It's taken a while, but here they finally are: the results of the second edition of the Scene Music Remake Challenge. In this challenge, musicians were invited to pick a piece of MSX music from an MSX scene composer of their choice and rearrange/remix it with whatever equipment they like. In the end, 8 entries were submitted, some from new participants, some from people who also participated in the first edition of this challenge.

A jury for this challenge was found in Danilo Danisi (DanDan), an Italian composer and designer best known for his work for IOD and the unfinished shooter X-Tazy. Danilo was happy to judge the results and provide an in-depth analysis of the entries. Thus, without further ado, here are the results as judged by Danilo:

1. Introdemo FDD2 Black Humour (winner)
   
2. Mirror Scroll
   
3. Callisto's Theme
   Omnifarious steps
   The Lost Battle
   
4. Dix Theme
   
5. Software Corner
   
6. Copy is profile

And so, Bart Roijmans wins this challenge with the FDD2 Black Humour song, which was originally made by Michiel Spoor (The Pretender) from Fony. From the whole MRC crew: congratulations, and the prize (an MP3-player MSX cartridge) will be yours! As mentioned, there is an in-depth jury report written by Danilo, in which you can also see the score for each song.

Relevant link: SMRC2 - jury report

You may recall a SymbOS image in advertisement style in 2007. That particular image was the winning entry of MSXart'07, a competition organized by the Passion MSX website. If you intended to compete with that challenge, but couldn't make it in time, you'll get a new chance: MSXart'08 has just been announced! As with previous editions, the idea is to create an MSX-themed wallpaper. Eventually a calender of the 12 best entries will be created and the creator of the best entry wins such a calender. The deadline for this competition is Sunday 12 October 2008, may the pixels be with you!

Relevant link: MSXart'08

Source: Karoshi forums

It's Easter and Easter is all about finding nice little surprises. Dvik & joyrex managed to surprise us with a beta version of their 2KB Open Source contest game M.A.Z.E! We're not going to spoil the surprise any further by telling you what this game is about. You'll have to download it and find out for yourself!

Relevant link: M.A.Z.E

If you haven't been searching for Easter eggs yet on this Easter morning, we have one for you: the fourth entry of the MRC MEGA-Challenge: Montana John and the Templar's Treasure, a platform adventure! Infinite's original plan was to create this game within one month for MSXdev'07, and while a very large part of the game was done during that deadline, bugs and unpolished content made Infinite decide to instead make it a polished MEGA challenge entry. A few weeks later, most of the game was ready and demonstrated on the MSX Fair in Nijmegen (now 2 months ago). Recently a few more details have been added, and as a result of that the ROM is now completely crammed with content.

The game, an SCC MegaROM for MSX2, is a platform adventure which merges gameplay from The Goonies and Usas while also hinting towards a famous movie character. While the game is an MSX2 game, the MSXdev'07 part of its history implicates that the game could as well run with the MSXdev'07 specifications, being a bare MSX1 with 64KB RAM. Naturally, an MSX2 (or an MSX1 with a V9938) with SCC is still the preferred configuration.

While the SCC chip plays a major role in the overall quality of the game, the production was plagued by that very same chip. This game's musical style exposed a major flaw in the SCC chip, causing the formal requirements to be somewhat different than you might expect: for flawless music on a real MSX, the game requires an SCC-I chip, like the ones in The Snatcher and SD-Snatcher. For emulators however, a normal SCC will do. For most people this would mean that the optimal way to play this game would be in an emulator.
With little over three months of development time to go we expect to receive much more entries so if you would like to get your hands on one of the free 1chipMSX computers you'd better start developing your entry or entries, had you not already done so. There are three disciplines (MSX2 game, 64x48 pixel limitation and history-theme) in which you can join, so there should be a fun challenge for every MSX developer out there. Full information on the challenge rules and disciplines can be found right here.

You can send in your entries to mega@msx.org until June 27th, 2008, 23:59 CET. For now, happy adventuring with Montana John!

Relevant link: Montana John and the Templar's Treasure

On the 27th of June this year, the 25th anniversary of our beloved MSX will be celebrated. At Konamito.com this is celebrated by an MSX-BASIC game competition. A maximum of ten lines of BASIC code is allowed, other than that, the theme is free to choose but there are some other rules to be obeyed when participating. All of them can be checked here.
The grand prize is not known yet, but it is going to be something MSX related for sure! The prize will be announced before the end of April. Most importantly, the deadline is due June 26th, 23:59 CET so you'd better start coding soon!

Relevant link: Konamito.com

With only a few days left, some late-minute entries start coming in. The latest entry for the second edition of the Scene Music Remake Challenge is from Team Bomba member Jorito. His entry, The Lost Battle is a song originally made by John Hassink (Demonseed) for the Umax game The Lost World.

To create this remake, Jorito used Renoise 1.9, with a Yamaha Motif ES-6, Roland XV-5050 and Native Instruments B4. The song was mixed in Soundtrack Pro. Jorito has also put online the original version, grab it here, and for older versions of the song check out this link.

Enjoy!

Relevant link: The Lost Battle

A new contest has been announced at the Karoshi forum! This new contest is a mini-game development contest that aims to provide a collection of Open Source 2KB games with commented code that will encourage new developers to join and will provide a valuable resource to improve assembly programming skills. The contest goal is to get full Open Source games for MSX, the prize will thus be the availability of the sources of all those games, commented by the authors.

The basic rules of this contest:

• Every game genre and theme is allowed
  
• Start adress: $C000 (it must work on every MSX with 16KB RAM or more)
  
• It must load with a "BLOAD" command from BASIC
  
• It must return to BASIC with a RET
  
• Max file size: 2055 bytes (2048 for the game + 7 bytes for the file header)
  
• Submitting deadline: 26th of June 2008 at 23:59:59

When the contest is over, a PDF will be published including all sources of the games with comments by the authors, and a ROM version with a menu will be built in order to enjoy the minigames in the most comfortable way.

Relevant link: Karoshi forum

Daniel Vik and Joyrex are known to cooperate on various unique productions, especially where it concerns stretching the boundaries of the MSX1. As of today, their latest effort has been made public: Lotus F3, an entry for the popular MSXdev'07 contest. This brand new racing game, along with details regarding the specifications, will obviously be released within six days! Patience is a virtue, but it's still itching!

Relevant link: MSXdev'07 website

A few days ago, MRC user Antti Laukkonen from Finland submitted the second entry for the second Scene Music Remake Challenge! Software Corner is a song originally made by NYYRIKKI, also from Finland. With well over a month to go for the final deadline, and X-Mas holidays ahead, we'll be expecting various entries to show up in the forthcoming weeks. For now: enjoy this fresh new entry!

Relevant link: Software Corner

In the last few years, the MSXdev competitions gained much praise from the community. Not only did it increase the amount of new content for the good-old MSX1 system, it also made game developers more active. In addition to that, some of the typical high-end developers had to take a technological step back in order to comply with the hardware specifications, which on its own is refreshing and educating. And so, the competition kept continuing and will continue in the next year!

The jury of MSXdev'07, being Timo Soilamaa (NYYRIKKI), Roberto Vargas (k0ga) and José Andrés Gil (Konamito), have played and judged all the MSXdev'07 entries. Based on the regular points, bonus points and penalty points they've given, here is their verdict:

1. Caos Begins – 78 points (winner!)
   
2. BeTiled! – 74 points
   
3. Txupinazo! – 74 points
   
4. Lotus F3 – 72 points
   
5. Mr Mole – 60 points
   
6. Penguin Mind – 43 points
   
7. Italian Stallion – 41 points
   
8. Night Driver – 41 points
   
9. Yahtzee – 36 points
   
10. Crazy MSX Frenchies – 29 points
    
11. Bag Man – 21 points
    
12. Balloon City – 20 points

The result may be what people have expected already, Caos Begins was seen as a very good candidate to win this edition when the game was released. The difference with the numbers 2 to 4 is small however, this clearly states the quality of these four games.

As Caos Begins is the main winner, Hikaru Games will be awarded with the main prize: a Sunrise CF ATA-IDE interface and 200 euro. There were more prizes available though: Luppie.net offered a 1 year webhosting package for the game with the best music, and this one will be awarded to Caos Begins as well. Furthermore, Nerlaska offered 3 PC games "Dracula Twins" for best music, best graphics and best game. All these 3 categories were -again- won by Caos Begins. Finally, there was a prize for the best shooter, a Konamito.com T-Shirt, which was won by Balloon City.

And with that, another year of MSXdev has been closed. MRC wishes to congratulate the winner of this edition, and thank the sponsors for their kind donations and the MSXdev organization for continuing this popular contest! Without doubt, MSXdev'08 will be in the pipeline, it's just a matter of when!

Relevant link: MSXdev website