MSX: The Origin of the PCs?

Over a month ago, before the distractions of Retro Reunited and my PS3, I started working through my MSX games collection, and last week I finally got back on track and completed my evaluation...

The MSX wasn’t particularly popular in the UK compared to places like Japan and Holland, which is a bit of a shame as it’s quite an impressive 8-bit system and is notable for several milestones in the development of gaming and home computers in general.

The MSX architecture was the first attempt by the industry to come up with a hardware standard that could be licensed by different manufacturers, the result of a collaboration between several Japanese companies and the soon to be mighty Microsoft, who agreed to license a fledgling version of MS-DOS for use on all MSX systems. So although it was not a worldwide success and the standard did not take off, you can argue that the MSX was the forerunner to the IBM PC compatibles that we all have sitting on our computer desks at home and work!

The system’s significance to the gaming world came from both hardware and software. While it wasn’t the first to feature them, most MSX computers had a cartridge slot and joystick controllers with two distinct action buttons rather than the standard one that competitors like the C64 had. Both of these features were utilised extensively by Japanese developers and almost certainly influenced the designers of Nintendo’s Famicom, which was of course a massive success shortly after the 1983 release of the MSX.

Software-wise the most notable contribution made by the MSX was that it was the first home system that Konami developed games for, beginning with conversions of their early arcade games but later progressing to several exclusive games and most famously Vampire Killer, the first incarnation of the classic Castlevania franchise. More on Konami later...

So with the history lesson over, let’s focus on my MSX setup. As I mentioned, the system wasn’t particularly popular in the competitive UK home computer market of the early 80’s, but there were still several versions of the MSX hardware. The most common of these is probably the Toshiba HX-10, which is what I own and can be picked up off Ebay for no more than £20 boxed. The unit is quite neat, with a good range of I/O ports including RCA AV outputs allowing good picture quality - quite a rarity in those days!

The MSX had quite an extensive range of games released in the UK. However, these were mostly ports of games from other systems released on cassette and are consequently of no interest to me. I picked up my MSX for one reason only – to experience obscure Japanese cartridge games that never made it to any other computer or console. Sadly when I bought the system I never thought to check how much these would be likely to cost me, and it turned out they are neither cheap nor easy to find – expect to pay £10 or more for unboxed versions of the better games! Anyway, without further ado let’s take a look at my modest collection of MSX carts...

Surprisingly most of my games have some redeeming quality, but there was one exception. Candoo Ninja looked to be a decent place to start, as from screenshots it appears to be a scrolling platformer/beat em up. However in reality your Ninja character shuffles along at a pathetic speed, can barely jump, does not have any kind of Ninja weapons like throwing stars and is killed by pretty much everything in the game - not so much Candoo Ninja as Can’t do anything!

Falling into the mediocre category is High Way Star, a reasonable Rally-X clone hampered by a serious issue with the in-game map – enemy vehicles and obstacles are not shown! Also failing to make an impression was Casio’s Kenja No Ishi (AKA The Stone Of Wisdom), an action adventure game with a similar visual style to Gauntlet but with gameplay that soon becomes tedious. Another Casio offering is Koneko no dai bouken - Chibi-chan ga iku (AKA Chibi Goes On Adventure), a cute flick-screen platformer that is probably as close to a Mario game as the MSX gets. Sadly the nice graphics are offset by a cruel difficulty level that sees poor Chibi the Cat meet his or her maker all too often!

Next I decided to try out some shmups, starting with my first Konami MSX exclusive, Sky Jaguar. Clearly influenced by Xevious, this vertical shooter offers a variety of enemies to be dispatched including a couple of large bases, and even has some rudimentary power-ups. With some nicely-designed backgrounds and a reasonable difficulty curve, this would have been quite an impressive offering for it’s era (1984) but for one thing – the scrolling, if you can call it that, is diabolical! Highlighting an issue with the MSX hardware that competitors such as the C64 didn’t have, it seems there is no hardware scrolling, meaning that action games such as Sky Jaguar shift the screen along by blocks at a time – in this case, around an inch of the screen is shifted with each ‘scroll’ which is incredibly jerky. That said, the game itself does compensate for that somewhat by being both challenging and addictive, and I did enjoy it despite the poor scrolling.

Some of the other shooters on the system actually cope a lot better with the scrolling issue. Scope On from ASCII makes life easier by limiting the background to a scrolling starfield whose white dots obviously take a lot less effort to move down the screen. As a result however the game itself is little more than a glorified version of Galaga with little in the way of innovation. Volguard from DB-Soft is a horizontally-scrolling shooter where your ship must destroy air and land based targets. The majority of the screen is blue sky with just a limited number of ground elements, so again the scrolling effect is achieved by minimising the amount of objects to be moved. The game itself is not bad, with a variety of enemies to dispatch, but it soon becomes tedious and offers little more than high-score chasing as a reason to replay. Also from DB-Soft is Zexas Limited, which avoids the scrolling issue by adopting a pseudo 3D ‘into the screen’ approach. Graphically it is quite impressive but the gameplay is again just simple blasting action that soon becomes boring.

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