3 ms·

The MSX2 was certainly fascinating, and better on most graphics measures (more colours, more sprites, better scrolling - unless you use the unintended C64 VSP t

The MSX2 was certainly fascinating, and better on most graphics measures (more colours, more sprites, better scrolling - unless you use the unintended C64 VSP techniques, which breaks on a small number of machines.) However, it had far inferior sound, and despite the higher clock rate it wasn't usually faster, since most 6510 instructions execute in 2-7 clock cycles whereas the z80 typically uses 5-25 cycles. The later MSXes could in theory have a lot more banked memory than the c64, but I don't know how common that was (there were RAM extenders for the c64 too but they were vanishingly rare). Apart from more colours and higher resolution, there's nothing in those 50 games you linked that would be clearly impossible on a c64. You should link to a demoscene showreel instead ;)

kragen 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVa0zviOJw&list=PLFxDEp8RK4OH2OQxVI9sCVPlrOMBtlg78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVa0zviOJw&list=PLFxDEp8RK4... is a C64 demo playlist, but I'm not sure it shows anything a MSX2 couldn't do either, except for much better sound. It certainly has a lot of stuff that's more visually impressive than those MSX2 games, but I suspect that's because it was made by better programmers and graphicians, not because of the limitations of the hardware. Definitely if I'd seen stuff like those C64 demos in 01982 when the C64 came out, my reaction would have been total incredulity; it is so far beyond what I imagined computers were capable of that it would have seemed like alien technology. And that is not true of the MSX2 games. But to a significant extent that's not really about the capabilities of the computers themselves but about the SID and the VIC-II, and to a smaller extent it's about algorithms and tricks that were developed years after the C64 itself. Boogie Factor, for example, is from 02005. MSX* demos I've seen like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY are more visually impressive than the games linked upthread, and very impressive indeed for a Z80, but still not in the league of the C64 demos, despite having lots more RAM to work in. I suspect the anemic CPU is to blame; that demo leans on raster shears pretty hard. Really, though, I'm more convinced by GEOS. In GEOS the C64 had a WIMP GUI with a WYSIWYG word processor with multiple proportional fonts, a pixel paint program like MacPaint, a faxing program, etc. Because what's really important is how computers increase human ability and especially how they empower human creativity, not how many colors they can show.

kragen 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVa0zviOJw&list=PLFxDEp8RK4OH2OQxVI9sCVPlrOMBtlg78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcVa0zviOJw&list=PLFxDEp8RK4... is a C64 demo playlist, but I'm not sure it shows anything a MSX2 couldn't do either, except for much better sound. It certainly has a lot of stuff that's more visually impressive than those MSX2 games, but I suspect that's because it was made by better programmers and graphicians, not because of the limitations of the hardware. Definitely if I'd seen stuff like those C64 demos in 01982 when the C64 came out, my reaction would have been total incredulity; it is so far beyond what I imagined computers were capable of that it would have seemed like alien technology. And that is not true of the MSX2 games. But to a significant extent that's not really about the capabilities of the computers themselves but about the SID and the VIC-II, and to a smaller extent it's about algorithms and tricks that were developed years after the C64 itself. Boogie Factor, for example, is from 02005. MSX* demos I've seen like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY are more visually impressive than the games linked upthread, and very impressive indeed for a Z80, but still not in the league of the C64 demos, despite having lots more RAM to work in. I suspect the anemic CPU is to blame; that demo leans on raster shears pretty hard. Really, though, I'm more convinced by GEOS. In GEOS the C64 had a WIMP GUI with a WYSIWYG word processor with multiple proportional fonts, a pixel paint program like MacPaint, a faxing program, etc. Because what's really important is how computers increase human ability and especially how they empower human creativity, not how many colors they can show.