MRC2k11

If you've ever entered one of the game contests of the past decade, you'll know the feeling after you submitted your entry at 23:50. It's that feeling where suddenly all the stress has gone, the feeling that at last you can go to bed again at decent hours, and the joy of awaiting the first reactions under the relevant newspost. Us presenting this whopping new website to you gives us the same feeling, pleasure and energy. On your screen is the all-new MSX Resource Center, at last! And the words 'at last' are truly there for a reason: it wasn't an overnight process, far from it.

It started with snout and Wolf chatting about which aspects could be improved towards the old website (which we refer to as MRC2k2). The concept of making an MRC2k7 was born. The first internal version of the new MSX Resource Center actually looked like MRC2k2, with the old menu at the right being wider and the difference between large newsposts and small newsposts gone. Years went by; MRC2k7 became MRC2k8, and later on it was renamed to MRC2k9. Sander van Nunen noticed that even activity at concept level had stalled and suggested to talk Jorito into the project. Sander started sketching his vision about the revamped MRC and quite soon his sketches looked somewhat like what you're seeing now. From that point Jorito started implementing these sketches, step by step, with admins looking over his shoulder and sometimes steering a bit. While admins have had their role in all of this, it's only fair to point out where credits are due: Sander van Nunen for the visual and functional design, and Jorito for all the hard work coding this new place and tactically ignoring further feature requests that would have moved this project to the year 2014. As game developers will know: sometimes just being a coder isn't enough, you need a manager too who knows when to pull the right strings, and these two gents certainly showed their management skills during the process.

So, obviously a lot of new things for you to discover here, let's introduce you to some of these!

• An all-new look, warping the MSX Resource Center to present day standards. The news is represented using headlines rather than having all the news on a large page, a big conceptual change.
• There is YouTube integration which presents you the latest MSX-related videos automatically.
• There is a new CMS for the admins (yay!), and there is wysiwyg editing for everyone - no need to learn the classic html tags any more!
• We have added a spotlight section for news which we consider important. Typical examples are fair announcements, contests, and major releases of products. This way, MSX fans that don't visit us daily (why?!) don't have to miss out on the most significant MSX news.
• News tweets. These are basically one-liners for news facts that would've been too small to write about, or would've been ignored on the previous website for not being 100% relevant or interesting for a wide MSX audience. In short: anything goes, and thus the news tweets should result in more news than before.
• You can finally have your own avatar.
• There is a new ranking. If you'd hoped to, at some point, reach the status of MSX Legend, MSX Guru, MSX Master and such, then you're too late. Long live the new ranking!
• We have added new search functionality. Try it, you'll love it.
• We have added a wiki. Once again: try it, you'll love it. The wiki is perfectly in line with our wish to preserve MSX information, and frankly: it's simply great fun too. The brand new scene wiki has been Wolf's wish for many years and was in fact the original reason why he joined the team. There are over a hundred scene groups already, and that's probably not nearly the end of it. A lot of articles are stubs however, as some groups have been lost in obscurity. If you know things about such groups or if you are or were actually part of such groups, by all means: make the wiki complete. Add trivia, add funny stories, complete the credits, make the wiki an interesting read for newcomers and old MSX people who might return to the MSX scene.
• Manuel Bilderbeek kindly donated his MSXFAQ to us, with the intention to have people converting all the information into separate and 'living' articles. Also present in our wiki are new articles about creating content, making it a place where both experienced and novice MSX developers could take a look. NYYRIKKI deserves a fair credit for adding his vast technical programming knowledge to our wiki. Designer and crew member Robert Vroemisse is currently working on articles about drawing for MSX, aimed at both experienced and novice artists. Some of our admins will moderate the wiki and keep things tidy and structured. There are stubs everywhere, the wiki is a big place and we could surely use your help. It's Christmas soon, how about you adding something to the wiki during these days? A wiki update is automatically placed onto the frontpage, so your efforts will be seen!
• We have a twitter page now. News which we consider relevant will be tweeted around the globe.
• The photo section has been improved greatly, with higher resolution versions of photos where possible.
• No more individual language pages, but everything together, cosy! Speaking of languages: you can now provide translations to newsposts - just click a dark flag in the header of a newspost and off you go. If your hands are itching to translate something, feel welcome to do so!
• We've added Japanese, Korean and Arabic to our set of languages.
• New versions of our smileys.

Without doubt, you may encounter a bug here and there. Don't worry, it will get repaired, and the best way to have it fixed is when you report these. Don't forget to mention the URL, your OS and browser (+version). And now: enough with the talking. Have a look at our brand new website and most of all: we hope you enjoy it!