I don't know of any statistics, but I think that's the case Manuel. At least in my case, all my MSX friend but one had MSX1 instead of MSX2. So, from my (limited and biased) sample of my group of friends, the stats were like this (as far as I can remember): MSX1: 4, Spectrum: 4, CPC: 2, C64: 2, MSX2: 1
My nearby (Barcelona) computer acquintances were something like:
-mine: Toshiba HX-20 (MSX 1)
-Neighbour: Amstrad CPC 464
-School far friend: Amstrad CPC 464 (first domestic computer I ever saw, I was MIND BLOWN, even it was a green phosphorus CRT)
-School far friend: Toshiba HX-10 (MSX 1)
-Friend: Philips VG8020 (MSX 1)
-Cousins: Philips VG8020 (MSX 1)
-Neighbour: Sony HB-501P (MSX 1)
-HiSchool Friend: Sony HB-F9s (RARE MSX2 jewel)
-HiSchool Friend: Philips NMS 8250 (MSX2, ULTRA RARE "rolls royce") (That's my everyday MSX machine, after he gave it to me for free years ago)
-HiSchool Friend: Some kind of Spectrum... Never saw it in person, he already had a 386 when I knew him.
I had never seen a C64 in person until 2018 (!!!!!). Virtually unknown among my acquintances.
This list might seem a bit MSX biased (and probably is), but I kind of want to think my friends became groups around the computer model your parents bought on the stores... My first MSX buy decission was pure chance, it could have been a Thomson MO5 laying around the same shelf as my Toshiba HX-20 (thank god it wasn't... shiver!!)
Similar here.
My friends had mainly ZX Spectrum, two of them MSX1, some CPC 464, one a C64, and never met anyone with an MSX2.
In the 80s the MSX2 was for me something expensive that you read about in the magazines, but that's all.
I think it's a matter of price. All we had cassettes, never cartridges, for example. And no way MSX2. Poor boy XD
This is just my personal experience in my city (Palma), of course not official statistics!
I did once saw an Spectrum at my classmates home in 1985, others had mainly C64, some Amstrad and first ST's. Only three of my mates does had MSX computers. The rich kid from our neighborhood had an Sony HB700D in 1986. He made the contact to the other users in Stuttgart. I remember a MSX meeting with about 20 users in Stuttgart. Never heard of a Speccy scene here in my town. Neither an Amstrad or MSX scene.
Computer shops were full of Commodore and Atari computers, althought we had tree shops selling MSX. Mainly they could be found in Hi-Fi and Television shops. The poor trainees that worked there had no clue about computers. Also one big music equipment shop sold Yamahas besides their DX7. None of the computer stores had Spectrum hard- or software when I remember right. All the Spectrum ports lacked on good graphics and were poor conversions to the MSX, most of the time. We haded them and laught at 'em. A good port I remember was KnightTyme, which I played a lot. This was my hometown in 1985/86. Later the ST/Amiga wars begun, MSX was to small to join that competition.
Here in Italy, in the neighborhood where I lived with my parents, there were MANY MSX and some C64. Never seen a Spectrum or an Amstrad CPC (except in recent times)...
Even though I grew up in the Netherlands, I was the only kid with an MSX in my neighbourhood. All the other kids with computers had a C64, and later the Amiga. And I had a cousin who had a Commodore Plus/4.
The only way I got to meet with other MSX users was at user groups.
In the stores there were also the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad computers, but I never knew anybody that had them. Although... my first computer was actually a Sinclair ZX81 which is the predecessor of the ZX Spectrum...
Was Elite a Specci port or individually designed for MSX?
I believe it shares some code but it seems to be a specifically-made version. Performance seems too good to be a direct port. I could be mistaken, though.
Msx got 1:1 ports because the vram layout is much more similar to zx
One. A sort of heaven for lazy programmers
if you compare with zx to amstrad ports you often see a better coloured game. why? Because the cpc had a display buffer more different than zx and developer were forced to recode graphical code from scratch giving therefore a better quality
Well then Highway Encounter (published by Vortex) could be a real port. I played it a lot on my father's ZX Spectrum and the MSX version is exactly as that version (including the monochrome colour scheme) but while the Spectrum version is pretty snappy, the MSX version feels sluggish, especially when there are lots of moving items on screen.
MSX bitmap modes require more bandwidth, particularly when changing colour (8 bytes/character vs. 1 byte/character). Also MSX has indirect VRAM access, due to this difference often Speccy ports write to RAM like on Spectrum and then a routine copies it to VRAM rather than directly writing to VRAM. This extra copy simplifies the port but also slows it down. For this reason Speccy ports on MSX tend to be a bit slower than their Spectrum original. They were generally ported under a very short deadline without time to recode the graphics routines to be optimised for MSX.