Hi y'all, it is I, Meits.
It's been ages, but I never forgot my roots.
Let me tell you some stuff about me and the gang that had to put up with me in our colourful MSX time.
My info:
- Name: Jelle Jelsma
- Birth: 14-03-1977
- City: Burgum
- Clubs: MSX Club Friesland Noord, Near Dark, MSX Gebruikersgroep Friesland
- Stuff I did:
- Soepfiskje: Music
- JarreTenk: Music
- Near Dark: Music
- Near Dark 2.5: Music
- D.I.S.K.: Music/texts/chief editor
- Alto: All but coding
- Tweety's choice: All but coding
- Did also some little public domain things and participated on several small projects in a musical way.
It all started out around 1986 when dad bought a Philips vg8235 with a greenscreen monitor and a vw0030 printer. I started playing River Raid like a lunatic. But something kinda bothered me quite soon already. It seemed that my friends had a Sony HB-F700P which had double the RAM and double the disk capacity. Alsy, they all seemed to have colourscreens. It took me a few years to confince my dad to replace that stuff he bought. One of those friends was Ronald Zijlstra, one the older people here might remember. He was one of the club called Genic or RBM group. He always supplied me with the latest games. Though, I didn't have loads of choice, since it had to be either singlesided, or 128kb or less.
When my dad bought the Sony 700 with colourscreen, the first thing I did was visiting Ronald Zijlstra, though he sold all his stuff to a dude named André Annema, the person that turned out to be Chip, the coder of our Near Dark/MCFN stuff. He supplied me with the games I wanted to play for years.
Also André seemed to be a coder person. He made funny little things and I was impressed by it. Also because I had those games and the other computer, I decided to buy an FM-PAC, which I ordered by MK-Public Domain.
All this together made me feel quite active in the MSX world, so I started gathering people around me who had such a computer as well and went with them to my first MSX fair ever: Tilburg 1993. I went there with André, Wouter and Hanno. This fair was so overwhelming.
The next fair I decided to buy myself a music module which costed me 275 guilders (man that costed loads).
Having all those nice little hardwares at home, I started playing with FAC Soundtracker and made some funny tunes, which I wish I still had 
. Some later André, Wouter and I started making plans for some software to create, though Soundtracker was not an option for musiccomposing, so I bought Moonblaster 1.4. We found some new friends, the brothers Arjen and Jeroen Haisma. Arjen was a drawing talent and Jeroen was a hardware goeroe, who did the northern service part for a man called Hans Oranje.
Since Arjen joined as graphics man, we fixed ourself the first music disk called Soepfiskje. As commercial support we asked Master of Audio (Emphasys) to participate, so we got some songs.
When we met the guys Klaas de Wind and Gerrit Jellema of MSX Club Friesland Noord, they got enthousiast with our product, so they were so kind to give us place in their ranks and so we sold Soepfiskje at the next Zandvoort fair.
It was such a weird feeling that people actually wanted to have the stuff we made, which made us twice as active.
For the next fair in Tilburg we wanted to go loads of steps higher in our quality. Peter van der Galiën (OPA) joined us for jet even more graphics. Cuz we needed skills to go over Soepfiskje, we decided to try Wolf for some sounds. Though this turned out not to work as easy as it went with MOA. So, contact was lain with Danilo Danisi (DANDAN). He was very enthousiastic. Also we got a new coder in our ranks called Ivor Bosloper. He was a math magician and coded the intro for JarreTenk. The result of the whole thing was so great. We sold more than we dared to dream of. Also we made loads of flyers for the thing. It was unbelievable all together.
After all this the software and public domain parts of MSX Club Friesland Noord got separated into MCFN and Near Dark, to give the software its own identity. Cuz we were so original and inventive, our next music disk was called Near Dark as well. This was one of the worst disks we made, it looks completely unfinished. Next step was Near Dark 2.5 (thinking of the Naked Gun series). We contracted yet another musical ingredient from the person called Johnny Hassink. He just got started with MoonBlaster. Before that he coded his music using MML (indeed). Near Dark 2.5 was a nice thing to make, but it never went over JarreTenk.
During all this history, we also felt the need to make a diskmagazine. And since Emphasys quit Golden Power Disk, we checked if we could take it over. That was quite easy done, we just could not use the name of the disk, cuz that was (C) Empasys. No problem for us, we just called the thing DISK. Later a person called Roberto Pinna told us that DISK means "De Idiootste Software Krant". We laughed our asses off and on our costs he would get all next issues for free.
DISK was kinda weird received by the audience. Bert Daemen saw DISK 1 as Golden Power Disk 12. Future Disk instantly hated us
and the audience was amuzed. The contents of DISK were absolutely not to be taken seriously, and I guess that was the problem with some reviewers, cuz they did take us seriously and compared us to Golder Power Disk (logical ofcourse, but ey).
After some internal difficulties with the MSX Club Friesland Noord guys, we went into cooperation with MSX Gebruikersgroep Friesland. André and Ivor already quit being active and didn't contribute any skill anymore. Though, since I had bought a Moonsound and I still had loads of MB1.4 music and enough graphics, we found Edwin van der Heide to code something around those musics/graphics. Tweety's choice and Alto were the results.
A little secret person joined the ranks to contribute music for both disks. No one ever knew who the person called JOAN was. I never told anyone cuz I liked the difference between him and me. That JOAN was just short for Jelle Onder Andere Naam, didn't come up to anyone. The musical styles were too different
DISK stopped after issue 7. A best of in the shape of DISK BBS (Biggest BullShit) closed the DISK series. Simply because I had to fill the disk almost completely alone. Since MSX Gebruikersgroep Friesland had their own magazine, we joined forces. Now Edwin van der Heide and I could do it together and that worked for a few issues. Then Sunrise Magazine quit. We took it over for 1 or 2 issues, but we had to change our writing style and loose our own identity. Also the text routine was strictly Sunrise and a no go zone for us. This didn't work. How it all ended, I don't remember.
The MSX world was fading. Clubs disappeared and the fairs started to get boring. Also Near Dark and MSX Gebruikersgroep Friesland kinda fell apart. We were history. We never had the chance to do a great project like a game and that still bothers me. The closest we got with a game was me playing a gay with Jaap Mark and also as just a pedestrian saying shit shit shit in Pumpkin Adventure III.
Sad that the MSX world got stabbed in the back by the modern computers.
To close this kinda Near Dark biography, I want to great and say hi to the persons I was with from beginning to end:
Wouter de Vries, Peter van der Galiën, André Annema, Haiko de Boer, Hanno Kooyker, Klaas de Wind, Gerrit Jellema, Kier Kracht, Arjen Haisma, Jeroen Haisma, Marcel Delorme, Edwin van der Heide, Martin de Vries, Janny Boertien, Johnny Hassink, Roberto Pinna, Jochem Smit, Danilo Danisi, Wolfgang Oberleitner, Jan Lieuwe Koopmans, Tristan Zondag, Daniël Hemelrijk and probably some more.
After my MSX activity was not mentionable, I started building a pc. Got internet on it and stuff, but it didn't make me creative like I was on MSX.
I used my MSX with Moonsound and philips keyboard for a little while when I was keyboarder in a black metal band. We even recorded a cd. So, there is a black metal album with Moonsound as keyboardsound
I lived together with a norwegian beauty from 2001 til end 2003 in Holland and after working as bookkeeper in a hospital and as a booker in a bank, I returned to school to finsh my bookkeeping education, where I still am.
The MSX activities I still maintain are the MSX games on my Playstation (thanks Tristan) and a stripped Philips 8250 with a panasonic FM-PAC and Philips Music Module.
I miss the MSX time.
Meits
