openMSX "Accuracy"

ANyway, I also remember Fear of an FM Planet. It was one of the first MSX2 demos I saw and I was very impressed with it. Great to see you again! I think I even met you in Tilburg in 1993 or so, is that possible?

I'll let him answer for himself, because I do believe he was a part of the MSX scene earlier than me, but from my experience there was a lot of upgraded SVI-738 X'Press computers. I did not see many Philips MSX'es, but quite a few Sony and Spectravideo MSX'es to begin with.
A shop called Spaceworld sold lots of SVI-738's priced down from 5995,- NOK to 995,- NOK, which at that time I believe would be 499 GBP to 83 GBP, for an easily expandable MSX (seems it was really designed to be an MSX 2 as it had the v9938 VDP, space for 128kb vram etc. on the print)
Upgrading was made even easier by the club "MSX Brugerklubben", which was a Danish/Swedish/Norwegian club which published a paper magazine called Syntax, later to become a floppy disc magazine.

There were annual meetings in Norway where members from Sweden and Denmark came and shared news and knowledge, i.e. Henrik Gilvad (the maker of i.e. Moonsound and GFX-9000) from Denmark who even did upgrade 738 MSX 1's to MSX 2, MSX 2+ etc. on site. Tore Brønnum and Tor Spigseth were also prominent Norwegian members of the club with hardware knowledge. Juan Salas also impressed us with new MSX Paint releases on many of the meetings. Northwind demos were also a hit, as well as software Henrik imported from The Netherlands and Japan and sold at the meetings.

My personal MSX story started with me buying a used Canon V-20 after my Oric-1 broke down. My best friends father then bought a 738, and I really liked the fact that it had a floppy drive. I went to drool at one at at Spaceworld one time and it ended up with me swapping my V-20 for an employee's 738 because he wanted better sound while playing Nemesis 2 with SCC. There was a design flaw in the 738's sound mixer which I then easily fixed by changing a resistor with the help of the knowledge from the MSX user club.
Then Henrik upgraded the machine to MSX 2 with 128kb RAM, then later with internal FM-pac, MSX 2+ upgrade and finally 1MB SIMM ram at different meetings. I then later bought a Panasonic A1GT Turbo R from a Swedish member. Henrik upgraded it with 1MB SIMM ram. I learned a lot from Henrik and using his info I then started upgrading my friends 738's myself.

I don't know when it started, but I think I was there from around ´93 to ´96 or ´97 when they stopped.

Sorry, I don't. But I sold one of my 738's to HansO, and I believe it had the HG memory mapper installed. As I recall it was a homemade print with 6 or 8 IC's, wiresolded to the simm. I did send some photos of it to mtn here on the forum back in 2017, maybe he still has the photos.

OpenMSX is cycle accurate for both the CPU and the VDP, including the access timing of the latter. Most of the research available on V9938/58 timing has come from the openMSX team. For that reason alone, openMSX should be considered the king of MSX emulation accuracy. Sound chips are cycle accurate as well I reckon, though the effect of writing too fast to their registers aren’t emulated.

Yeah, sorry, my underlying belief is fairly simple: if a random person came up to you and asked "which MSX emulator should I consider first?" then the answer would be OpenMSX. So it should be at the top of the table. Determining whether it matches the criteria that would allow it to be there is therefore a proper thing to do.

The this-way and that-way edits mostly result from the criteria being somewhat opaque. Though I also chucked in the MSX 1/2/2+/Turbo R columns the better to find a tick list way to differentiate lesser emulators such as my own. The editors there seem to love comparing things by tick lists.

There seems to be nothing that can be done about the entirely-nebulous 'recommended' column, but luckily that's already ticked. Phew!

EDIT: I've upped openMSX to "cycle" accuracy per the cargo cult-ish perception of that term over on that Wiki, elevating it above anything actually descriptive, and the confirmation above that the emulator fits the criteria. I've also moved it to the top as I think it fits the Wiki's rules for being at the top. Maybe we'll find out that it doesn't, but I don't intend to get into an edit war about it. You can't fix everything on the internet, it's not a big deal.