Hey. My handle is Mirg, and my real name is Paul Martens. I currently live in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, but I was born in Oosterhout (Noord Brabant). When I was twelve years old, I bought my first MSX Computer. It was a second-hand Philips VG8020 MSX1 with a black and white TV with a screen that looked more like a fishbowl.
I've used my MSX1 for YEARS and then made the step to the PC-platform. My love for Konami's games made me buy a Playstation around 1995. Things went a bit over the top after that and now my console-collection has about 30-35 systems and somewhere between 350-400 games (all originals, of course).
A couple of years ago I bought some MSX systems from Iwein (from MSX2.com), along with the F700D (with 7MHz and MSX2/MSX2+ switches) I use as my main system. It has a four-slot expander, a memory expander, an FM-PAC and an SCC (a not too nicely modified King's Valley 2-cartridge).
I like programming a lot, although I've been mainly coding Perl and PHP the last couple of years. Back when I was twelve, I wrote everything in BASIC, which I still like a lot (although I forgot pretty much everything). When I was 16 or so, I wrote Pascal (with a couple of x86 ASM tricks that I could type, but didn't fully understand) for a couple of years and switched to C++ (with the same ASM tricks, which I still didn't understand) after that.
I'm a Mac-user and when I'm not around my MSX, I can use the openMSX emulator that I somehow managed to compile using msxgamesbox.com's guide. I spent a whole Saturday trying to compile the bastard, then gave up and went to bed, Sunday I type "./configure", "make" and "make install" and the dumb thing installs without a hitch. I still have no idea what I did wrong on Saturday / right on Sunday. Ah well, it works now.
I've attended two of the Oss fairs and one fair in Tilburg, around 1999 - 2001. After that, I got a girlfriend who (I believe) spawned from Hell and screwed up my private life. Well, all's good now, and I hope to make some new (online) friends here to talk about the machine that still makes me smile like an idiot when I use / see / hear about it.
Posted: September 06 2005, 09:50 
