Failures of MSX: poke -1,170

I think this failure has something to do with "the English disease failure".

When I started with my MSX-2 computer I bought also an MSX data-recorder,
cause at that time all MSX-games were on cartridge or tape.
At school I met a guy, who gave me some games to start with.
To my horror non of these games seemed to work on my MSX-2 computer.
Whattahell was going on, MSX-1 software should run on any MSX-2 computer !

As usual I was wrong.
There were MSX-1 software that only run on 32K RAM or 64K RAM computers

or just not on Philips MSX-2 computers or Sony MSX-2 computers etc etc.

But as always there was a solution for running most MSX-1 software on MSX-2 computers, the magic poke -1,170.
I think it was for Sony MSX-2 computer different.

Still some original MSX-1 games were so poorly programmed that only cracked versions worked on MSX-2 computers.

So sometimes I bought the original game and tried to download an cracked version
that worked on my MSX-2.
Yeah yeah, MSX world standard did exist (but only in the minds of ASCII and Microsoft).

Failures of MSX: the English ziekte

You should check my  earlier post about color spill on SCREEN 2 for more reference...

 You did read it ? Ok, let's continue then...

A lot of games are made for MSX-1, but in the last years of the Dutch MSX magazines, 

most MSX-1 games suffered what was called in Holland as "the English desease". 

 

Why ? Because most MSX-1 games came from England (or Spain). So the main screenplay was often in 2 colors, a black background and another colour for the player and scenery. 

Maybe cause these games were conversions of Zx Spectrum games. 

Any way these games look horrible . 

Some tried to use more colours for player and scenery, but because of the color spill on SCREEN 2, it looked also very poor. 

In the end everybody did not want to buy these games that looked so bad and the companies stopped making those MSX-1 games... Is it wrong to say I am happy they stopped ?

Failures of MSX: Color spill on screen 2

On wiki I found an very interesting article about the color spill on ZX Spectrum and MSX-1.
It even explained why we had so much MSX games with the English desease.

Anyway I hate the color spill on MSX-1, I was glad I bought an MSX-2, so I didnt have to
deal with it. But when I tried to write MSX-1 programs with SCREEN 2, it made me crazy to
get the text in the right color and the graphics not edged instead of blurred (see picture 1).

 Oke, the picture on the left seems to have its charms but if you want to draw circle with color A and it is partial color B, or worse square instead of round, I prefer picture 2 on the right much more.
There are ways to avoid the color spill, but mainly the solution is: less colors and less gfx. Well...

Why MSX-1 had 15 colors, if you cant use them the way you want it ?
Maybe the same question: why ASCII added SCREEN 3 to the MSX-1 ?
I guess I never know.

MSX Google: week 22, 2015

I was thinking about playing some of my favorite MSX games and blog about it.
So I was wandering if there were any MSX walkthroughs left on the net.

So I Googled on "MSX walkthrough" and found a few sites worth mentioning.
And now I know Metal Gear is maybe the most famous MSX game, cause Google found
a lot of walkthroughs only for this game.

I must say there are sites only dedicated to one game or others faked their info about
any (MSX) game.

Here is a small list of MSX walkthroughs, I dont know if these sites will stay online...

* First a very nice tribute to Xak and other RPG game-series:
http://www.retro-type.com/xyz/

* Second a site with lots of maps of MSX games: http://msxsolutions.msxblue.com/index-2.html

 

* Third a very big website with lots of walkthroughs and some for MSX system:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/msx/list-264
NB: if the first 3 columns are empty, then there is nothing to see...

* 4th just a couple walkthroughs with lots of screenshots: http://neonnights.msxblue.com/walk.html

* 5th same as the 4th, just some story-like walkthroughs: http://msxwalk.msxblue.com/index.html

Conclusion: Maybe it's time that some big MSX site opens a wiki for all MSX games
                  cheats/pokes/walkthroughs etc. so everybody can upload their info.

-= Still searching for a complete walkthrough of L'Affaire =-

Fan van The Beatles

Actually I am not really a Beatle-fan any more, 

but The Beatles were the first musicgroup of music artist 

I became fan of. 

My older sister bought for me Abbey Road for 5 guilders, and The Beatles 62-66 (The Red Album) for 10. 

Then I started bying LPs and MCs of The Beatles until there was none left, well....I didnt bought Hey Jude, cause I had most songs already, ditto for The Magical Mystery tour 

(borrowed it) and Revolver, cause a friend of mine had the complete album on a stereo bandrecorder. 

So I recorded it on my own cassette tape (although the heads of the bandrecorder were no good,  I had to change manual the recordinglevels DURING the recording itself).

It gave me headaches and very strange stereo-effects...

I have some great memories about collecting every Beatles Rarities album I could find, or buy the St. Pepper album with the paper moustache (picture)
, the funny cartoonmovie Yellow Submarine, and recording the complete Let It Be movie on tape by putting the mono buildin mic of my cassetterecorder as close as possible to the speaker of our television. 

My friend at that time liked The Beatles almost, but he prefered more the early years (62-66). I liked the period (67-70) more. 

Funny enough he had The Blue Album 67-70 and I had
The Red Album, but we never switched or traded...

There are so many Beatles songs I liked, so I will mention only the ones from Abby Road, cause I still think it is the best album they ever made. 

First, Come Together altough it took many years to understand what the song was about, You Never Give Me Your Money, cause of the genius changes from ballad to boogie-woogie to rock and back. Finally The End, because it has a lot of great guitar-solos in it.

When I was searching on YouTube for some special versions of Beatle-songs it was clear I shouldnt search for any cover versions, cause every artist who want to be (or stay) in the spotlights has recorded one of more songs of The Beatles. Instead I search for mixes, remixes or megamixes...

After I heard 9 false attempts (cut n paste vs. fade-in/fade-out) I stopped looking and search for the first commercial Beatles mix ever...the Stars on 45 project.
Well, the Star on 45 concept had many more episodes (less succesfull), so here is the long version of The Beatles Medley

My Music Memories : How can we hang on to a Dream - Tim Hardin

This sad song will always remind me of the end of the Dutch movie "Searching for Eileen"

It's about a young man who lost his girlfriend and sees a girl just like her.

He tries to find her...Eileen. The last scene is at a empty trainstation and...well...

see for yourself.

It's a movie from the book "Zoeken naar Eileen" by Leon de Winter, but I remember only the last scene of the movie with the Tim Hardin song.

Sadly I did not much about Tim Hardin, so I was glad to read song comments with more 

info about the artist and wiki helped a lot. Seems his life was like this song "How can we hang on to a Dream".

As always I searching on YouTube for other versions of the song, but most are worse 

than the original.

I tought that more female singers would have covered the song, but no.

Any way...this version by Marianne Faithfull is almost as good as the original.

And this strange version of RSN is somehow a remix of the original, it left me breathless...

Highlights of MSX: listings

Because the MSX-Basic was capable of many things without or with a little help of machine-code, lots of listingbooks were available for MSX-1.

And every MSX magazine had some listings in it, cause they were very populair and the magazine could make some extra money by selling cassettes and disks with the programs of the listings on it.

The listings were getting longer so some magazines make controlprograms to check if the typer had not made mistakes.

I had a lot of fun typing in games, utilities and music.
And I learned a lot about how to use MSX-Basic commands, cause most of the time
I had to check and fix the errors in the listings.
It was also a cheap way to get new MSX software, without paying high prices for cassettes or disks.

The pics show some of the books with listings I had typed over.
Frequently I was suprised by the quality of these listings and still play or use these listings
during my MSX sessions...

Failures of the MSX: slow ramdisk

When you have only 1 diskdrive in your MSX -2 computer and you are busy creating something, you want to store your temporary files not on disk ( cause disks are slow and not reliable ) but on a ramdisk so you can save and load easily and fast.

Lucky for you the developers of MSX-2 made a build-in ramdisk that can be used with the CALL MEMINI command. 

Sadly it is so slow saving and loading, you don't wanna use it.

The problem is that the MEM: disk saves everything in ASCII instead of binairy, like normal ramdisks do.
I used the MEM: drive only for creating textfiles or textfiles with MSX Basic commands.
And only for small files, otherwise it takes forever to save and load.

CALL MEMINI was just a good idea with bad development and a waste of RAM space.

No plus for the MSX-2 standard.

Another Wordstore demo and more: The Blackhouse Samples

This is a post I was afraid to write it.
Can I explain after all these years why a Beatles fan bought 2 LPs of Blackhouse a Christian Industrial band ?
I dont think I can at this moment, maybe later.

What I do remember that, when I was very depressed I put on a record of Blackhouse
and after playing 1 side, I wasnt anymore.
I had bought "Holy War" and "We Will Fight Back" (with the crucified rabbit, Blackhouse wasnt happy with it), after that none/
My taste of music changed I guess...

Blackhouse made songs full of hard rhythmic noises or should I say, it's like standing in a great factoryhall where all machines start making noises during a couple of minutes and sometimes you hear somebody shouting to you, but you hardly understand any word.

Why this MSX post ?
I was browsing and playing my collection of MSX games,  when I found some lost Wordstore musicfiles on a disk. I started my Wordstore+ and found "Rhythmus III"
of Blackhouse from the album "We Will Fight Back"
And I liked it and I remembered I sampled once another song of Blackhouse called "Whispers Of Love"
from the album "Holy War". 
Not with Wordstore+ but with a simple program that created 1 binaire file with both player and sample in it.

Sadly I forgot the name of that program, but unlike Wordstore+, the sample could not being edit in any way.

So the idea was born to make a disk called
"The Blackhouse Samples" and created 2 little demo's around these 2 samples.
And these samples sounded even harder than the
originals on vinyl. 

Converting the pictures to MSX readable format was
the hardest part, cause my favorite online MSX conversor(link) didnt works any more.

I converted the pics to gif and showem.com
(a MCCM GIF Viewer) converted in MSX readable format, but it did some nasty tricks, like saving the picture twice as an copy-file and creating pics with strange dimensions.

Finally I managed, so here it is: "The Blackhouse Samples"

Mediafire
Gavitex

Check out more songs of Blackhouse if you dare ...

TnC house classics presents: Injected With The Poison (Free Your Body)

Praga Kahn has made more famous house tunes,
but this one is very special
for me.

It has everything an house classics should have, simpel housebeat, orchestral hits, piano pingels, heavy distored bass, some shouts and short melodic vocal singa-a-long part.

And the song Injected With The Poison always reminds me of the film "The Running Man" with Arnold Schwarzenegger,
a actionmovie with a message ( if you search for it,
just like the actionmovie
"Total Recall" ). 

I found the song on a CD with the title "Kaos Theory 2", sadly it was best track.

Here is the videoclip of the song I like (except for the cut-off intro).
Here is the original videoclip (before it was remixed
or so..).

And here are some covers...

Failures of MSX: HD diskettes

I started my MSX life with a Philips VG8235 with the single sided floppy-drive.
And I really liked it, cause it was so much easier and faster to save and load files
then with data-cassettes.
The limitation of 112 files was no problem, cause 360 Kb is not that much space.

On my NMS8245 with double-sided floppy-drive I got sometimes 112 files on a 720 Kb disk and 360 Kb free space I could not use.
That was really a waist of space, cause 720 Kb disks were not so cheap on that moment.

When everybody was exited by the new MSX-DOS 2 with the use of subsirectories and harddisk IDE-interfaces, I had my broken double-sided floppydrive replaced with a HD PC floppydrive.
I had no money for an harddisk IDE-inferface or any PC harddisk and making subdirectories on a 720 Kb floppy was not so usefully, most of the time 720 Kb was not enough space.


Then came the moment that the 720 Kb disks were hard to get.
However nobody came with the idea to make MSX ready for ready HD disks with a piece
of hardware so we could storage more on a MSX-disk.
No instead, we had to cover the extra hole with a sticker and format all the 1,2Mb disks
to 720Kb, almost half the storage.

What a joke !

Highlights of MSX: FM-Pac

I had to say it, most of the music in MSX games made by PSG, could not compete with the ones in Commodore 64 and its SID musicfiles.

Even worse, some of the greatest PSG music in MSX games were conversions of the Commodore 64 originals !
Yes, I mean those Benn conversions of Gremlin Graphics...

In MSX-Basic it was possible to create music with 2 different methodes, it was still not easy to create drumsounds or different instruments.

Then the Panasonic FM-Pac came on the Dutch market.

I bought it from Time-Soft, a computerstore in Amsterdam (who sold also lots
of imported MSX-stuff from Japan, but not cheap).

The package included the FM-Pac of course, an A4 printed (on red paper) list of
commands and some marketing "blabla", a MSX-disk full of music (and demo's )
of winners of a Time-Soft Fm-Pac contest, and a MSX-disk with the first Dutch FM-Pac demo,
with stolen music and pictures of other Japanese stuff.

After I listened to the disks I started an Japenese game I got from my MSX partner
in EMP-Soft and I was speechless by the sounds of the intro-demo.
I think it was the game Aleste I  from Compile.

I made asap an appointment with him and that afternoon we tried to find all games
that had MSX-Music (as it was called).

I think that FM-Pac finally made it possible to make and listen to great music on every
MSX computer and not only those MSX-2+ with the strange signs on the keys.
And maybe it kept the MSX scene alive for 3 or 4 years longer.

Later I sold my FM-Pac to my EMP-Soft partner and bought me a cheaper Zemina FM-Ship,
cause I didn't use the Pac part (for save games), like he did.

FM-Pac (or must I say MSX-Music) was a MSX feature, nobody wanted to miss.