Machine of the month
A valiant attempt to create a common 8-bit standard.
Microsoft MSX architecture
This month’s computer is a little different. Rather than being a single system, MSX was actually a Microsoft specification for eight-bit microcomputers. Countless brands produced their own MSX machines, which dominated Eastern markets. The MSX era is a fascinating period of computing history often neglected in the West, which showcases an unusual stage of gaming evolution.
Japan in the early 1980s was flooded with home computers. Despite most machines sharing Microsoft BASIC, these computers were usually incompatible with each other. In June 1983, Microsoft announced the MSX specification: an attempt to standardise eight-bit microcomputers into a unified architecture. Rather than being an invention of Bill Gates, the MSX standard was actually the brainchild of Kazuhiko Nishi, the vice-president of Microsoft Japan and director of ASCII Corporation. Inspired by the VHS video standard, if software could work on one MSX machine, it should be able to work on any other.
The standard was designed around the Spectravideo SV 328, largely because it was built with off-the-shelf parts, and used Microsoft BASIC for an operating system.
It’s unclear what MSX actually stands for. It’s believed to mean either Microsoft Extended, or Machines with Software
Exchangeability – though Nishi hinted that it may also refer to the MX missile!
Hardware development
Primarily, any MSX machine needed a Zilog Z80 CPU and a Texas Instruments TMS9918 graphics chip with 16KB of VRAM, plus several standardised I/O chips. Beyond this specification manufacturers were free to do as they pleased, and all major Japanese manufacturers released machines, with some wildly varying form factors.
RAM ranged from 16-128KB, though 64KB was the most common. Streamlined chipsets were common in budget models, and there were numerous cartridge-based add-ons. Instead of rubber chiclet keys, MSX computers usually had proper keyboards and arrow keys, which increased costs. Software usually came on either cartridge or cassette. Although disk drives were available, they weren’t common until the MSX2.
Gaming
MSX gaming was a strange world of in-betweens. Even though games often featured impressive environments to match the consoles, the machine’s single colour sprites looked like something from a cheap British micro.
MSX computers also had a console-style cartridge slot, which unlike Western micros was actually used by most games. Therefore games could often load instantly, and use a combination of the keyboard and joystick.
Most Japanese MSX games come from between 1983 and 1987 – the Japanese were quick to move onto the MSX2 – and usually on cartridge. European and South American titles extended into the early 1990s, mostly on tape, or less commonly on disk.
The underlying MSX hardware was similar to the Sega SG-1000, and many MSX titles were Sega ports. Arriving before Nintendo’s Famicom (or “NES”), the MSX was Japan’s platform of choice before Nintendo’s eventual dominance.
Gaming giant Konami was particularly famous on the system, and series like Bomberman and Parodius got their start on the MSX,
well before arcades or consoles. Other MSX classics include Kung-Fu Master, Penguin Adventure, and 1942.
Legacy
Even though the MSX wasn’t popular in the US, Australia or the UK, the MSX was the machine of choice in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina. In Japan, MSX machines were dominant through the 1980s, until PCs finally became cheap enough to end their reign. By the time the MSX was discontinued, at least five million units had been sold.
The MSX was followed by 1985’s MSX2, as well as the MSX2+ and MSX Turbo R – machines we will explore in future issues.
Emulation
Emulating the MSX isn’t entirely straightforward. If you only want to play classic cartridge games, that’s easy enough. But if you want to run software from tape or disk, or use BASIC, then everything becomes more complicated.
Multi-purpose emulators like RetroArch and MAME require BIOS ROMs in order to work, so you may as well use an MSX-specific emulator. There are two main choices: fMSX and openMSX. fMSX is bad at running cassettes, and openMSX is bad at running disks. Cassette software was more common for the original MSX, and openMSX works better across platforms, so we’ll focus on that.
Installation and usage
For Windows users, head to https:// openmsx.org where you’ll find the Download section in the navigation bar on the left. There are both 32 and 64-bit versions available, with the choice of “install” or “zip.” Grab the “install” version. It comes with an MSI installer, which is compressed in a ZIP file, so you’ll need to open or extract the ZIP f ile first and double-click the installer file.
Follow the prompts, and openMSX should be available in your system menu under Programs > openMSX > openMSX.
For Linux users, openMSX should be available either in your distro’s repository, or you can use the Flatpak available at https:// flathub.org.
Once launched, openMSX is fantastic for quick and easy gaming – joysticks are automatically detected, and an excellent scanline mode is enabled by default.
To get started, ignore the no-cartridge error message, and move your mouse pointer to the top-left of the window, where a menu button will appear. Choose “Load ROM… (slot A)” from the top of the new menu, and in the file browser pick your .rom cartridge.
And that’s it. If you don’t have a joystick, most games use the arrow keys for movement, and Space to fire. Alt+Enter toggles full-screen mode.
Disks and cassettes
Unfortunately, openMSX’s open-source ROM only supports cartridge games – you need to provide a BIOS image for cassette functionality. These are still copyright protected, though are illegally available on ROM sites; the openMSX documentation provides instructions on how to legally obtain ROMs.
If you want to use disk images or BASIC, try fMSX, which supports both out of the box. It comes with cassette support, but it rarely works.
If you do have a BIOS, then for Windows, copy the files into My Documents/openMSX/share/ systemroms. For Linux, copy the files into ~/.openMSX/share/ systemroms.
BIOS wise, we found that “MSX System v1.0 + MSX BASIC UK (1983)” and “MSX System v1.0 + MSX BASIC Japanese (1983)” both gave us a good selection of working machines.
To get started with cassettes, you need to launch openMSX Catapult, which should be under the same menu as openMSX. Once inside, run File > Test MSX Hardware to scan for local ROMs. Anything that openMSX recognises will then be added to its menus of usable hardware.
Once the scan is finished, you can select a machine from the “MSX type” menu. Anything with “C-BIOS” is an open-source replacement, so choose one of the other available entries, presuming that you provided a recognised ROM.
To specify a tape image, click the “Cassette” button in the “Cassette Player” field, and choose “Browse cassette image.” Select a . cas tape image, then click “Start” at the bottom of the window. OpenMSX should automate the loading process and run your tape image.
If you still want to try disks with openMSX, it recognises the Digital Design Electronica DDX v3.0 ROM, which is an add-on you can enable in the “Extensions” menu. You can browse for .dsk files in the same manner as cassettes.
“In June 1983, Microsoft announced the MSX specification: an attempt to standardise eight-bit microcomputers into a unified architecture.”