Syn

Although I signed up years ago here on MRC I didnt posted much back then and I never bothered to introduce myself. So maybe a long overdue selfintroduction, and sharing some of my MSX memories with you all.

I am a 32 year old male from the Netherlands. Mainly a msx fan, never active in the demoscene or whatever. I signed up a few years back on MRC but I lost interest. Nowadays not a msx user but just playing some games/listening to music on emulator. A few weeks ago I started having interest in the MSX scene again and now I think I want to become active in the msx dev scene to ty keep the msx spirit alive!

Anyway a short history with some memories:

My parents gave me a MSX 1 (sony hitbit 501p) when i was around 8 years old, because they heared it could help me do better at school. Ofcourse it did, playing Konami's Atheltic Land a few times a week helped me improve my math skills My favorite game was Nemesis 2, a game I borrowed a lot from a neighbor (like a few weeks in a row). Super Laydock was also very fun. I prefer cartridge games because my mom wouldnt let me play more than 30 minutes per week at first because she was afraid videogames were harmful, and loading up a game from tape would already cost me 10 minutes of my valuable play time. I remember one race game really took like 25 minutes to load (maybe exxaggerating a bit) so I always ended up at some select screen when my mom called me to stop playing.. ;D I also had a cartridge of Valis, I liked that game a lot, especially the drawing on the cover of a half naked girl with a sword (i was like 11 back then so sue me! )..

But anyway I did good enough at school so after a lot of nagging I got a MSX2+ (sanyo wavy 70 fd2, a second drive I never used) when I was 12, and the world opened up for me.. such awesome graphics, great sound. From school friends and that neighbor kid I got a few games, I think the games I played the most are Aleste 2, Laydock Last Attack (fabulous scrolling). I wasnt active in the MSX scene, never went to fairs and stuff, so my supply of copied games was small, so a lot of games I have never played back then, especially the Konami Megaroms, because you needed 128KB to run the hacked rom (loaded from floppy).

Back then we had a local computerclub which, from what I can tell, was just a weekly warez meeting where everyone was busy copying games from eachother.. at least that was what people from school told me, I never went to those clubmeetings, I just gave a few floppies to them "gimme some stuff".

A friend at school had a msx from phillips, the 82xx series, maybe 8250 or something. I couldn't run a hacked copy of SD-Snatcher on my msx (due to me having 64kb ram) so I would go to his played a lot to watch him play SD Snatcher.. it was a great game.. neither of us could read japanese but we had great times .. you know trying to dodge the bullets with your head etc ... so funny "hahah sucker you did it again!!"

More games I enjoyed back then. Nyancle Racing, F1 Spirit, f1 spirit 3d, Magical Tree was fun, Quinpl was fantastic imho so much 2 player fun with my brother. Tetris was very addicting but boring to watch for player 2. Thexder 2, awesome game and fabulous soundtrack. Runemaster III was great, we always played it during lunch break,,. if I recall you could complete it in 30 minute ish so we would be in time to be back at school. Xak 2 intro demo music blew me away, but never got past the city part because my disc 2 or 3 crashed. Undeadline, I loved that game, especially the music. Randar, Golvelius II, sure I am forgetting a lot. I never played YS so I will have to pick that up later. I saw that autoplay video of Ys III on youtube and it dropped my jaw.. wow such a beautiful game I have missed.

Speaking of soundtracks, MSX was the computer that made me appriciate music. Both through games but also demo/music discs. FAC soundtracker I had a lot of songs for to which I listened too, and only a few months later I discovered most of those tracks where real music on CD (mainly those Synthesizer Greatest cd series.. which I bought.. as my first CD, because I knew the songs on the MSX).. Later I started liking the Pet Shop Boys because of that first stereo MSX demo,... it was called Awesome or something like that.. it had a lot of pet shop boys songs on the tracks player. I only had the build in msx-music in my msx 2+ but my school friend had a phillips music module. He brought it over to me, I think he didnt had a fm-pac (he was always bashing the fmpac how bad it sounded compared to the phillips music module, and i agreed) and we hooked up my stereo so we were enjoying Stereo music on MSX.

I discovered a new hobby too through msx, making music. I remember my first music piece, I wrote it in Synthsaurus. Well not really wrote, I just held down space and press up down right or something totally random like that.. and I actually thought it sounded cool, but it was really just totally random notes. Later I started to try read and deceiver the stuff written in Fasttracker, and ended up making some amateuristic music.

Some more fun memories:

You remember you could do those konami cartridge combo's, where you have 2 carts in the MSX you get special bonusses/cheats? So the neighbor who had the Nemesis II cartridge had one hacked rom loaded in internal memory, and another rom loading directly from floppy to have the cheat working.. so while he was playing the loaded rom, floppy drive was spinning nonstop for the cheatrom.. still amazes me his DD didnt break. I dont recall what game combo it was, I always thought it was Nemesis II and Qbert, but when I think about it, he shouldn't need to have Qbert running from floppy if he had a real nemesis II cart (enough memory to run qbert from ram).. it was a shooter so I think it was the Nemesis 1 + twinbee combo

I remember freaking out when I saw an ant crawl into my sony msx1 cartridge port.. I thought he was going to kill my msx by shortcircuiting (I was 11 back then.. ). Ofcourse the MSX survived that.

On one bored day, I was 14-15 i think I decided I want to see whats inside my MSX (the sony hitbit). So I took it apart. It was fun to study every part. I was curious if that ant was still there, but no nothing.. not even a dead ant. When I put it back together I ended up with a lot of spare screws.. obviously I missed a few holes

Eventually I lost interest in MSX because I bought a super nintendo, and later a PC, and another pc, and another... But MSX will always have a special place in my heart

*edit* forgot to mention, Astro Marine Corps, great psg music, only too bad it only had 1 song playing in loop as far as I know. Still, that psg tune is wicked!