Hello there, Being from a spectrum background concerning the 8 bit machines, i've always wondered what msx users(who got a lot of spectrum ports)actually thought of the games?

I know manic miner, certain "ultimate play the game" games and countless others were ported straight over to the msx(ignoring its extra power), but did the msx owners ever enjoy the games?

I found classics like manic miner on the spectrum to be great fun, but what did you(the msx owners)think of them?

I'm expecting some harsh comments here about the spectrum was crap and so were the games
But i can take it

The problem was, that the porting to MSX was often done bad, and on the other hand, you had the excellent Konami MSX games that stole all the attention

Actually the port was crap, not the game itself.
The HW, especially wrt the VRAM architecture, are different, a direct port from spectrum is usually slow and unplayable.
If on speccy the game is fine, when monocrome gpx is compensated by the gameplay,
on msx you get both crappy monocrome grpx and slow and crappy gameplay.

Quote:

Hello there, Being from a spectrum background concerning the 8 bit machines, i've always wondered what msx users(who got a lot of spectrum ports)actually thought of the games? I know manic miner, certain "ultimate play the game" games and countless others were ported straight over to the msx(ignoring its extra power), but did the msx owners ever enjoy the games? I found classics like manic miner on the spectrum to be great fun, but what did you(the msx owners)think of them? I'm expecting some harsh comments here about the spectrum was crap and so were the games But i can take it

Paul, in game scenario, any game should be written by taking in account specificity and limits, of the platform, not barely doing a port of one platform into another with the main goal to take the less time to do.

MSX users typically do not say that zx was crap, usually they complain about the sloppy ports. Using an msx as if was a spectrum is (as using any other computer as it was another) extremely stupid.


What you can say if a exclusive ZX Spectrum 2+ game sound with the bepeer instead of the psg?
I think you say:"ZX spectrum + 2 had psg, the game is sloppy programmed!"

Well, the speccy games were somewhat retro compared with the later MSX(2) stuff.. I doubt there's much difference between asking us what we think of speccy games and of early non-ported MSX1 games.. Games in that era were simply a conventional product of its time.

Hi Paul

Controls were often sloppy, not taking into account the MSX actually had cursor keys. I've never really enjoyed those "ultimate play the game" games due to massive slowdown (not on the Speccy, that), and monochrome graphics. Though some ports were done nicely, Auf Wiedersehen Monty for example: nice effects with scrolling tiles eg. animated waterfalls, great music, and using the MSX PPI for sound effects. I quite enjoyed the miner Willy series too, I remember I was impressed by that piano on Manic Miner's titlescreen ;p

Auf Monty, Head over Heels, Gun Fright, Knight Lore, Astro Marine Corps... there's a lot of *good* ports, and they are quite fun to play!

The most noticeable thing is mostly none of the ports used the MSX sprites, they just convert the drawing routines to MSX - mostly because to use sprites and to get a really fast vram write would mean to re-write the whole game, and as allways it's a time x money thing...

It's a shame Turrican was never ported to MSX, it's amazing on the Spectrum side... but I guess it would be too slow to be played once ported...

There was some notable exceptions about using the sprites right over a spectrum port, as in Gremlin Graphics' Future Knight (and Terramex?) or the weird port of Tai-pan (why the hell the sprites are blue!?).