MSX Nostalgia

kudos.be provides some web space for the MSX Nostalgia site that brings information and downloads for the once very popular MSX home computer system.

You can find the download site at MSX KUDOS

The maintainer of MSX Nostalgia has sadly passed away. It does not look anyone else will take over ownership and maintenance of the MSX Nostalgia site. I will continue to host the files for MSX Nostalgia on my server as long as the links are working on the MSX Nostalgia site

About MSX

MSX is an old Z80-based family of home computers which appeared in autumn 1983 as an attempt to establish a single standard in home computing similar to VHS in video. They were popular in Asian (Korea, Japan) and South American (Brazil, Chile) countries as well as in Europe (Netherlands, France, Spain, Finland) and former Soviet Union, but they are virtually unknown in USA. Although the MSX standard quietly died from year 1988, the world got to see MSX2, MSX2+ and TurboR extensions of it.

The MSX standard has been designed by a company called ASCII in Cooperation with Microsoft which provided a firmware version of its BASIC for the machine. Because this BASIC version was an extended version of MicroSoft Basic, it was called “MicroSoft eXtended BASIC”. This explains the name “MSX”. The system thanks his name to the built-in BASIC.

The MSX machines were produced by such giants as Sony, Yamaha, Panasonic, Toshiba, Daewoo, and Philips. The only MSX model ever sold in USA appears to be an early SpectraVideo machine (and possibly some Yamaha CX-5M machines, which were merely sold as musical instruments…)

In spite of its sad history, MSX is a very nice computer, especially useful for educational purposes which is clearly indicated by example of the Soviet Union. Russian Ministry of Education bought hundreds of MSXes (and later MSX2s) grouped into “computerized classroom systems” of 10-16 machines connected into a simple network. Entire generation of programmers has grown up using these computers.

Hardware-wise, MSX represents a hybride of a videogame console and a generic CP/M-80 machine. Its heart is a Z80 CPU working at 3.58MHz in the base model. The clock frequency has been doubled in the TurboR. The video subsystem is built around a TMS9918 or TMS9928 VDP chip also used in Texas Instruments' TI-99/4 computers, ColecoVision, and Coleco Adam. In the later MSX models this chip has been upgraded to V9938 (MSX2) and V9958 (MSX2+ and TurboR). The latest version of it is V9990. The audio system is handled by AY-3-8910 chip by General Instruments, same as the one used in Sinclair ZXSpectrum128 audio. AY-3-8910 provides 3 channels of synthesized sound, noise generation, and two general purpose parallel IO ports which are used for joysticks and some other things in the MSX design. Due to their hardware structure, MSX machines were perfectly suitable for games and there is a lot of good games either written or ported to them.