Highlights of MSX: easy way to add more hardware

On almost every MSX-computer there were 2 cartridges slots.

These could be used for almost everything, interfaces for harddisks, diskdrives, slotexpanders, modems, rom-games, music-cartridges and more and more.

It is impossible to name every kind of hardware that could be inserted into 1 of the cartridge slots.
They were easy to use and you could choose from more than 1 company, if you wanted additional hardware for your MSX.

Even in these non-MSX times are still companies that sell their MSX games on cartridge.
Check out: http://www.msxcartridgeshop.com/

My Music memories : Different Corner by George Michael

It's not always uptempo songs that stays in my memories. 

Some ballads seems to be forgotten by me and then a memory pops up
and the song is back.

I heard "Different Corner" of George Michael when I was a trainee at a iron work industry (see "Sledgehammer") and I though why he left Wham and the happy uptempo songs and start his solo career with a such a sad song.

I wasnt happy as a trainee, cause it was dirty and sometimes heavy work and I had hard times to keep up with the other co-workers. 

But the radio was always on, so I heard all the latest hits, like this one.

And I felt less unhappy after hearing this song...

I found a video if George Michael performing "Different Corner" with a huge orchestra
in Paris, but it seems the whole orchestra was playbacking, cause it sounded just like somebody put the CD-player on.
Exactly the same sound, sad choice. So I chose the original video-clip.
I search on YouTube for a male or female singer who covers the song like never before,
but everybody sing (or tries to sing) it like G.M.

And remixes were hard to find, until I came across this Chill-Out version, with a beautiful video full of moving images.

George Michael released in the same periode "Careless Whisper" another sad ballad song,
this one stayed longer in my music memories.

My Music Memories: Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel

I heard this song (short version) for the first time, while I was working as a trainee in a iron work industry. It was always warm and dirty, the work too, but the radio played at high volume and when the brasses started I loved it instantly. And when I saw the video, it was the craziest video I ever saw until then (some parts were made by the people of Walles and Grummet)

When the song is so strange but yet so catchy, it's hard to create a version of the same song that's not a big fiasco.
But the Coloureds remix does a good make-over of the original "Sledgehammer".
And miss Morgan James covered the song like it was a gospel.

Fan of Yello

It all began with a commercial on MTV for the Video and CD Essential Yello (the best of).
I heard some songs I liked a lot and then I knew, it was all YELLO !!!

So I bought the CD an Video (with a different version of Jungle Bill and Who's Gone video).
I liked most of the songs even those I never had heard before...
After that I start search for more Yello music and bought New Mix 82-85 with some earlier stuff of Yello, but I liked it anyway.

I liked it because it was weird, funny, melodic, electronic and I was easy for me to sing along with Dieter Meyer, cause my voice was rather low.
Combine with the crazy video's featuring the members of Yello (Dieter Meyer and Boris Blank) I came more and more addicted.

After buying these compilations, I started collecting all Yello albums on CD.

The first was Claro Que Si and I was not sure if I wanted to buy more of Yello, cause 

the versions on New Mix were much better than on Claro Que Si and worst of all I didnt like the other songs very much.

After a while I was enough hungry for more Yello, so I bought them all.

The beste creative period of Yello was just before releasing Essential Yello, after that

Yello tried to be hip with experiments with house, dub, electro, dnb, but most of the time the remixes of these songs were much better than the Yello ones.

So after a few albums I better forget (Motion Picture and The Eye), Yello got back to its own style and managed to make it sound fresh again, it was called Touch Yello.
Not only on CD but there was a DVD as well, called: "The Virtual Concert"

For me a reason to stay being fan of Yello, until present time.

Yello always tries to go with the flow, their website looks cool and changed from time to time, they made an app for mobile-phones and tablets, made car-commercials, interactive online music-mixer and much more.

That's make me as a fan very happy, I am not looking for re-issues or remasters.

If you want to become a fan of Yello: check out on their website their Videology 
(click on the green block) and play a few videos.

DJ Riko:, Xmas mixer and Mashup DJ

There were times that I listened to Sky Radio, days before Christmas.
Every day I heard Wham, Slade, Maria Carey, Mud, Slade and of course somebody singing White Christmas.
I had made some tapes with our favorite songs from me and my wife and some weird tapes with modern xmas songs in rock, reggae, chillout styles.
But I thought maybe unknown artists can cover christmas songs better or even make new ones....
So I collected over 50 CD-Rs with christmas mp3 songs from artists I never heard of, who  shared their songs on a free to download websites like mp3.de and simulair.

While I was collecting, I found some Christmas mixes and podcasts full of new music. Great cause I like mixes and remixes. So one day I stumbled into:

who made almost every year a new X-mas mix !
Free for everyone to download on his own website djriko.com.

I liked DJ Riko very much, cause I discovered Mashups when listening to his other tunes and other mixes. He doesnt make much new stuff ( look at the New page), but his Mashup "P-Funk In Playing My House" is really great and even released on vinyl ! DJ Riko repeats himself in the longer mixes, so if you play 3 of his longer mixes, the rest dont matter.
His X-mas mixes however, are not to miss and a must have to play on every Christmas day. Here is the page, so download them all !

Last note: his ringtones are no ordinary tunes, check it out

My Music Mories: We all die young of Steel Dragon

Sometimes you hear a song in a movie and you just wanna know who sang it. I had it when watching the end of movie Rockstar with Mark Wallenberg.

It's a film about a boy who becomes the lead singer of a heavy metal band and all the stuff around it. At the end he quits, cause he wants to spend more time with his girlfriend than being famous. 

This song starts very gentle and later become the normal hardrock ballad. I liked it anyway cause the singer is great (not Mark W. himself ofcourse) and I like the way the song starts and build up the tension...

After I found the song, there were more songs, all were credited to a group named Steel Dragon (like in the movie Rockstar) . 

In fact it was a group called Steel Heart. 

Well, all songs are cliche heavy metal songs, but the singer is really good and the band performs solid. 

So here is the whole song, here some parts from the movie itself and Steel heart live

Wanna know more: see this blog

DnBuser & TnC: Strong & Delayed

Together with DnBuser, someone I recently met at the DJ collective called "DJ Station",
I created a serie of Drum 'n Bass soundscapes under the name "Strong &  Delayed".


We created these tracks live, afterwards I cut off the failed attempts (yes, I scr** up a lot) and added fade outs
at the end.

If you still reading, here is the link to the playlist at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/audiotex-1/sets/strong-delayed

DnBuser likes to play DnB like Liquid Funk style of the mixes of DrumsoldieR, just the kind of style I like in DnB.
Less aggressive, more mellow.
But after this serie our paths go different ways, I have a lot
of other projects I want to do and so is he.

Maybe I will coop with another DJ from the "DJ station" collective, at this time I won't mention any name. Peace !

Introducing a new serie: 112 MSX Basic Games

During a Dutch heatwave, I often started up my old NMS 8280 MSX computer to copy some 1DD disks to 2 DD disks and make disk-images from these on my PC to use it in BlueMSX.
Of course there was a lot of crap I wouldnt dare to post it in any way, but I found a lot of forgotten Basic Games I typed in long ago from MSX listingbooks I bought when I started with MSX and had not a lot of programs to run, for example this one on the right...


I played a lot of these MSX Basic Games I typed in and I decided they should not be forgotten again.
A MSX diskette can hold no more than 112 files, so this serie will be 112 posts in total.
At this moment I don't have 112 Basic games in stock, but I'm pretty sure I can make at least 30 episodes.

Each post will have at least 2 screenshots and the game to download.
Remember: in most MSX Basic games the controls are a little slow so your response time are more importent than rapid fire. Have fun.

Mixmeister TnC Moonblaster mixes (total 7)

Hi, 

It's been a while since I post something new, but a Dutch heatwave, stress at work and some nasty Flash player malware, got me away from the keyboard and my blog.

So this once is some sort of retrospective of my MSX Moonblaster mixes so far.

Yes, I created 7 mixes, not 6, cause I refurbished my 1st mix and the result was more different than the original plan (the REPRISE). 

I uploaded all my mixes to mixcloud so you dont have to download anything, just listen.

Here is the link: https://www.mixcloud.com/NoiseCollector/

Will there a mix number 7 ?

I had already some pre-recorded songs, but I have some other interesting projects I workon so I leave it where it is right now.

If you looked carefull to all the playlist, you know that each mix is created from a diskette with 20 tracks or more (ordered alfabeticly).

So mix 7 will only included tracks begin with the letter K and L.

On the left side you see an example of the source of all mixes.
Of course I should include here pictures on Moonblaster, BlueMSX, Mixmeister Fusion and Audacity, but if you download a package from the link at mixcloud you get a lot more info about each mix and an interesting bonusdiskette too...

Terraria Game Music

After I played Minecraft a lot, my son got interested in the game Terraria.
Mainly because a friend at school had the PS3 version of the game,
there was also a PC-version and it was just like Minecraft but in 2-D instead of 3-D.

Well, that is not fair for Terraria, a lot of things are the same as in Minecraft, like creating random worlds, different diomes, mining and building.
But in Minecraft you do not a lot buying, selling (remember the villagers?) and crafting things
In Terraria there are so much usefull and unusefull items and you can get them in different ways, like killing an boss or enemy, crafting or buying from a salesman.
And there are a lot of different salesman, if you build houses enough (and kill enough bosess).
Terraria has plenty of bosses like The Twins, Destroyer, Plantera, Golem, even more smaller enemies, and there are also invasions of Pirates, Goblins, Frost Moon, Red Moon , Halloween etc etc.
You can even start a boss fight or invasion whenever you want as long as you have the right items !

Of course is Terraria multi-player and it's very easier to start one, just fill in the IP-address and it works.
Even nicer the game doesnt need much grafical power, so it can be played on laptops too.
Are there any negative sides ? Yes, after a while the created world is no challange any more cause you mined everything and beat every boss multiple times. Then it's time to start a new world and do it all over again. Nice feature in Terraria is: you can take your character to another world, so you dont have to start with a bronze sword and no armor...

And when a game is populair, people start making there own versions of the gamemusic.
Terraria has very interesting music from  Scott Lloyd Shelly 
So the soundtrack is well worth listening , but there are always people who think they can do better...
Well I search on YouTube a lot, but it's hard to beat the originals.
Here are a few, try it, maybe you like them I know I did...

And did I tell you you can play in teams and do PvP or not ?
No, I just did !

Some weird tunes from the past

I once heard a song that goes like this "They coming to take me away hoho, they coming to take me away haha like elephants on parade". So I search where the song came from, but could not find it.
My only clue was it should have been a song from a cartoon...
Yesterday I found this song (and more) in an obscure mixtape on mix.dj Theatre Of The absurd by The Tapestry Weavers. Napoleon XVI...who was that ?

And the artist was:
I took a good look at wiki and found it was a  alias for ... and it was a big hit in 1966,
and the title was "They coming to take me away haha". There was also an album with the same title full of even more weird creepy stuff...

But no elephants on parade, untill I searched on YouTube,
it was from the Dumbo movie of Disney !
No kiddin !

If you listen to the "Pink Elephants On Parade" refrein of Dumbo
and then to "They coming to take me away haha".

Do you hear some similarities ?

Strange isn't it...

Of course the song of Napoleon XIV was covered, so listen to this and that or those and them

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 ...