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Quote: (I must also apologise to Graham, the fifth team member, whose surname I forget - and for any factual errors, which are all mine!). Might it be Graham Conduit? I found the following post on VideoPac.org about Shark Hunter by him.

Yes indeed - that's interesting too - I'd forgotten Shark Hunter was Graham's concept from the VideoPac. Thanks for locating that, and apologies to Graham for forgetting his surname.

Answer: #3 Maybe not commerically.. but you can't improve much on a tetris clone

Paul are you using an emulator nowadays? (not neceserally to program but maybe

Paul, what did you like about the MSX platform, if anything? (E.g. compared to ZX Spectrum.)

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Answer: #3 Maybe not commerically.. but you can't improve much on a tetris clone Paul are you using an emulator nowadays? (not neceserally to program but maybe

Yes, I do use emulators today to program - although I've not been involved with games for many years. Currently I'm writing user-interface code for handsets (Panasonic / Motorola), and so use a software handset simulator for initial testing. Ultimately, of course, target testing is the only way to prove code.

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Paul, what did you like about the MSX platform, if anything? (E.g. compared to ZX Spectrum.)

What did I like - well, it was superior to the Spectrum in many ways - not least in terms of sound, colour resolution, and sprites - you only had to compare Antarctic Adventure to any 16K Spectrum game. The machines were more robust, and had decent keyboards - at the cost of being much larger than a Spectrum though. Of course, all of those positives came at a price too. Having said that, though, timing meant that MSX seemed an evolution, whereas the Spectrum, being earlier, seemed more of a revolution - and nothing could change that.

So, how was the cooperation with Taito established, and did you take any part in it?

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So, how was the cooperation with Taito established, and did you take any part in it?

That would have been a business decision between Mike Hall, & Jeff Fenton, not an engineering decision I'm afraid - certainly I took no part in it.

Some more questions for Paul:

1) What did you find the most impressing MSX game?

2) What was your biggest competitor?

3) What was your favourite MSX game?

4) Did you guys ever play MSX games at work?

5) How did you test your software? Did you have to record the binary to tapes and load them? If so, wouldn't that be an extremely clumsy and slow way to test software? (Meaning very long development cycles...)

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Some more questions for Paul: 1) What did you find the most impressing MSX game? 2) What was your biggest competitor? 3) What was your favourite MSX game? 4) Did you guys ever play MSX games at work? 5) How did you test your software? Did you have to record the binary to tapes and load them? If so, wouldn't that be an extremely clumsy and slow way to test software? (Meaning very long development cycles...)

1 , 3 & 4) Good question - I'd have to say that technically, I found Antarctic Adventure one of the most impressive for functionality vs code-size, and I would play that occasionally in the office to wind my brain down - more so than any other game, anyway. Maybe my second favourite was ChoroQ.

2) Biggest competitor - another good question, but not being privy to the detailed sales side of things, I don't really know - we probably had more MSX titles than anyone else at the time (but I'm prepared to stand corrected).

5) We used an ICE (In Circuit Emulator), as far as I remember on real target machines, to be able to develop and test code in real time - so the cycle was simply recompiling and sending the code to the ICE again. Loading and saving to tape would have been far too slow, as you suggest.

Can you tell a bit more about ICE? Who made it? Was it a link cable type of solution or a programmable chip / circuit board that you swapped between UNIX system and MSX?

There was also few Konami titles (Pippols & Hyper Rally) made as prototype on Softcard. AFAIK 4 was made... What is the story behind this? (Pictures: http://msx.fi/party/pictures2005.htm )

Ahhhh! I didn't know about these Konami Softcards! Paul already said that he was quite sure that they also distributed some Konami titles.
But apparently this didn't make it beyond the prototyping phase...

NYYRIKKI: who owns these softcards and where did they come from?? How do you know there are only four (2 sets of 2 games)?

The softcards in the pictures are owned by STT. He also told me that there exists only two other cards, that are duplicates of these.

Some more questions to Paul :

1) Do you have copies (originals I mean) of your own/teammates games?, maybe some ES memorabilia?

2) Do you know or remember about unreleased prototypes or simply abandoned MSX projects?

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Some more questions to Paul : 1) Do you have copies (originals I mean) of your own/teammates games?, maybe some ES memorabilia? 2) Do you know or remember about unreleased prototypes or simply abandoned MSX projects?

Well, I have a copy of Shark Hunter, and Graphics Editor - and I think Buzz Off somewhere. Other than the products themselves, I don't remember much in the way of potential ES memorabilia - I also have a copy of an ES interview for one of the gaming mags of the era (oh, the fame!).

Abandoned projects? Well, the Music Editor I wrote (in the Editor series) was unreleased, as far as I know - and I'm not aware that much came of softcard developents either (through ES at least), but I'm prepared to be proved wrong.

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Can you tell a bit more about ICE? Who made it? Was it a link cable type of solution or a programmable chip / circuit board that you swapped between UNIX system and MSX? There was also few Konami titles (Pippols & Hyper Rally) made as prototype on Softcard. AFAIK 4 was made... What is the story behind this? (Pictures: http://msx.fi/party/pictures2005.htm )

ICE is a generic term for "In Circuit Emulation" - basically, a processor that emulates hardware "in circuit", but which is inherently more powerful than the emulation, thus its possible - amongst other things - to add real time code breakpoints, memory comparisons, etc etc. Consequently, code is loaded via some cabled interface to the emulator memory and runs from there, all the remaining hardware being intact.

Pippols (and maybe Hyper Rally) is a game I recall from my ES days - so I assume ES might have distributed it - whether that was in relation to Softcards I don't recall.