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Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park (1984)

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MSX is the name of a standardized home computer architecture, first announced by Microsoft on June 16, 1983, and marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation. Microsoft conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various hardware makers of the period.

They were popular mostly in Japan, and several other countries. It is difficult to estimate how many MSX computers were sold worldwide, but eventually 5 million MSX-based units were sold in Japan alone. Despite Microsoft's involvement, the MSX-based machines were seldom released in the United States.

Before the appearance and great success of Nintendo's Family Computer, MSX was the platform for which major Japanese game studios, such as Konami and Hudson Soft, produced video game titles. The Metal Gear series, for example, was originally written for MSX hardware.

Evolution

MSX spawned four generations: MSX (1983), MSX2 (1985), MSX2+ (1988), and MSX TurboR (1990). The first three were 8-bit computers based on the Z80 microprocessor, while the MSX TurboR was based on a custom 16-bit R800 microprocessor developed by ASCII Corporation. By the time the MSX TurboR standard was announced in 1990, only Panasonic was manufacturing MSX computers. Its initial model FS-A1ST met with moderate success, but the upgraded model FS-A1GT introduced in 1991 sold poorly due to its high retail cost of 99800 yen. Production of the TurboR ended in 1993 when Panasonic decided to focus on the release of 3DO.

The MSX3 was scheduled for market in 1990. Delays in the development of its VDP—then named V9978 on the pre-release spec sheets—caused Yamaha to miss its time to market deadline. In its place, an improved MSX2+ was released as the MSX TurboR; features of the new R800 processor such as DMA and 24-bit addressing were disabled. The VDP was eventually delivered two years after its planned deadline, by which time the market had moved on.

In an attempt to reduce its financial loss, Yamaha stripped nearly all V9958 compatibility and marketed the resulting V9990 E-VDP III as a video-chipset for PC VGA graphic cards, with moderate success. Sony also employed the V7040 RGB encoder chip on many other products. MSX-FAN Magazine also mentions the then-impressive power of the V9990, being able to compete with much more expensive hardware such as the Sharp X68000.