MSX image gallery

These pictures were taken in 2000 or so, with a Sony Digital Mavica disk-based camera.

Cartridges

General purpose cartridges


A 2 MB memory mapper, made by MSX club Gouda.


The BERT SCSI-interface, made by Hardware Partners Nederland.


A DOS2-ROM cartridge (which I don’t own anymore).


I bought this nice small IDE interface at the Bussum fair 1999 (version 4.00). The next version (version 4.01) is put in a larger box, and can be bought in combination with an RS232 in the same cartridge (see below for a single Sunrise RS232). It’s cheap, fast and Sunrise has it in stock so it’s easily available. Nowadays though, most people use Compact Flash carts as their hard drive, with Sunrise’s CF-IDE interface.

Sound cartridges


The cartridges in the picture above are the following, from top to bottom:

  1. Music Box, the Korean FM-Pac. Terrible quality with lots of noise… :)
  2. FM Stereo Pak. This is also an FM-Pac, but this one seperates the drums (right) and the other channels (left), which supposedly makes it ‘stereo’, although I can’t say I’m really enthusiastic about the effect. It also has a line-in connector.
  3. Konami SCC. Here inside the King’s Valley II-cartridge. It has a switch added onto it to select between the game or soundchip-only. I also have an F1-Spirit-cartridge where the original owner removed the ROM to turn it into an SCC-only cartridge. That’s kind of a waste…


Here you see a Toshiba Music Module (with an MSX Audio OPL1 sound chip). Most well-known are the Philips Music Modules, which were just like Toshiba’s but also contained 32k of sample RAM, and a mic-in. Because most music made for the MSX Audio cartridges depends heavily on the sample RAM for drum kits and the likes, the lack of it in the Toshiba cartridge makes it often useless. Fortunately, it is possible to build some sample RAM into the Toshiba Music Module, which I did, so now it’s almost equal to the Philips one.


The external keyboard that could be attached to the above Toshiba Music module. It has a touch-sensitive pad on top which you can use for drums or mode/instrument selection functions, etc.


This music extension is the latest-of-the-latest for MSX, the MoonSound (well, the design is from 1994, so it’s not exactly new :)). It’s quite a nice cartridge, using the Yamaha OPL4 sound chip. 18 channels FM (equals the OPL3 part of the SoundBlaster Pro) and 24 channels Wave (samples). It plays samples and MODs quite well ^_^, although there are memory limitations. It was a bit expensive for a high schooler’s wallet (about 170 euro), but it turned out to be a nice purchase :).

Communication equipment


The RS232 module which can be plugged in the (old) MT-telcom modem (that I forgot to take a photo of).


A Philips RS232-interface. Which is, unfortunately, broken.


Bought this RS232 interface from Sunrise at the MSX fair in Oss of 2000. It’s an RS232-only, but it can also be bought on combination with an IDE-interface (version 4.01) or as a single IDE-interface without RS232. It hasn't got an RS-BIOS, so it doesn’t work with most terminal-software, but it does work with Erix and the terminal program that I wrote (downloadable from the old datax pages, it’s quite ‘alpha’ though). Why buy this one? Because it’s cheap, and although it lacks the RS-BIOS (might be possible to put one in the IDE's FlashROM btw) it's got a really good UART (a 16550, the same most PC’s have), with large FIFO buffers and hardware flow control.

Some devices


A philips NMS 1150/00 touchpad. Two buttons, one on the pad and one on the pen (both 1st firebutton). Can be used with for example Philips Designer Plus and from Basic using the PAD function.


This is a Philips NMS 1170/20 barcode reader. Move the pen over a barcode and the number is returned. The dedicated software doesn't recognize a lot of barcode-types, but there is some third-party software which recognizes more. I assume it sends back a simple binary signal that you have to do some timing magic with. With the software you can also print barcodes and use it for your own administration. That’s the most ‘practical’ use of this thing.

Software cartridges

These cartridges are, from top-left to bottom-right:

  1. The Treasure of Usas, by Konami.
  2. Contra, by Konami. Now actually containing Penguin Adventure, the original Contra broke in a ‘freak accident’, and I still had a loose PA print without box laying around… :)
  3. Metal Gear, by Konami. The original game that started the entire series.
  4. Metal Gear, by Konami (again).
  5. Mirai, by Xain. Everything in the game is English, exept the title… :) It's got some quite cool PSG-music.
  6. Fantasm Soldier, Telenet. Really a great game.
  7. Yaksa, Wolf Team.
  8. Fire Ball, a pinball game by Hudson Soft
  9. Darwin 4078, a shmup by Hudson Soft. It didn’t get good reviews but I kind of liked it. Then again, in those days I had never played Aleste yet… :)
  10. Arkanoid 2, revenge of Doh (TAITO)… Do I have to say more? Everybody knows Arkanoid.
  11. Traffic, a simple 16k game of Sony. Still it's a fun game…
  12. Eddy II, a drawing-program by HAL for the MSX1. I’m an MSX2 guy, so never used it.
  13. Ah… LOGO… This language was really popular for some time. Tried it out a few times, but I already learned Basic and LOGO was a little too limited to keep me interested, and it was MSX1-only too… A friend of mine can program in SuperLOGO on the PC though ;).

Disks

Games

From top-left to bottom-right:

  1. Sa-zi-ri, Telenet
  2. Teachers Terror, Hegega
  3. Psycho World
  4. Eggbert, Fony
  5. Akin, Parallax
  6. Magnar, Parallax
  7. Pentaro Odyssey, cabinet
  8. Pumpkin Adventure II, Umax
  9. Pumpkin Adventure III, Umax
  10. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake English, by Konami, translation by Maarten ter Huurne & Takamichi Suzukawa
  11. Sonyc
  12. The Lost World, Umax

Disk magazines

Defender and FutureDisk:

Datax products (my old group)

Track was a disk magazine and Overload a music disk. Also a disk with the Strategic Army editor on it, a game that I had in development, it was never finished though.

Hardware

Some joysticks and mice:

A Sony HitBit 75P MSX1 computer. I can’t for the life of me remember where this ended up, I don’t think I still have it.

The TI-83 graphical calculator I used in high school, it also has Zilog®Z80 inside! ;)

Books

Still vital for my MSX programming activities. I also have a printed copy of Stefan Boer’s VDP programming course from the Sunrise diskmagazines.