Some MSX-links: RuMSX emulator of Lex Lechz

I mentioned the RuMSX emulator of Lex Lechz. It's very outdated and it works as an emulator, still, lots of features are still missing and there are no signs it will be updated ever.
Why bother then?

RuMSX has just one feature that all other MSX emulators are missing, a complete interactive reference of all MSX Basic commands with examples and lots of information for experienced MSX-ers, like VDP registers etc.

When you click on Help and MSX help you see the page above with almost everything
you want to know about MSX (if you interested in programming of course)
Many times its information got me on the right track to solve my MSX-Basic problems.

Get it if you want to start programming in MSX-Basic, now !!!
 

Google week 40, 2017

I haven't googled MSX things lately, but since I got some ideas about my "Mega Wordstore+ Demo" (about using the MIF package to create new looking converted pictures for my Wordstore+ demo's), I googled again.

Well, there was an interesting topic about the updated MIF package on msx.org. More than that, there was a whole forum about MSX software on msx.org with more interesting stuff.
And that is what this post is all about, just forum posts about MSX software from msx.org.

* To take off, of course, the topic about the updated MIF package, currently v2.3 but not for use in MSX-Basic anymore
* Then a new feature of Google, you can search for similar pictures, mentioned in the topic about finding the name of some MSX games
 and so I found this website full of MSX cassette images of a lot of commercial games and magazines  this is a real treasure chest, maybe some are good enough to be translated for my 112 games list
* A free new MSX game (2 games into 1), this is really good platform game(s)
* Next, a Dutch MSX magazine which was also famous, the MSX-gids, it has not an online archive (sadly), but in the topic, you find some links for some issues
* A list of the weirdest MSX games can be very amusing, so here is the topic, you will find also videos and download links
 * An MSX-1 demo made by an Amstrad CPC coder. Well, it's a little better than a Commodore 64 coder, but he really shows what MSX-1 can do, where are the MSX coders now?
* I also found a topic about every pinball game ever released on MSX. Most of them are MSX-1 and look a bit crappy. I still love Rollerball of HAL, not Fireball and sometimes Pinball Blaster. Some of the pinball games you can play at www.file-hunter.com
* A topic about free race games got me download 2 free games, Car II and Lotus F3
* Last of all I found out the MSX-2 point-and-click adventure ZOO of Radarsoft was translated in English and French, I still have the original Dutch version somewhere.

Some (MSX?) links: ASCII Art generators

On MSX I haven't seen much ASCII Art,  some MSX BBS'es had some nice ANSI pictures.
I was busy preparing some (more) Wordstore MSX-1 demo's and I had the idea to convert some pictures into ASCII Art for use on MSX-1 SCREEN 2.

Mainly because SCREEN 2 is at his best with only 2 colors.
If you use more (15 at the most of course) you have a challenge to fix the bluring...

So I search for some website for ASCII Art and found these 2:

 ASCII Art Word Generator

ASCII Art Picture Generator




I like them both, maybe I will use it on my next MSX menu-screens, but I noticed for a good picture you need to have more than 80 characters on 1 line...
And MSX-2 can...oke I will tell you... 80.
So the next picture cannot be played on a MSX screen, it's to big (>200).

But it's fun to convert texts and pictures into ASCII Art, you should try it too...

Some MSX-links: DiskManager of Lex Lechz

The DiskManager and the BlueMSX emulator made me turn back to my old MSX-disks and start playing, creating, watching, reading MSX-stuff after I think 10 years.

With this program you can convert your MSX-disks to files (with extension .dsk) and these files can be easy used on almost every MSX-emulator.
But there is more, you can also add/delete/rename/extract files on these .dsk files, so if you have some MSX-files download from somewhere, you can create a new .dsk file and add these files to use it in a MSX-emulator, or extract some files to copy them to another .dsk file
without starting up MSX-Basic  or MSX-DOS.

I had most of my double-sided (720 Kb) disks converted to .dsk files and stored on my harddisk, but most of my single-sided (360 Kb) could not be read by my floppydrive
on my PC.
But these disks were pretty old, more than 20 years at least...

Without this program, there was no Mixmeister TnC, no blog and I should be playing only Facebook games instead ;-)

So here is the link for this musthave.

There are also a couple negative things about it:
- you cannot search for files
- no sort of files and saving them
- not much support on single-sided disks


Lex Lechz has made also an very interesting MSX emulator called: RuMSX.
But that's another story...

Some MSX links: MSX Screen conversor

I know, I know, links are not forever. But this one should be mentioned again and again.

With this webtool you can convert almost every picture into a MSX format.
It supports all screens of a MSX-2 (SCREEN 5,6,7,8), but also SCREEN 12 (MSX-2+/Turbo-R) and SCREEN 2 (MSX-1).
I found the last one very special, the color-errors in SCREEN 2 made it almost impossible
to create colorfull demo's and games on a MSX-1, but this converter give great results.

That's not all, you can set some options, get a preview of how the conversion looks like, download the preview together with the converted MSX screen and grab the listing for how to display it on a MSX-computer.

If you don't believe me, here it is in BlueMSX SCREEN 2.
Wow, great job !
But jannone has more great MSX stuff, so check out http://msx.jannone.org/