  
• SuperSoniqs will demonstrate Franky, the all-new SEGA-meets-MSX cartridge.
  
• Alifort chapas will have all kinds of MSX merchadising for sale, like sheets, turnkeys and magnets.
  
• AUIC (Asociación de Usuarios de Informática Clásica) will inform the visitors of the most important retrocomputer meeting in Spain: RetroMadrid. Also, some merchandising will be presented.
  
• Sd-snatcher, application developer for Obsonet, will demonstrate the new ethernet card for MSX.

For a list of scheduled activities and any other details concerning this fair, consult the AAMSX website.

Relevant link: AAMSX

This month, the second issue of OLD!Gamer arrived in Brazil. This magazine is aimed at a number of old computer platforms, including MSX, and it's very famous in Brazil. This issue features MSX right away: Marcelo Tini, of MSX History was interviewed. This fresh bimonthly magazine is targeting at collectors of old systems and games. Other platforms featured in the magazine are Arcade, Atari, Dreamcast, Master System, Mega Drive, Neo Geo, NES, SNES and various others. These make up for a very wide era of gaming, and to have our MSX between these is of course something truly special!

Relevant link: OLD!Gamer - issue 2

DB-Soft's Woody Poco is a colorful adventure from 1987 that was virtually unplayable without any knowledge of the Japanese language. Tsunami Translations and Max Iwamoto have translated this game for you to enjoy, it will be released as an IPS-patch. To wet your appetite, a video of this translated game has been posted on YouTube. Keep your eyes peeled for a release soon!

Relevant link: Woody Poco - YouTube

Vampier has uploaded six fly-throughs of MSX shooters to his YouTube page. Featured are all the main levels (not the bonus levels) including the demo cut scenes. These videos are of course an interesting insight into these games, in case you have never managed to get all that far yourself.

But is Vampier really such a shooting wizzard? No, he was testing a brand new feature in openMSX: reverse. This is a function you may know already from emulators such as meisei, where you just 'rewind the tape' if you made a fatal mistake. As the current formal version of openMSX (0.7.2) was released half a year ago, this new version of openMSX is obviously a development version.

The six fly-throughs Vampier has uploaded are:

• Nemesis
• Salamander
• Nemesis 3
• Parodius
• Space Manbow
• Universe: Unknown

Relevant link: Vampier's YouTube page

SuperSoniqs has put the first version of the instruction manual of Franky online. Inside this manual you will find general information about Franky, how to convert Sega programs to MSX and detailed information about how to access the VDP and audio modes of the Sega A/V processor.

Relevant link: SuperSoniqs (Documentation section)

Today, Retroworks released a port of the classic Konami platformer King's Valley for Spectrum 48k and Spectrum 128k. This port was programmed by Manuel Pazos (Guillian) and Jaime Tejedor (Metalbrain), and it features the same gameplay, stages and music of the original. The graphics have been ported by Francisco Javier Velasco (Pagantipaco). The game can be found on the Retroworks website, including a complete map and a user manual. A video of this port can be seen on YouTube, right here.

Relevant link: Retroworks - King's Valley port

In two months the fifth edition of the annual MSX Fair in Nijmegen will be held. It's the only major pure-MSX fair left in The Netherlands after the annual Bussum fair was discontinued. As of today, the registration form is online! Tables for this fair have a width of 1m40 and cost €7 each. Traditionally, the day will end in the nearby Chinese restaurant. If you want to participate in this feast, you are encouraged to reserve your seat, as there's a limit of 35 persons. Another aspect to think about is the stage act. If you have a fun idea for the stage: make yourself known.

What would this fair bring to us? Perhaps the highly anticipated Nowind, and what about Franky, the SEGA-meets-MSX project from SuperSoniqs? If you want to find out: be there or be grey, all come to Nijmegen!

Relevant link: Nijmegen - registration form

The Mini Game Competition 2009 1KB/2KB category results are in. Three MSX games were submitted and one of these reached a runner-up position! Let's have a look at this year's harvest:

• Jos'b has submitted the game Zone in the 2K compo and reached runner-up position
  
• MRC Historian Yukio has submitted two games, Fishing for the 2K compo (ranked 7th) and Aviao for the 1K compo (ranked 12th)

As for Yukio, he seems to be a busy little bee, as he has announced six entries for MSXdev as well. On December the 1st 23:59 we'll know what he managed to finish!

Relevant link: The Mini Game Competition

Have you ever dreamed of making a shoot'em up, but never succeeded in forming a group? A game editor like Yoshida Konzern might be the answer. Imanok thought up the idea to collectively make a new game by each contributing a level. There was one catch: Yoshida Konzern's interface was in Japanese, which makes it hard to figure everything out. But now a first release of the patch is available! Over 90 percent of the menus have been implemented. The translated help texts haven't been inserted yet, but they will be in a future release.

Relevant link: The MSX Files

In little over two weeks we'll be presented with the harvest of MSXdev'09, the yearly game programming contest that managed to break through after MSXdev'04 and was especially fruitful during MSXdev'05. You may recall from last year that there was an awful silence regarding the number of entries we would be seeing.. until that last evening when games kept coming and coming. It would probably be safe to put money on a similar situation this year. Although eleven games have been announced in advance, not many have been finished yet and half the registered entries come from one single person only: Yukio. His recent output for the Mini Game Competition exposes him as a busy little bee however, and six completed entries would surely be the stunt of the year. An overview of finished and unfinished projects so far:

• Plumber, a platformer by AG Software -finished-
  
• Blinking Magic, an RPG by Yukio
  
• An untitled shooter by Yukio
  
• Running Way, a gambling/casino game by Yukio
  
• Ba-Boon!, a puzzle game by RELEVO (former Karoshi member viejo_archivero)
  
• Jumping in the Bridge an action game by Yukio
  
• In Jail!, a mini game, again by Yukio
  
• In Jail! part II, Yukio's last entry
  
• Castle Tomb, a platformer by AG Software -finished-
  
• Retaliot, a shoot 'em up by Video Hazard
  
• Menace, an arcade classic by The New Image

In addition, there's an unanounced SCC-Megarom in the pipeline by Infinite, which happens to be a game which missed last year's deadline. Considering Infinite's deadline reputation, it'd be safe not to put it up there with the rest yet.

Some people have asked the organizers when the exact deadline was, some thought it was December 31st, while others thought it was November 30th (as was mentioned on Passion MSX). The real MSXdev'09 deadline is the first day of December, 23:59.59, Central European Time (Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, Rome and others).

Relevant link: MSXdev