Thank you for the link, that was very interesting and eye-opening 
I find that retro game-development nowadays is significantly 'easier' because of the excellent debugging functionality that is part of emulators. But, looking at how sophisticated an powerful these HP machines were, it seems the professional game-developers definitely had access to something similar back in the days.
From the YouTube video, it looked like you could even 'emulate' an EPROM that could be plugged into a live MSX machine? It is just speculation from my side if that would work, of course, but potentially that could give you a very good representative test machine for debugging and development
If you look at those brochures and prices of this stuff you know why those Konami games were so expensive 
wow, cool stuff. By looking at the video I'm wondering how tedious it would be to program an MSX game. It seems, I dunno, complex and time consuming.
A world of differences and yet not is how we emulate MSX with openMSX on modern hardware, for example. I'm using just that to code and it it's soooooo much faster than the old days. Hurry for save states
wow, cool stuff. By looking at the video I'm wondering how tedious it would be to program an MSX game. It seems, I dunno, complex and time consuming.
A world of differences and yet not is how we emulate MSX with openMSX on modern hardware, for example. I'm using just that to code and it it's soooooo much faster than the old days. Hurry for save states
I've been on the microprocessor and microcontroller programming business for quite a while, never worked with the gaming industry or gaming in general (I still would like to make a MSX or Android game, but my art and music skills are really lacking 
), and while I did start work with this over a decade later than those guys made those games, I can tell you even with in circuit emulators (like those HP Workstations) costing less than they've costed then and having evolved quite a bit, still this was not something everyone could enjoy using it and I bet quite a lot of MSX games from other publishers did not use that approach. Not being able to do ICE or having conditional breakpoints make your life quite miserable at a times but you can be creative in your approaches to debug stuff. I just remember that I was having quite a hard time debugging issues with my UNAPI driver / bios for OCM / SM-X devices just because emulators do not have the capability to emulate the ESP hardware and the interface connected to it... It took me literally 4 months of hard work to get it about 35% done... I've decided to pick-up Bluemsx code (just because it was a lot easier to compile for Windows than Open MSX that requires a quite beefier machine than I had at that time) and emulated the interface between ESP and MSX with it and connected the ESP via serial to the PC, being able to faithfully reproduce/emulate that on BlueMSX and having breakpoints and all the sort of tools we get was a blast... Took me 2 weeks to program that into BlueMSX, and took me other 2 weeks to finish the remaining 65% of work.
So, having the tools is really nice and can help you to catch bugs quite a lot faster, but that doesn't mean that if you don't have such tools you can't do amazing stuff... Surely there were really talented people that were very creative on how they programmed and debugged even though not having any kind of ICE / Emulator and that created quite a few gems we like. I kind of admire those people, and I bet Konami had quite a few of those too, even though they had the money and tools, which explains why they had so many admirable games working really nice on different platforms.
