In the early 1980s, the Spanish MSX Magazine recalled in its first issue, you could walk into a software shop and find the same game in fourteen different formats, one for each incompatible computer. Kazuhiko Nishi of ASCII, the company that adapted Microsoft BASIC for Japanese manufacturers, proposed a way out: a published standard that any manufacturer could build to, like VHS for video. On 16 June 1983 ASCII, Microsoft and fourteen manufacturers held the first MSX press conference in Tokyo. By Christmas, Computer and Video Games reported, eight companies were selling twelve different MSX models.
The standard fixed what mattered to software: a Z80 processor, a Texas Instruments video chip, a General Instrument sound chip, Microsoft’s BASIC in ROM, and a cartridge slot. It left the rest to the maker, so MSX machines came from Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Yamaha, Toshiba, Canon, Sanyo, Mitsubishi, Daewoo, Gradiente, Sharp and many others, in every shape from a basic keyboard computer to a machine with a disk drive built in. A cartridge that ran on one ran on all of them.
Fast facts
- Announced: Tokyo, 16 June 1983, by ASCII and Microsoft with fourteen manufacturers.
- CPU: Zilog Z80A or compatible, 3.579545 MHz (the NTSC colour subcarrier frequency).
- Video: Texas Instruments TMS9918A or compatible: 256×192 pixels, 16 colours, 32 sprites, 16K of video RAM.
- Sound: General Instrument AY-3-8910 or compatible: three tone channels and a noise source.
- Memory: 32K ROM holding MSX-BASIC; at least 16K of RAM in the hardware specification (8K in the BASIC chapter), and 64K in most of the machines sold in Britain.
- Generations: MSX (1983), MSX2 (1985), MSX2+ (1988), MSX turbo R (1990).
- Strongest markets: Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, and school and Arabic-language markets in the Soviet Union and the Middle East.
A standard with an owner
COMPUTE! explained the arrangement to American readers in December 1984. The “prime force” behind MSX was Nishi, then president of Microsoft’s Far East division as well as a co-founder of ASCII, and Microsoft “owns the rights to MSX and licenses the technology to the manufacturers”. The magazine also passed on the standard’s main weakness: the parts were “solid, versatile, cheap—and old”, and critics called MSX “technologically obsolete” beside the new 16- and 32-bit machines.
What the name stands for has never been settled. When MSX reached Europe in 1984 it was said to mean “Microsoft eXtended” BASIC. Retro Gamer later reported that Nishi told a Japanese business magazine in 1997 he had wanted to call it NSX, for Nishi-Sony-X, until he found Honda had the name, and that he has since said it stood for “Machines with Software eXchangeability”.
The screen is not in memory
On the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64, the picture lives in the processor’s own memory and a program draws by writing bytes there. MSX works like the ColecoVision and the NES, whose video chips keep their memory to themselves. The TMS9918A owns 16K of video RAM, and the Z80 reaches it one byte at a time through two I/O ports: 98H for data and 99H for commands and status.
The software shows the split. MSX-BASIC cannot PEEK or POKE the screen, so it has VPEEK and VPOKE, which take “an address of VRAM” from 0 to 16383. The BIOS has its own routines to read, write and fill video RAM (RDVRM, WRTVRM, FILVRM), because a Z80 block copy such as LDIR cannot reach a screen outside its address space.
That shaped MSX games. Redrawing a whole bitmap through a single port is slow, so the fast way to animate is to let the video chip do the work: define 8×8 tile patterns once, then change the name table that says which tile goes where, and move the 32 hardware sprites by rewriting a few bytes of their attribute table. Programmers paid for it in the sprite limit. The TMS9918A shows at most four sprites on any one line, and the data book warns that any more “on the same horizontal line” are not displayed. Games that crowded a row with enemies had to make them flicker in turn.
MSX2, MSX2+ and turbo R
The standard grew by keeping everything that came before. MSX2 arrived in 1985, two years after the first machines, with Yamaha’s V9938, a video chip that still ran every MSX1 screen mode but added far more. Its data book lists a palette of 512 colours, up to 256 colours on screen at once, resolutions up to 512×424, up to 128K of video RAM, and eight sprites per line instead of four in the new modes, each able to change colour on every line. It also had hardware commands to move rectangular areas and draw lines, so a program could hand block copies to the video chip instead of pushing every byte through the port.
MSX2+ followed in 1988 with the V9958, which added a YJK colour mode “capable of simultaneous display of 19,268 colors” and hardware horizontal scrolling. The MSX2+ was a Japanese machine. The Games Machine doubted in January 1989 that it would ever be sold in Britain, but Dutch enthusiasts found their own way: in September 1990 MSX Computer Magazine carried an Amsterdam importer’s advert for a Sony MSX2+ at Hfl 1,495, and in the same issue explained how to convert an MSX2 into an MSX2+.
The last generation, MSX turbo R, came from Panasonic in 1990. It added a new processor, ASCII’s R800, alongside the Z80. The Brazilian magazine CPU MSX explained in 1993 that the R800 runs Z80 instructions unchanged, and that a BIOS call, CHGCPU, switches between the Z80 and two R800 modes. It also measured the machine against its reputation: the turbo R was “always” said to be ten times faster, but existing Z80 programs ran only five or six times faster, and the full gain came only from programs written for the R800.
Around the world
Japan. MSX took hold at home first. Computer and Video Games reported in November 1984 that it had taken 30 per cent of the Japanese home computer market, and The Games Machine described the Japanese base in December 1987 as “over two million consumers who are treated to a 220-page monthly magazine dedicated solely to MSX”. Total sales are uncertain. Wikipedia’s MSX article cites a figure of nine million worldwide, seven million of them in Japan, and Nishi’s own lower figure of three million in Japan and one million overseas.
Britain. In spring 1984 the manufacturers planning to export to Britain formed an MSX Working Group to give hardware and technical information to British software houses, and machines reached the shops that Christmas. They arrived after the Spectrum, the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC had settled in. By December 1987 The Games Machine put the UK MSX market at “some two hundred thousand users”, small beside the Japanese one.
The Netherlands and Spain. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, brought its VG 8000 MSX to Europe in 1984, and the Dutch and Spanish scenes supported their own magazines, including MSX Computer Magazine in the Netherlands and MSX Magazine in Spain. The Dutch scene outlived the commercial market: in 1993 a Dutch MSX group, Oasis, released an English translation of Konami’s SD Snatcher, by common consensus the first fan translation patch (see Fan translations).
Brazil. Brazil’s informatics policy, the reserva de mercado, required government approval to import foreign microcomputers and favoured Brazilian-made ones (Brazil’s market reserve); Micro Sistemas noted in 1984 that the IBM PC could be exhibited at a São Paulo fair but its sale was “proibida no Brasil” (prohibited in Brazil). MSX arrived as Brazilian-made machines. At the 1985 Informática fair, Micro Sistemas reported Sharp’s Hotbit HB-8000, built by the Sharp-group company Epcom with a TMS-9128 video chip, an AY-3-8910A and a keyboard with Portuguese accents, and Gradiente’s Expert. Brazilian magazines such as CPU MSX were still covering new MSX hardware and software in the 1990s.
The Soviet Union and the Arab world. Wikipedia’s MSX article describes classrooms of networked Yamaha MSX computers used to teach informatics in schools in the Soviet Union, some Arab countries and Cuba, and Yamaha-built Sakhr machines with Arabic support, made for the Kuwaiti company Al Alamiah and sold in Egypt and the Gulf states.
Konami’s MSX
Konami sold its MSX games on ROM cartridges, which loaded instantly while the same games on other computers came on tape. Retro Gamer found that the MSX versions of arcade games such as Gradius “looked closer to the arcade originals” than the Spectrum and C64 conversions and kept levels those versions dropped. Konami also used the two cartridge slots many machines had. Plug Gradius and TwinBee in together and you could fly the TwinBee ship through Gradius, collecting bells instead of power-up capsules; with Yie Ar Kung-Fu in the second slot, a player who lost all their health in Yie Ar Kung-Fu 2 could be revived by a character bringing a cup of tea.
Hideo Kojima began his career on these machines. Retro Gamer records Penguin Adventure (1986) as the first game he worked on, as assistant director. His Metal Gear followed in 1987; The Games Machine reviewed the MSX cartridge that December without knowing which of Konami’s Japanese authors had written it. Its sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), was an MSX2 cartridge released only in Japan, with guards who turn their heads on patrol and hear the player knock on walls.
Later history
MSX did not end cleanly. The turbo R was the last generation, and Panasonic’s machines were the last new ones. Enthusiasts carried on, particularly in the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil and Japan, and in 2005 Retro Gamer reported two signs of it: a Brazilian programmer’s new role-playing game for the turbo R, released on CD-ROM in 2004, and ASCII’s One Chip MSX, an MSX1 built into a single chip with two cartridge slots so that it could run original games.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games, issue 37, November 1984, pp. 48-49: MSX feature, including the Tokyo press conference of 16 June 1983 with Microsoft and 14 manufacturers, eight manufacturers and 12 models by Christmas 1983, the 30 per cent Japanese market share, and the MSX Working Group of manufacturers exporting to Britain.
- COMPUTE!, issue 55, December 1984: MSX feature (Nishi’s role, Microsoft’s ownership and licensing, the specification, the “technologically obsolete” criticism).
- ASCII Corporation, MSX Technical Data Book: the MSX standard (section 1.1), the main unit’s LSIs, memory and screen (sections 1.3.1-1.3.4), the VDP ports (section 1.7.4),
VPEEKandVPOKE(section 2.1.14) and the BIOS video RAM routines. - ASCII Corporation and Nippon Gakki, V9938 MSX-VIDEO Technical Data Book (1985): features list and the two sprite modes.
- Yamaha, V9958 MSX-VIDEO data sheet: YJK colour and horizontal scrolling (pp. 1, 5, 8).
- The Games Machine, issue 2, December 1987, p. 61: Metal Gear review; the UK and Japanese MSX markets.
- The Games Machine, issue 14, January 1989: the MSX2+ and its prospects in Britain.
- MSX Computer Magazine (Netherlands), issue 40, September 1990: Sony MSX2+ advertisement (Hfl 1,495) and “MSX2+ uit MSX2: de hardware”, p. 39.
- CPU MSX (Brazil), issue 32, 1993, pp. 18-19: the turbo R, the R800 and
CHGCPU. - Micro Sistemas (Brazil), issue 37, October 1984: the IBM PC’s sale “proibida no Brasil pela reserva de mercado”.
- Micro Sistemas, special edition “Informática 85”, September 1985: fair reports on the Sharp/Epcom Hotbit HB-8000 and the Gradiente Expert.
- MSX Magazine (Spain), issue 1, May 1985: the fourteen formats; Nishi and Spectravideo’s part in the standard.
- Computer Games (Italy), October 1984: the Philips VG 8000 launched in Europe.
- Retro Gamer, issue 15, 2005, “MSX Appeal”: the name, Konami’s cartridges and two-slot combinations, Penguin Adventure, Metal Gear 2, the 2004 turbo R homebrew and the One Chip MSX; MSX2 two years after MSX.
- Wikipedia, “MSX” (consulted September 2026; web, secondary): sales estimates (citing PC Gamer, 2017, and Diamond Online, 2020), school use in the Soviet Union, Arab countries and Cuba, the Sakhr machines, and the turbo R’s 1990 launch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX