[Infamous Muffie Topic] What's needed to make openMSX more popular?

Paladin (933)

05-03-2009, 14:48

Well, my two cents:

1) Inclusion of copyrighted material. PPL don't want to dump their roms, don't want to use C-BIOS and don't want to surf on torrents to find out ready to use machines. They want a combo box to select: Plain MSX1, MSX1 Japanese with DD, Fully Loaded Turbo R with SCC, Moonsound and GFX9000, Perfect Game Configuration (2+), SymBOS Configuration with included HardFile, etc...Well, my two cents:

2) An integrated GUI.
OpenMSX have so many features, but you need to be an expert to tweak it and configure it as needed. OSD menus are great for Mobile versions (where are they anyway?) and Catapult is not user friendly.
Something similar to BlueMSX GUI should be enough.

3) HAP could help them to include PSG Factory and those GFX/Tile viewer/editor from Meisei. Those are really nice additions.

*PS* I'm not judging if my suggestions are legal or not (period).

By st1mpy

Paladin (904)

05-03-2009, 18:12

I am not sure if this has been improved, but last time I checked, OSX version's documentation wasn't accurate. A lot of key combos written in the doc were for PC version.

By hap

Paragon (2042)

05-03-2009, 18:12

1) no, it's free software
2) isn't the OSD menu (AppMenu key on Windows btw) + internal commandline good enough as an integrated GUI? An extra typical Windows menubar would be useless IMO.
3) I doubt, openMSX doesn't want to deviate from MSX standards. Then again, who knows, Wolf was able to make them add the PSG vibrato effect, after a lot of whining.

By Vampier

Prophet (2409)

05-03-2009, 18:22

Thanks for this feedback: I'll blame the person who's responsible for this for you

By muffie

Paladin (933)

05-03-2009, 19:36

1) BlueMSX is not free software?
2) No, it's not. It's not good enough to regular desktop users. Perfect for iphone like apps, but not for full desktop users.
3) MSX Standards? I was talking about your tools: Tile Viewer and etc...

By Manuel

Ascended (19314)

05-03-2009, 20:16

st1mpy: as far as I know all key combo's for Mac are correct since a few years already... Can you please tell me what was wrong?

During the last release, we even clarified the table a bit, see here:

http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/manual/user.html#keymapping

By hap

Paragon (2042)

05-03-2009, 20:32

Nope, blueMSX is not free (and you know I don't mean having to buy blueMSX). Noone minds though: Bazix doesn't deal with MSX logo/BIOS ROMs stuff anymore, the Japanese are in Japan, and Microsoft doesn't care.
As for my tools, changing PSG waveforms and editing graphics on the fly, etc isn't standard.

By muffie

Paladin (933)

05-03-2009, 21:09

Well, debugger isn't standard too.
So, It's more a philosophical matter right? Not including M$ Basic or MSX Bios?

By turbor

Hero (519)

05-03-2009, 21:48

So, It's more a philosophical matter right? Not including M$ Basic or MSX Bios?

Not only that. There are two reasons:
1) It is copyrighted material so distributing it without permission would be illegal, and even if nobody cares we do not won't to go that way.
2) We have our project hosted at sourceforge, so we can't according to their rules.

By muffie

Paladin (933)

05-03-2009, 23:28

well, as I said, I'm not judging the legal part of it. Neither the way authors want to go. I'm just trying to figure out what could help openMSX to became more popular.
AFAIK, up to now, I'm the only one suggesting something. Others are just disagreeing.

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6933)

05-03-2009, 23:46

My two cents about the legal part:

IT IS PERFECTLY LEGAL TO USE MSX ROMS IN EMULATORS PROVIDED THAT YOU OWN AN MSX MACHINE (EVEN BROKEN AND/OR STORED IN A REMOTE CELLAR)

This is due to the fact, in the EU at least, once you have bought an msx (read any digital device), you have all the rigths to dumpt its roms.