MSX demo : ZZ-TOP demo of Ax-Alex

When I made the post about "Gimme" from ZZ Top, I started to remember this...

I bought my first  MSX-2 computer and started looking for more people with an MSX computer, so via a friend in a village Arkel, just next to the city Gorinchem where I lived , 

I got some MSX programs from a guy who called himself Brainsoft  (I guess at that moment  I got the idea to name myself CopySoft) specially some Picture demos he made by digitizing images with a NMS8280, which he worked with at the Local TV satoon of Gorinchem.

He digitized me once too, but right now I wont post it. 

There were always be pictures you're not proud of...

But the guy of Brainsoft (Part of the  MGGA) gave me some German MSX-2 programs 

like Philips Drum System and some demo's of a German guy named Ax-Alex. 

I dont know much German MSX software, cause most German computernerds preferred Commodore Amiga 500 more than any MSX computer.

Ax-Alex made for example an Anti Amiga demo, which only proofed that MSX-2 was no match for Amiga 500. 

He made also an ZZ-TOP demo, the reason for this post.

It contained some partly digitized partly badly drawn screen 8 pictures and a PSG sample of ZZ-TOP song "Sharp dressed  man". 

The sound was not bad for A PSG sample and if you knew the size of your memorymapper, you could listen longer.

I called this demo Metal Demo 1, cause no demo before that used (hard)rock in any 

MSX demo. 

So when I was busy creating hardrock/heavy metal samples with FM-FAC Soundsampler 

I named my demo Metal Demo 2, but that will be in another post.

If you follow the link, you can download it from passionmsx.org, still a great website for any 

MSX software...

PS: I included the cover of the album "Afterburner" of ZZ Top  in the post, cause it had some simularities with the pictures in the ZZ Top demo.

My Music Memories : Gimme all your lovin of ZZ Top

This song "Gimme All Your Lovin" is very good example of  commercial sing-a-long rock. Great song of ZZ Top for every karaoke party, everybody will shout the refrein with you... 
 

I really liked songs like "Gimme all your lovin", "Sharp dressed man", "Legs" and "Viva Las Vegas", so I was once in a big record store in Amsterdam, and searched for a sort of best of. 

But it was very expensive if you know just 4 songs of the maybe 20...So I bought the low prized Eliminator with the first 3 ZZ-TOP hits and on the cover that famous red hotrod. 

Well there rest of the songs was not much to talk about. Millions of bands could play those songs. 

It seams these were only made to fill up the CD. 

"Gimme", "Sharp" and "Legs" were good examples how rock can sound better with some help of synthesizers. 

The other songs hadnt. 

After that I never bought the Best of ZZ TOP ever , cause if you have already 3 out of 4 favs, why buy the 4th fav for a full prized CD ?

I will end this post with a 12" of "Gimme" ZZ Top never made (but should have...)

and after listening to at leaast 6 bad remixers, If found this, not perfecty but this is how "Gimme" should sound like in the house 90s...

My Music Memories : I Don't Mind At All of Bourgeois Tagg

I was searching on YouTube for mr. Geldofs hit "I Don't Mind At All", but the song was called "Song of Indifference".
So the first result YouTube offered was this long forgotten song  "I Dont Mind At All" of a long forgotten group Bourgeois Tagg from a LP "YoYo" I once bought in a period I read reviews of band with a (let's say) possitive attitude.

YouTube offered me almost the whole LP YoYo, but now I only liked this sad ballad 
"I Don't Mind At All" and "Coma" a really hauted ballad, the rest of the LP was a kind of 80's rockfunk I seems to forgot to like it forever. 



The  song "I Dont Mind At All" has simple lyrics, but you get the message easily and if you had a bad Valentine's Day, 
this is a song for you.

I album YOYO was produced by Todd Rundgren, who also made a interactive album for Mac, Windows and CD-I called "No World Order". I have a Windows original, maybe I can let it run on Win7 and create a post about it... 
 

MSX demo : The Warp Demo of PTC

I mentioned the demo earlier on my post about Blue Monday of New Order, so here it is...
The Warp demo is nothing more than a 2 disk demo made in MSX-Basic with Philips Music Module samples.
It was made by First Class Software, PTC Rotterdam, The Poltergeist, White Shadow but in fact it was mostly done by John van Poelgeest.

The samples were recorded and looped by the FM-FAC Soundsampler (which was made, by the way, by FAC)
- There was also a FAF -


Pretty much every sample demo I made, was made with FM-FAC Soundsampler, cause they released a freeware Basic replayer to use samples in your own MSX Basic programs.

The samples used in the Warp demo came from (of course) Blue Monday of New Order and other synthesizer orientated music like Jean Michel Jarre.
When I saw the demo I was impressed about how it uses the MSX mouse to let the user interact with the demo
(mostly scrollers).
Some pictures (maybe all) were stolen from MSX games, very common at that moment in the MSX demoscene...
This Warp demo was made before John start making music with FACs Soundtracker, showing he was more than just
1 of the music composers within the FAC ...

John made at the same time also an impossible fast breakout MSX-2 game with Music Module samples, called Quattro.
I bought it together with The Warp Demo for maybe 15 Dutch guilders at the first
and last visit to a PTC (Philips Thuiscomputer Club) meeting in Rotterdam.

Yes, the PTC was a club for all users with any Philips computer. I remember that visit
very well, cause John himself demonstrated the first version of Soundtracker, which had
a nice GFX intro that was lost in the Soundtracker 1.0 when I bought later.

Wanna run the Warp demo (with a MSX mouse) ?
Mediafire: Disk 1 Disk 2
Gavitex  : Disk 1 Disk 2

My Music Memories : Rat Trap of the Boomtown Rats

It was Monday again and I was a bit down, so I though by myself I Dont Like Mondays. 

Of course that was a huge hit for the Boomtown Rats, but I liked that other song much much more.

Rat Trap was a big hit in England, not in the Netherlands, it never hit any charts. So I listen for hours to the BBC radio waiting for the song to play. 

Finally it was there ,I missed the first seconds of Rat Trap cause I had to press Play and Record together on my cassetterecorder. 

I was so exited I could record the song, it was hard not to sing along,  that would be a real problem, my trusty cassetterecorder had only a build in microphone...

I liked Rap Trap cause had a great saxofoon loop and it's still sounded fresh. I heard some bad covers on YouTube I would like to be removed by YouTube itself, cause they are incabable to play Rat Trap.

After I Dont Like Mondays I never heard again from the Boomtown Rats, altough the singer Bob Geldof had a sort of hitsong with I Dont Mind At All (I mean: The Great Song of Indifference - whatta shitty title) and ofcourse organising the Live Aid concerts...

My Music Memories : Blue Monday of New Order

When I though about I Dont Like Mondays of the Boomtown Rats,  another song about Mondays popped up. 

Yes, everybody likes a version of
Blue Monday, I like the original too. 

It got me interested in dance music for
the first time.

The synthesizer bass with computer drums, some real instruments and semi monotone singing...

I realise now it sounded like early Underground techno. 

Back then it was a song like nothing else it wasn't even a real single, it was only available as 12" ! 

So instead of let's say 4 minutes, New Order took almost double time to finish and I liked every minute of it. 

I found a documentaire about Blue Monday with short interviews with old members of
New Order, the story about the too expensive cover, how 4 different songs were used to create it, the (mis)programming of the song, the Top of the Pops failure and much more...

The song was remixed by dozen of so called DJs and also very populair in the computer scene and yes, I found a sample of Bue Monday in the MSX-2 Warp demo made by John vd Poelgeest.
But I will tell more about it in another post.

So I will leave you with 2 well known coverversions of Blue Monday in very different styles.
Flunk and Orgy and the rest doesnt matter, trust me...

MSX Google: week 5, 2016

Well, I was only browsing with Google for images of MSX Basic and I found some MSX websites I wanna share with you:

First of all: http://www.silueth.com/msx/?

This site has a very Spanish collection of all kind of MSX programs, mostly GFX related. If you wanna discover MSX programs you never heard of and you are not allergic for some Spanish words, go for it !

Second: http://msxdev.msxblue.com/

This site has some nice games to download, not all of them are freeware, but it's worth browsing if you still like MSX gaming.

Third: http://www.lavandeira.net/relearning-msx/

This site offers some kind of MSX cursus, but not just MSX Basic, but also MSX-C and MSX-DOS. It's not completed yet, but there is a lot of interesting stuff here.




The 4th https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC3R3X6_msx-games?guid=7b69b10f-6a4a-4361-9d0d-d3914c1f78ca

This site is the strangest site about MSX I ever found.

It seems you have to find 3 caches hidden somewhere in the Netherlands, by using some kind of tracking device ? I dont know how that works, but I could not resist it so maybe somebody can explain it to me...

Ho Ho Ho this MSX Xmas demo you dont want to miss !

 Yeah I'm too late for the holiday's, but Alberto Sgaggero did such a new job with programming this MSX BXmas demo in Basic, I could not let this wait until Xmas 2016.

Wait, Wonder And Enjoy the graphics and music of MSX Merry Christmas 2015 - (BASIC) 

It really shows the hidden powers of MSX-1 Basic....

112 MSX Basic games presents: 112-MENU.BAS (games 112 - 100)

Well I promised to release a disk with a working 112-MENU.BAS and the first 10 MSX Basic games, so here it is. I changed very little, so I wont mention those.

Here is a list of the contents of the disk with the MSX Basic games 112 til 100:

112) CARDS.GAM (HI-LOW)
111) CARDS.GAM (CONCENTRATION)
110) STARTREK.GAM
109) PARROT.GAM
108) ADVENTUR.GAM
107) GRANNY.GAM
106) JOHNNY.GAM
105) BLITZ.GAM
104) DETECTIVE.GAM
103) PLAYMAZE.GAM
102) BEACHBAL.GAM
101) DUTCH-J2.GAM
100) KITCHEN.GAM

When I look at the list I am happy I didnt pick only the non-action MSX Basic games,
cause it's much easier to program a game like HI-LOW.GAM then a JOHNNY.GAM

From my view a good MSX Basic game should have at least the following:

1) an intro displaying the title of the game
2) short introduction about the story in the game
3) short howto how and which controls will work
4) saving a highscore during playing the game
5) games should stop nicely after CTRL-STOP or other mentioned key.
6) the difficulty should be increased during playing

I have to say, some games are so simple, you dont have to know what you should do,
for example BEACHBAL.GAM
But in STARTREK.GAM I'm happy I made some kind of instruction page for all keys used
in the game.

I may said it before, I will say it again, translating games is not so easy as it looks, sometimes you have to change parts of the gameplay to get it right.
In DUTCH-J2.GAM I had to make a new highscore table, otherwise the values didnt fit.

And sometimes the games were too easy or too hard, so I added some kind of difficulties
in some games, like DETECTIV.GAM

Enough talking, download the disk at MediaFire or Gavitex as long as they are there...