Nostalgia brought me into this place and I was quite surprised to see so many familiar names. It's been at least 10 years since I have seen any of them though. So a bit of a reintroduction is not out of place.
I started my MSX fandom when my father bought me and my brother a Mitsubishi MSX computer because we were monopolising his PC (which was one of those ancient ones that ran on a steam engine I think). I started coding on that thing pretty much from the start. I did a bit a basic but went on to experiment with ASM pretty quickly. A drawback was that I didn't have an assembler and that everthing I did was hand assembled with my z80 bible and poke'd into memory from basic.
Somewhat later my father wanted to experiment with video editting so we got a Philips NMS 8280 MSX2. On this I wrote a lot of half finished code until I finally got an assembler. My attempt to get into then rising demo scene was severly delayed because I have no creative skill worth mentioning.
After discovering how screensplits worked, things started to go quicker. Although definitely not the first, it wasn't very commonly used at the time and I tried to heavily exploit it. I started the RMF and with some friends we did get a demo onto a picturedisk. The (according to wolf) infamous demo without any sound at all. This worked very well for us because we managed to attract Wolf to do our music for us.
While this was going on I was usually at the big MSX meetings in the Netherlands. And often at the local clubs in Heerhugowaard and Heiloo.
All this fun came to an end rather abruptly when I went to university. I studied Aerospace Engineering in Delft and that quickly needed most of my time. I chose to leave MSX behind because it was not compatible with making it through.
I did get a PC of course. Currently I'm a close follower of the open source scene, although I wish I had the time to participate more. I use Linux exclusivelynow. As on old msx-er, how could I resist the penguin.
Although the details are a bit fuzzy, I had a great time in the MSX scene. And I'm planning to stick around here for a bit. I still have an A1ST somewhere which hasn't been used nearly as much as it deserves.
Posted: December 12 2004, 15:24 