TnC Collected Works: The Turbo Basic Demo Disk side A and B

On a big computer fair in the Netherlands I bought from Sparrowsoft a disk with 2 A4 manual. It was called KUN compiler that could speed up MSX Basic programs a lot.
Of course it was not true, it could only speed up some Basic commands and only on a MSX-2 or higher.
Well, that was not true, but the KUN compiler worked on MSX-2 screens a lot faster.

When I started to use it I had to rewrite the programs to get no errors and collected my findings in 1 textdocument while creating Turbo Basic versions of all kinds of small graphical Basic demo's.
 
As you know an 720 Kb disk can only held 112 files,
so soon I had more and the disk was still not full.
I decided to use FLIP.COM a nice program which allows you to use both FAT tables, to store almost 224 filed. Looking at all demo's I had to admit there are some different versions
of the same demo.

I am still proud of the tricks and tips I collect during my own adventures with Turbo Basic.

Yes it is confusing story, I bought the KUN compiler on disk, but later I found out it was original sold on cartridge, so maybe I bought legally an illegale copy from Sparrowsoft.

And all programs made for the KUN compiler (like the examples I got on my KUN disk) had the extension .TRB, which was short for Turbo Basic a more common name for the KUN compiler.
Even more confusing some MSX-ers called Turbo Basic compiler XBASIC.


I am not sure how many products in the Dutch MSX scene were made with a little help of Turbo Basic, cause programming in assembler was much cooler than (Turbo) Basic so less MSX-ers mentioned they used it.

Have fun with the simple GFX demo's. Why this post in MSX Failures and MSX Highlights ?

It's a kind of failure cause there are so many commands
it cannot speed up, it's a kind of highlight, cause when it can speed up you get amazing results and is MSX-2 Basic not so slow anymore.


Side A (with English menu and English Tips): Gavitex  / Mediafire
Side B (with Dutch menu and Dutch Tricks): Gavitex / Mediafire

NB 1: Please note: both side A and B have totally different
         programs !!!
NB 2: Cause Side A had 112 files there was no room to
         auto-start it, you have to run MENU-A.BAS in MSX-DOS
        (see screenshot).
NB 3: Of course I didnt create all these demo's in the menu's
         and listings I tried to preserve the original creator
         or publisher.

 

Failures of MSX: slow cassettes

In the begin years of MSX  most programs were on cartridge or cassettes/tapes.
Cartridges were expensive, cassettes were (normally) cheaper.

And of course most of the time you did not have any choice, so you had to buy it on tape.
So when I bought my VG8235 MSX-2 computer with diskdrive, I had to buy a datarecorder if I wanted to buy some MSX software.
That should not be a problem, but the loading and saving speed of MSX datarecorder were
1200 or 2400 baud, still very slow.
It costs me almost 15 minutes to start up "Oh Shit" from a tape, while my nephews with a Commodore 64 had turbo loaders and play one game after another...

So sometimes I bought a original MSX game on tape and search on MSX BBSes with my MSX modem for a cracked version, so I could play it on disk.

Later on I got so sick of the loading times, I never bought any MSX game on tape and used my datarecorder only for recording Wordstrore+ samples...

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.

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.

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 !

Introducing: Failures of an MSX

Everybody who have seen this blog, knows I still like the MSX-system more than any other computersystem.

But there are some things about MSX that made me real dissappointed in the system itself.
So here I will make some noise about these.
I promise I will make also some posts, why I like the MSX-system anyway.

While checking for some anti MSX picture, I stumbled on a anti MSX group (ofcourse with members of the CBM /Commodore/ clan)...
But do you MSX/ers know where the FAC stands for ?