MSX Google: week 34, 1996

I'm not very good at counting or remember dates. So here is week 34 after releasing week 35.

This time I was looking for a comfortable way to play MSX-games on a big Smart TV and my Philips NMS8280 computer.
As you may know the joystick connectors and the keyboard connector are on the backside of this computer, which is not very handy if the computer is stored in a tv furniture next to an old X-Box.

So I needed extension cables for both the joysticks and keyboard.
Well, the joystick connectors on MSX are, lucky for us, very common used in all sorts of micro-computers. If you look for Sega extension cables and you have a MSX joystick at hand, it should be easy to find those.  But until now I could not find any keyboard extension cable or the right components to make it yourself.

This is a blind spot on the MSX-market, those MSX companies who sell games should sell also extension cables for any MSX.

Well, I ordered my joystick extension cables (here) and search for some MSX-games cheats.

I found a new fresh website called cheatmsx.com, with a forum, great search options and more. Check it out.

Then I search for some kind of MSX gameloader that works with joystick so you dont need the keyboard to start a game.  And here I found 2 versions, both only for MSX-DOS 2 (which I sold many years ago, without a harddisk I didnt see any improvements with MSX-DOS 1). But there is also an improved MIF-package V2.2 !!!

 I bought on a MSX-fair a MIF v1.0 package, cause I was amazed how nice the (converted) pictures looked on SCREEN 7 or SCREEN 8 when converted with MIF.

MIF decompressing is a bit slow on a standard MSX-2 and the v1.0 PC conversion tool was not very userfrendly, it could only convert pictures in the same resolution as the MSX-2 (with some interlacing).
I havent tried the new MIF package, the screenshots looked very promising.