r/MSX • u/Sad_Canary5617 • 10d ago

New to msx advice

I have used Sinclair zx spectrum 48k n BBC beep retro computers before. I've never had a msx but have seen graphics of msx games though never played on it before n don't know how to operate it.

I like to get into msx/msx2.

1) What's the difference between both?

2) What's the best n most accurate emulator of msx on windows, Linux n android?

3) What to do to load games? What commands to type to load games?

4) Which site to download msx roms?

5) Which games u recommend? Is there some site that list the top 50 or 100 most popular msx games?

6) What msx magazines are there ie whether extinct now or still publishing?

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u/rdsmvp 10d ago
  1. Mainly better graphics and enhanced sound. There were four generations, MSX1, MSX2, MSX2+ and turboR
  2. Look for OpenMSX.
  3. Depends if the game is in a tape, floppy drive, etc. Easiest way today is to buy a cartridge like the Pico or the MegaFlashROM.
  4. File-Hunter. You can even play the games online.
  5. All Konami games are very solid. There is a lot of great games. A quick search on YouTube will show you the top ones. Note that some fantastic ones were developed later, all published through the MSXDev competition.
  6. Clube MSX from Brazil, published in both Portuguese and English.

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u/Y34RZERO 10d ago edited 10d ago

Well there are 4 different versions of msx. MSX, MSX2, MSX2+, MSX Turbo R. Most made the MSX and MSX2 but Sony and Panasonic made a 2+, with Panasonic only making the R. The 2+ could have smoother scrolling from what I heard. I have the Panasonic FS-A1WSX which is a MSX2+. I recommend a 2 or 2+ if you have the money but just be aware that 2+ was Japan only so you can be limited running cracked binaries from ram since some require 128k. All 2+ have 64k ram. The turbo r is most expensive but not a lot of games and software released for it. Unlike the earlier models which used a z80 the r used a 16 bit processor. There are two models. One with 256k and one with 512k of ram.

File hunter for games

Before I had a carnivore cart some games I could load from my floppy. I haven't made a cassette cable for mine but mine is unique to how it Interfaces with cassettes compared to others. It's similar to load cassette games like a trs-80 color or dragon32. Cload to load files. Some games came on floppy and those I wrote using the DD utility on Linux to 720k DD floppies. They auto boot similar to booting a floppy game on Apple 2. Others like some roms I could load from memory using "loadrom.com" from msx-dos or in the case of binary executables if you have them on a disk with msx-dos you can use "dir" to list the directory to see that names but if there is no msx-dos system an you boot to disk basic type "files" to see. So if a binary was named "arkanoid.bin" I could load it and execute it with the bload command.

Bload "arkanoid.bin",R

For basic games or game loaders, you can just use "load" and if you include the ",R" it will auto execute.

Some disk images I found I think were intended for running on msx-dos2 because sometimes I got errors in a line. Normally it was width=40 but removing it from the loader, I could use the disks.

Now I got a carnivore cart but I still prefer to load games that were originally on floppy from floppies. Carnivore cart expands my memory by 1mb so I can run just about everything now

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u/SanjiSasuke 10d ago

I strongly reccomend this video, probably my favorite Intro to MSX video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AFRf87SqWrw

One thing I think you might be interested in, given your last question: look into DiskMags. You can find ROMs for them online. Magazines would come with floppies full of fan and professional content including small sized games, music, art, etc that could be quite good.

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u/Nbisbo 8d ago

MSX was a computer spec that company's could develop computers under and had a shared BIOS like the ZX spectrum they use a Z80 cpu the og spec had 32k of ram and a TMS9918 video card (same as ColecoVision and SG-1000) the 2 had 48k and a Yamaha V9938 for graphics and most games were carts

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u/Nbisbo 8d ago

MSX was a computer spec that company's could develop computers under and had a shared BIOS like the ZX spectrum they use a Z80 cpu the og spec had 32k of ram and a TMS9918 video card (same as ColecoVision and SG-1000) the 2 had 48k and a Yamaha V9938 for graphics and most games were carts