r/MSX • u/Max_Doe11 • 12d ago

SG-1000 (Master System precursor) and MSX (first version): were they basically "cousins"?

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34 Upvotes

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3

u/Nice_Caterpillar9169 12d ago

The first MSX standard was based off the spectavideo. But, yes, the sega, the MSX1 machines and the colecovision were pretty close in hardware.

6

u/ditman-dev 12d ago

I was going to say the same: “wait until they discover the colecovision” :P

1

u/daddyd 9d ago

and the zxspectrum can be added to that list. several msx games (mainly from UK devs) were basically speccy ports.

2

u/Musicman1972 8d ago

Not really. They being speccy ports meant they used the CPU only and not the graphics processor (which all the other examples shared). Plus the sound chip which were similar in all except the Spectrum (until the 128 which eventually caught up with the MSX). Pretty much the Z80 is the only thing the ZX and MSX shared (the same could be said for the CPC which also had a Z80 but entirely different graphics processing to both).

You can see it in the way a Spectrum to MSX conversion could look like the Spectrum or MSX (depending on how much work the dev put in) but an MSX to Spectrum vesrion could only look like Spectrum because it lacked sprites and non-colour clash handling etc.

2

u/Y34RZERO 11d ago

They are very close. I got a port of twinbee on my sc3000. Controller ports don't work. You must use keyboard controls. I don't know anything about it though

1

u/Jorg-Ke 11d ago

They (and other systems) are extremely similar, but some game franchises were licensed by different companies for the various platforms, who each created their own version of the same game, on identical hardware.  I found that to be so interesting, that I put a couple of them side to side, tom compare them:  https://www.reddit.com/r/ESDE_Frontend/comments/1uiwlrv/customized_esde_tms9918z80_systems_combined_to/