I´d really like to see the following features in the next MSX Dev games...

- Intros with beautiful screens. Or even better, intros with videos (remember Sonic 3D for Sega Genesis? or Neo-Geo Double Dragon?)

- HUGE enemies, just as huge as the ones in Game Over or Astro Marine Corps. Or even better, enemies larger than the screen.

- Non-black backgrounds during the game.

- Cool video FX.

- Digitized speech.

- I´d say that it´s impossible, but after watching WAVES, I changed my mind... Digitized music for the PSG.

And most important...

Original ideas that usually come from limited gaming plataforms, such as the MSX.

And you guys?

A Metal Slug or Three Wonders clone!

Well, 128kbyte ROM and 16kb RAM, TMS, PSG and 3.58mhz ain't much for all those things you're asking..

Leandro, I think it is feasible, all you need is an HD, not a ROM, and eventually 4MB of RAM (for the digitized FX can help)

Yep, indeed, most of them are very doable; but at a high memory cost!

Two games from MSXdev'05 already included digitized speech (sort of) packed in only 32 KB ROM games.

But I should agree with the rest: memory is the main issue here, even providing that a 1 Mbit ROM using good programming techniques and compression (aka BitBuster) can contain almost 2 Mbit of useful information (data, code, whatever).

I would focus in original games and interesting concepts rather than still graphics, full screen animations and other stuff that does not improve the real gameplay.

In fact, as far as I remember I found all speech in commercials games highly annoying. Was prolly done with a "look, we can have speech!" point of view, but not something very interesting for the gamer. I think the only funny game with speech is "Oh Shit!"

Come on! Laydock series? Fuzzball? they rocked!

apart from that: I hope for quite a few brand new, hopefully original, games. Last year there were many pleasant surprises, and looking at the amount of projects announced already this year will be no exception

No... That´s the point. I´ve seen all of them in an MSX1. At least not simultaneously...

Video: Needless to say that I don´t have the dream of more than five seconds of video. Suppose that the game has 64 kbytes in size (not an absurd for MSX standards). We still have 64 Kbytes for video...

65536 bytes for video. An uncompressed MSX full screen would occupy 12288 bytes. Or to put it simple, 5 frames of video.

Suppose that we decided to reduce video size, about a 256 x 128 pixels windows. That would be similar to a movie aspect ratio. Now each screen would have 8192 bytes. Or 8 frames of video.

But if we have an RLE compression we could simply copy some octets to the next one, both in color and size. The trick would be to analyse image size, etc. in order to create this redundancy (calculations done in a PC, for obvious reasons). Needless to say that this analysis could also grab whole 8x8 squares and transform them into a simple rectangle if we still needed size reduction for each frame. If a compression of 25% is allowed (remembering that color attributes would work great in RLE and frames also encode based on the last one), we´d have about 32 frames of animation. Or about 3 seconds or video in a 10 fps display. That´d be nice for an intro. I´ll try to create a demo in Blitz Basic later.

But needless to say that for me that would just add some spice to the game. Gameplay is indeed most important. However, if someone finishes a game, and there´s loads of space at its end, I dont´t see why it should not be done.

But talking about games, IMHO there are many game styles simply overlooked in the MSX...

1) A top-view multi-directional scroll racing game, like Overdrive, Micromachines or Death Rally.
2) A multi-directional scrolling plataform game.
3) A Contra / Metal Slug like.
4) A Dance Dance Revolution or Bust-a-Groove.
5) A Son Son like.
6) An RPG (even a simple one) like Crystalis.
7) A turn-based strategy game.
8) A Real-time strategy game (needless to say that AI would have to cheat, and enemies would run blockly).
9) A game like Dune (the first one, by Cryo).
10) A decent Double-dragon like game.

Regarding video: within these limited specs I'd never store videoframes in a ROM, no matter what format they are, or how compressed they are. I'd rather make a fully-featured demo-engine then. Apart from that, in our case I fear we really need the full ROM for the game.

Colored non-black backgrounds in a game: that all depends on how you're going to use sprites and char-based players. Backgrounds have been black to supply a dark contrasting color for single-color sprites (it's why I'm less charmed by MoG and its nearly-transparent sprites), an extra black-outline sprite will solve that, but that costs you a sprite, and the MSX1's 4 on a row is quite a pain here.

Character-based players have limitations in how they can move, it's usually per 8 pix. In some games this will be sufficient, but in most games it won't.

About MoG. I agree, Wolf. But a middle-term solution would be...

Draw sprites in the colors 3,7,9,10,11,14,15 (Lightest colors). Use other colors for background GFX.

I'd say: create a game for msxdev06 using your list o' suggestions.. we'll see how happy and motivated you still are in december

Just tips, Wolf, just tips. I don´t have programming skills for the MSX (I will learn it someday, there are other project$ in the spool now). I do trust your MSX knowledge. MSX Dev 06 will also have your game (I really hope so), and I am eagerly waiting to play it.