Consoles M.I.A. 62
1up is running a piece looking at four game consoles missing in America. These pieces of consumer technology historia just never made it to the states, for one reason or another. Usually, good reasons. From the article: "The Xbox was not Microsoft's first console venture. Nor was Dreamcast's WinCe operating system. No, Mr. Gates' first foray into the console arena happened more than 20 years ago, hand-in-hand with current nemesis Sony. Sounds like madness? It's not. The MSX wasn't precisely a console, either...it was more like a computer that could play cartridge-based games ... So why didn't MSX make it to the U.S.? Though the standard was conceived by a Microsoft executive, it was a Japanese initiative. In America, the company supported the IBM PC standard." Reminds me of our TI computer. Hunt the Wumpus indeed; the MSX got Castlevania (Vampire Killer).
Link (Score:4, Funny)
A slashdot first, I'm sure.
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Good thing my work's proxy blocked it, I almost read the article!
Castlevania? pfft! (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but we (I had a TI 99/4A) got great games like Parsec, Munch Man, and Tombstone City!
Parsec (Score:2)
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Say what about the Dreamcast?! (Score:2)
So if Microsoft was behind the Dreamcast's OS, was that why the Dreamcast ran so hot?
Re:Say what about the Dreamcast?! (Score:4, Informative)
The bulk of Dreamcast games did not run the CE varient.
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I only ever remember hearing about a single game that actually used WinCE (other than the networking stack, which I think most games used if they used the modem/ethernet). Sega Rally was supposed to use it when it was released in Japan. The game had framerate issues and didn't look very good at all. By the time the game got to the US it had been rewritten to be completely native fixing the issues.
I don't think the DC was fast enough for a large layer of middleware under a game like WinCE.
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I bought a *lot* of DC games and I think that, and maybe Crazy Taxi, were the only games that used WinCE. I remember also MSDN had, for awhile, a lot of info on using DirectX with WinCE specifi
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More like "thank god we didn't get them" (Score:2)
Btw, Hunt the wumpus was freeware, (hell it was a basic game). Why don't you compare commander keen to castlevania, apogee software wins with ID backing them up
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Of course, it failed for
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On the other hand, I'm surprised there wasn't any mention of the SuperGrafx [wikipedia.org]. Powerful little system from NEC, now super rare, with some of the best arcade ports of the time.
Also, the GP2X [wikipedia.org] would be nice to hear about, as it isn't t
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The MSX was undoubtedly a computer (Score:2)
So it wasn't a console, then. There's nothing about ROM-based media that keeps them from being used in computers. I'm pretty sure there were other computers that accepted cartridges, but my knowledge of obsolete non-x86 computers is a bit rusty so I can't name any.
BTW, the most notable game for the MSX was definitely Metal Gear 2. The real Metal Gear 2.
Rob
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Commodore 64, for one (according to my memory, backed up by wikipedia and eBay searches).
It was quite popular at one point :-).
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Basically, the MSX to Japan what the Commodore 64 (and Atari 800, and Tandy CoCo, and all the other 8-bit home computers) were in the United States and Europe.
I think 1up is a little naive in thinking that a Microsoft-backed platform could have become the gaming standard in that era; back then, MS was a much smaller company, best known for selling BASIC interpreters and licensing their disk OS to IBM. Not the monopo-lithic giant we think of today.
Yes it was a computer (Score:2)
BTW.. On the subject of cartriges - let me remind you that the C-64 also had a cartridge slot and games delivered on cartriges.
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In a strange way I miss that old thing, it wasn't MSX compatible but close enough.
/Mikael
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No, cartridge slots weren't uncommon at all. Not too sure about games, but for the Commodore 64 I have the COMAL programming language and Simons Basic, and besides these and (mostly older?) games there were floppy speeders, game hacking tools and plenty other gizmos. Same with the C 16, the Plus/4 and, I assume, the VIC-20. However,
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Keep in mind that we're talking about the early-mid 80's here. The idea of floppy disks and such was still fairly new to the general
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All of the early Atari computers also had cart slots.
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Yes Rob, thats right they were fully fledged microcomputers.
The ones I saw were just like todays machines, keyboard, screen sitting on a desktop case. Picture a tandy or PC, only MUCH cheaper, more in the range of a commodore or TI.
They were big in Japan & solved the problem of having to be a dos guru to get a game to run, just plug a cartridge in to the MSX & play.
Microcomputers should have gone in a direction but Stupidity at Commodore killed that, market ignorance/r
Very few Dreamcast discs used WinCE (Score:3, Informative)
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DirectX 5, actually.
>Most games used Sega's own OS and graphics libraries,...
True.
>...which ran much faster.
False. That was spread by certain parties within Sega who had a vested interest in boosting their own SDK. There was some overhead in running an OS versus writing to the bare metal, as Sega's SDK did, but even then, the WinCE SDK came out ahead in certain respects.
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it was more because it was not easy to port games written on wince/directx to the playstation or n64.
Really missing the MIAs? (Score:2)
Say what? (Score:1)
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He's also working on a PC/Java version of Tunnels of Doom...
http://www.dreamcodex.com/ [dreamcodex.com]
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Actually the name is TurboGrafx-16 [wikipedia.org], not "TurboGraphx-16", "TurboGrafix-16", "TurboGraphix-16" or even "TurboGraphics-16"...
That console has to be the one with the name being written incorrectly most of the time...
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It's an easy way to separate the true fans from those not in the know. Remember the Intendo?
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MSX (Score:3, Informative)
They promised to standardise games & software, giving a capable microcomputer kinda like an IBM PC but much cheaper.
At that time IBM PC's were hideously expensive, the average joe could only afford a Commodore 64/128, Ti etc but they had no interoperability of software at all.
Here in OZ importers/wholesalers advertised them a fair bit in computer magazines but not the main stream press.
Retailers did'nt pick up the ball.
Consumers could'nt find the games or software for them.
They fizzled out. The end.
The MSX kicked ass (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX [wikipedia.org]
The specs on the graphics hardware were simply INCREDIBLE for that time. The MSX 2, especially, was easily more powerful than the Amiga was (for games, anyway).
Do Google search for some screenshots of some of those games, especially the Konami tiles (Salamander, Vampire Killer, Metal Gear). The MSX machines were unrivaled gaming machines until the SNES was released.
Pretty awesome, actually.
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Seems it didn't move forward fast enough and got overrun, the last model still only has 256KB of memory as standard.
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Secondly, the disk dr
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Wait, is this a classic '90s home computer war vortex I'm spinning in?
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Japanese computers had custom hardware for multilevel parallax scrolling, hardware sprites, hardware scaling and rotation, hardware input and other goodies. The Amiga only had a blitter, a copp
MSX No Loss (Score:2)
I remember when those machines came out in Britain. The computer magazines were the only happy people, since it meant there was always at least one new machine a week to review and because so much of the machine's behaviour was the same they can't have needed to do so much work! Not like reviewing those computers where everything was different, such as the Jupiter Ace.
And those MSX machines were terrible - I don't think I knew a
Back off the Oric!!! (Score:1)
I had an MSX for a while (Yamaha), but only for the superlative MIDI support
Lacking content (Score:2)
3rd Party Developers (Score:1)
When the console was created it was deemed Microsoft's way of taking it to the "Japanese console manufacturers" and they lost millions on it.
It just goes to show how important games are to the consoles that are developed - over the years every console has
Bandai Playdia (Score:1)
The console looked like Fisher Price designed it and the titles were nearly all anime games. It probably wouldn't have been much of a success in the US.
Sony and Microsoft together for gaming (Score:1)