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MSX was really a little too little too late. The BASIC interpreter looks nice and MSX-DOS was CP/M compatible. I can almost imagine a past where something mor
by buescher 3y ago
MSX was really a little too little too late. The BASIC interpreter looks nice and MSX-DOS was CP/M compatible. I can almost imagine a past where something more like MSX2+ came out much sooner and you could program it with Turbo Pascal.
That would have kept me occupied for a long while. The problem is you have to square that with a world where the Macintosh came out in 1984 and the Amiga in 1985.
- forinti 3y agoIt had a nice architecture for an 8 bit machine, though. You could add a ton of RAM even to an MSX1. And you could get 80 columns cards too. The first MSX was sold in 1983. It couldn't realistically have been made much earlier. You must take into account that the 80s had an explosion of technology. As soon as something hit the market, it was already superseded by something better.
- buescher 3y agoThe Colecovision, which is similar, came out a year earlier. The Z80 (1976) and the TI graphics chip (1979) were old news by that point. I could almost imagine an MSX standard a year earlier, with a fast Z80 (i.e. the 8 MHz Z80H, 1982) and an iteration on the TMS9918.
- wk_end 3y agoTechnically I guess "too little too late" is a way to describe it, but the MSX was a pretty big success in its home country - and at least as big a success worldwide as the Amiga was - so you might alternatively describe it as "just enough at just the right time". For your average Japanese consumer, a commodity MSX machine was dirt-cheap and had an absolute murderer's row of high-quality games available for it. The Amiga and Mac were comparatively expensive and software starved for most of the MSX architecture's life...and then the PC came along and ate everything anyway.