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Cartridges

Some cartridges which are useful for developers and programmers:

From left to right:
The first cartridge is an 2 Megabyte MemoryMapper, made by MSX club Gouda.
The second cartridge is the Bert SCSI-interface, made by Hardware Partners Netherlands.
The third cartridge is just a Dos2-cartridge (which I do not own anymore).

I bought this little beauty on the left at the Bussum fair 1999 (version 4.00). The next version (version 4.01) is put in a larger box, and can be bought in combination with an RS232 in the same cartridge (see below for a single Sunrise RS232). It's as well the cheapest as the fastest interface available!

Now, some Musical cartridges:

The cartridges on the left are the following:

- FM-Ship, the Korean FM-Pac. Terrible quality with lots of noise...

- FM Stereo Pak. This is also an FM-Pac, but this one seperates the drums (right) and the other channels (left). There is also an line-in connetor on it.

- Konami SCC. Here mounted in the King's Valley-cartridge. It has a switch built-in to select between the game or soundchip-only. I recently bought an F1-spirit-cartridge where the ROM was removed to have an SCC-cartridge. What a waste...

At the right you see a Toshiba Music-Module. This is one of the popular series, the market however was lead by Philips. This because their Music-Module had 32k SampleRAM mounted in it and it had a mic-in. However, I have built-in some SampleRAM in mine too so now mine is almost equal to the one of Philips.

At the left you an see the latest-of-the-latest for MSX, the MoonSound (well, the design is actually from 1994). It indeed sounds like a moon, it's really an awesome cartridge. 18 channels FM (equals the OPL3 part of the SoundBlaster Pro) and 24 channels Wave. Finally we can play decent samples and MODs on a normal MSX. Bit expensive (about 170 Euro), but the output is much better compared to, the SoundBlaster 16 on the PC, which produces a lot of noise.

Now some telephone-equipment:

At the left you see the RS232 which can be plugged in the (old) MT-telcom modem (where I forgot to take a photo of).

At the right there is a Philips RS232-interface. Which is now, unfortunately, broken.

Bought this cool interface at the MSX Fair 2000 in Oss. It's an RS232-only, but it can also be bought on combination with an IDE-interface (version 4.01) or as a single IDE-interface without RS232. It hasn't got an RS-BIOS, so it doesn't work with most terminal-software, but it does work with Erix and my terminal program downloadable from this page. Why buy this one? Because it's cheap, and although it lacks the RS-BIOS (I think it is possible to put one in the IDE's FlashROM btw) it's got a really good UART (a 16550, the same most PC's have), with large FIFO buffers and hardware flow control.

Other devices:

A philips NMS 1150/00 touchpad. Two buttons, one on the pad and one on the pen (both 1st firebutton). Can be used with for example Philips Designer Plus and from Basic using the PAD function.

This is a Philips NMS 1170/20 barcode reader. Move the pen over a barcode and the number is returned. The dedicated software doesn't recognize a lot of barcode-types, but there is some third-party software which recognizes more. However, it still doesn't recognize most of them (better software needed!). You can also print barcodes and use it for your own administration. That's the real 'practical' use of this thing.

Finally, some software-cartridges:

The cartridges at the left are the following:

- The Treasure of Usas, of Konami.

- Contra, of Konami (now containing Penguin Adventure, the original Contra was broken, and I still had a PA without cover)...

- Metal Gear, of Konami. Also below.

At the left are 3 more game-cartridges:

- Mirai, of Xain. I forgot the title, but fortunately Manuel Soler told me. Everything in the game is English, exept the title... Can you imagine? Well, it's got some quite cool PSG-music.

- Fantasm Soldier, Telenet. Really a great game.

- Yaksa, Wolf Team.

These are the cartridges
on the right:

- Yess!!! Now I know the name of this cartridge, thanks to Albert Beevendorp... It's Fire Ball (a direct translation!!!).

- Darwin 4078. This game was called shit by a lot of people but I must confess I still liked it. But then I had never played Aleste... :)

- Arkanoid 2, revenge of Doh... Do I have to say more? Everybody knows Arkanoid.

- Traffic, a simple 16k game of Sony. Still it's a fun game...

- Eddy II, a drawing-program for the MSX1

- Ah... LOGO... I tried to learn this language a few times but it didn't work out. I already learned Basic and it just had too little possibilities, and it was MSX1-only... By the way, a friend of mine can program in SuperLOGO on the PC.