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Interview with Takumi Miyamoto, former employee at ASCII Corporation

Interview with Takumi Miyamoto, former employee at ASCII Corporation

by Pac on 06-03-2021, 02:17
Topic: MSX Related
Tags: ASCII, Interview, MSX turbo R, MIDI
Languages:

As you probably remember, last May 2020 we announced an uncoming interview with a Japanese ASCII Corporation former employee. In order to make it even more complete and interesting, we opened that forum thread inviting MSX users to take part of it by contributing with their own questions. For some reasons it has taken a long time but finally we got it!

Takumi Miyamoto was a young system programmer who worked for ASCII when the MSX standard reached the top regarding hardware power specifications, that's right, we are talking about the MSX turbo R computer. In contrast, this also meant that our beloved computer system was living its final commercial stage. Thanks to his words we can look into the past and revive those special moments, pure nostalgia.

Unfortunately and as we might expected, some of the questions were not possible to answer due to the considerable time lag, barely 30 years ago! Despite this fact, it doesn't make the interview less interesting as you can see.

The MSX Resource Center team would like to express our deepest gratitude to Takumi Miyamoto for kindly accepting this interview and share his experience with the MSX community around the world.

Also thank you so much to user kimoan for his valuable help. This interview would not have been possible without his support in the text translation.

Arigatō gozaimasu!

Relevant link:Interview (English)
Relevant link: Interview (Japanese/日本語 )

Comments (7)

By sdsnatcher73

Prophet (3961)

sdsnatcher73's picture

06-03-2021, 08:02

Very nice to read all this. Especially about the play bug which was patched by him in MSX-BASIC 4.1 Wink

By TheKid

Paragon (1238)

TheKid's picture

06-03-2021, 08:03

Yes,do more interviews like this LOL!

By PingPong

Enlighted (4138)

PingPong's picture

06-03-2021, 09:16

'I'm not sure'. The most convinced man of the world ;-)

By Pac

Scribe (7011)

Pac's picture

06-03-2021, 10:15

30 years ago...! We got more information than we expected. Unfortunately the more interesting questions, technical ones, were hard to answer for obvious reasons. .

By gdx

Enlighted (6217)

gdx's picture

07-03-2021, 10:09

The VDP was not focused enough on the game (no tile in bitmap modes and not efficient enough scrolling). MIDI came as standard much too late. MSX-VIEW development must have taken a long time when it was almost useless. Never stereo sound. In addition to several causes like this, I have the impression that protectionism was also a important factor in the end of the MSX.

By Ivan

Ascended (9358)

Ivan's picture

13-03-2021, 10:18

gdx wrote:

The VDP was not focused enough on the game (no tile in bitmap modes and not efficient enough scrolling). MIDI came as standard much too late. MSX-VIEW development must have taken a long time when it was almost useless. Never stereo sound. In addition to several causes like this, I have the impression that protectionism was also a important factor in the end of the MSX.

While I do agree that the MSX turboR is seen by a lot of MSX users as a supercharged MSX2+ and that barely made it into the 16bit era, it is a proper 16bit machine which came out in a time when, unfortunately, software houses were shifting to other platforms (16bit consoles and other 16bit/32bit Japanese home computers). Just take a look at some Illusion City advertisements: the supported systems are 16bit/32bit Japanese systems (X68000, FM-TOWNS, PC-98,...) yet the MSX (turboR) is still there Cool Wish that Konami would have stayed a bit longer with the MSX, just only one year more and we would probably have seen at least one Konami game for MSX turboR.

By The_Engineer

Master (192)

The_Engineer's picture

15-03-2021, 21:01

Thanks for the interview Pac. Very insightful!