[Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

OpenMSX-gui is a frontend for openMSX, "the MSX emulator that aims for perfection".

The MSX was created in the early '80s to set a standard for home computers. Although it was backed by large companies like Philips, Sony, Sanyo, Samsung and Panasonic, it was only a moderate success in countries like Japan, Spain, Brazil and The Netherlands.
Game company Konami was very active on this platform, and series like Metal Gear started on the MSX.

The last generation was the MSX TurboR, only manufactured by Panasonic (around 1990).

Emulators
There are quite a few emulators for the MSX. fMSX is already available for the N900. fMSX is not able to emulate the TurboR, and it could not run some small games I made way back :)
OpenMSX is more accurate and can emulate almost all extensions ever made for the MSX. I am using version 0.7.2 of openMSX. Not the newest version, but I had issues with more recent versions (in terms of performance etc). I have had contact with the developers of openMSX, but we could not fix the issues on short notice.

Bios
A bios is needed for openMSX. By default, it uses the opensource bios C-Bios, which is included. But this bios has limitations, and is basically only suited for loading gameroms.
In openMSX-gui, I only offer support for C-Bios and the Panasonic FS-A1GT MSX turbo R machine. This computer was the last en most powerful MSX. If you want to emulate the Panasonic FS-A1GT MSX turbo R, you will need its bios roms (named fs-a1gt_firmware.rom and fs-a1gt_kanjifont.rom) and place it in /opt/openmsx/share/systemroms or /home/user/.openMSX/share/systemroms. The roms can be found on internet.

Keyboard
The MSX came with a lot of variations of keyboards (European, Japanese, Arabic etc). So general keyboard emulation is difficult, especially because the MSX had native keys like "graph" and "select", not to mention the Japanese "kana" key. Some keyboard shortcuts are defined to overcome this, see the about in openMSX-gui.

Joystick
With the gamegripper (or SixAxis) in mind, I binded keys to emulate the first joystick. It can be reconfigured and disabled. By binding the keys to a joystick, the keys for using the joystick can still be used for typing text.

Loading games/programs
It supports roms and disks in various formats. It can be zipped, but I would be careful not to zip disk images if data is writted to them.

OpenMSX and openMSX-gui can be found in the extra-devel repository.

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

Nice 1,

i will give this a go even just for the cartridge games nemesis/gradius series they had great sound and good graphics but the scrolling was poor.

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

You guys in the UK only enjoyed the MSX-1, later models where never released there :(

Nemesis 2 and later all had the SCC sound chips mounted in the cartridge, which greatly improved the sound. Of course this sound chip is emulated by openMSX :)
You are right about the scrolling. MSX has a bad track record on this. Hardware smooth scrolling in all directions was not introduced till the MSX2+.

But talking about Nemesis 2 and smooth scrolling: some hackers patch it, so it scrolls rather smooth on MSX-2+ and higher. You can see an example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a13QWpZ1Cao!

I can also recommend the MSX2(+) konami game which is very similar: Space Manbow.

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

Cheers for that i will look into it,

also over here i am sure the msx also had something to do with toshiba.

but overall it was a good system for its time and it was an alternative to the amstrad, spectrum and c64.

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

You are right again. The Toshiba HX-10 was mostly sold (more dumped) in the UK afaik. It was also my first MSX computer. With the green graph key and red stop key it was quite colorful.

In your country, many ZX spectrum games where ported to the MSX. Because they often lacked color, we in Holland called it "the english disease". No offence of course :D

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

wow great work.. interesting 8bit computer to port :)
let me know if you port vice to ;) hint hint

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

Never played any msx games, but as a fan of Snatcher, SD Snatcher looks extremely interesting. Thanks Ade! :)

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

SD Snatcher is rated one of the best MSX games. It is in japanese, which makes it hard to follow the storyline. But there are english translations created by fans. It's predeccesor snatcher (never played it), was also translated to portugese afaik.

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

never tested it, but it is said to be ported already: http://my-maemo.com/software/applica...to=1356&faq=46

Re: [Announce] openMSX and openMSX-gui for N900
 

This is quite good, its a mixture of gradius, thunderforce and r-type.

Have you thought about attempting to port the sharp x68000??