Javi Lavandeira, the webmaster of www.aamsx.org, is currently in Japan
and he had yesterday an interview with Nishi, Yamashita, Yokoi and Gotou
>from ASCII corp. This is the english translation of the message he sent
to the spanish MSX mailing list:
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ASCII wants to make a new MSX. And this is not a rumour. I repeat: this
is not a rumour. And it is not only that "they want" to make it, but
actually they are already working on it. It is a three phase project:
* Phase 1 - Develop the ASCII official MSX emulator
This emulator is already almost finished and it will be presented on
Den-yu land 2000. It will emulate MSX, MSX2 and MSX2+ as well as a PC
can emulate it. If I understood correctly, from now on they do not worry
about Turbo-R. Once finished, english, spanish and portuguese versions
of the emulator will be developped. And *MAYBE* (I repeat: maybe) MSX
DataPack (+1000 pages) will be translated to these three languages.
Phase 1 status: The emulator will be finished in approximately one
month.
* Phase 2 - Develop and sell software which will work both in real MSX
and in the emulator
ASCII will release an internet server for selling MSX software. There
will be free software and pay software. Nishi already spoke with Konami
and Namco and they will sell here their old programs *AND THE ONES
DEVELOPPED FROM NOW ON*. Amongst the free software there will be
software from amateur groups (not necessarily japanese). ASCII will
obtain a percent of the benefits for the software sell through this
server.
Phase 2 status: The software to be used for the server is already
developped, and ASCII has negotiated with NTT the internet payment
system details. When the emulator is officially released, the server
will be put online.
* Phase 3 - Develop a new MSX.
The new MSX will have a 100 MHz or 120 MHz Z80 , 4Mb RAM and 4Mb VRAM.
About the rest of the hardware, they do not know yet exactly what they
will do, because there is two simultaneous developping works:
1) ESE Artist's Factory is using reverse engineering to build the MSX
circuits using PLD technology. There is already finished and 100%
working PSG, SCC and V9918. Z80 is not needed to be copied because it is
a very common chip. Now they are working on V9938/58.
2) ASCII has already negotiated with Sega the making of the new machine.
Yokoi commented that they can start to produce it when they wants to do
it.Contrarywise to the ESE option, now all the MSX circuits are
integrated in one, so production is very cheap. They are negotiating now
the selling price: 19800 yens the complete machine. ASCII finds this
price too cheap (this is very logical because they want to earn money).
Phase 3 status: negotiating with SEGA while ESE work on the VDP. The
ones who first finish will win, because ASCII do not want to wait.
Yamashita says that now is the perfect moment to release a cheap home
computer which can be a reasonable alternative to PC.
As you can see, things are not as bas as we though . Will we
successfully reach phase 3? It depends on the amount of software sell,
because what ASCII wants is to earn money selling software through its
internet server. Benefits for selling computers will be very small.
By the way, I did not only to hear during the interview. One of the
problems exposed by Yamashita is the VDP: they doubt between use a VDP
at the same speed, so the new machine will be unusable (4Mb VRAM with a so
slow VDP is a nonsense), or put a new VDP four times faster but
incompatible with old software. I proposed a solution: enable Z80 to
directly access VRAM by mapping it into its addressing space as if it
were normal VRAM (same thing is done by Ademir Carchano's ADVRAM ). It
seems that they had not though on this solution and they liked it a lot,
so if the new MSX uses this system you know who you must thank! ;-)
Wednesday 23 at 13:00 (Tokyo hour) I'll return to ASCII to speak again
with Yamashita, Yokoi and Gotou. If you have any suggestion, send me via
email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (don't use the mailing list, because there will
be a discussion with thousands of messages about the characteristics
which the new MSX should incorporate).
Regards.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.aamsx.org
*** NEXT BARCELONA MSX USERS MEETING: DECEMBER 9TH ***
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Konami Man - AKA Nestor Soriano (^ ^)v
Itsumo MSX user
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://konamiman.msx.tni.nl
Kyoko Koizumi home page (under construction):
http://www.geocities.com/tamachan1976/index.html
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