MSX Fan type ins

Champion (327)

12-01-2015, 06:32

I've downloaded two PDFs of the Japanese magazine MSX Fan. These are No. 9 and No. 10. I'm now planning to type in a couple of short games listings from Issue No. 10. These are called Romincle (P54) and Kinako (P60). I can't read the instructions because they're in Japanese. Can anyone here tell me what these instructions say? Unfortunately, some type ins in MSX Fan contain Japanese characters which aren't available on my Philips VG8235. I'm not sure if any of the listings actually require these characters in order to work. I think some of the characters may be redefined as something else by one or more programs, so I'd have to type in the correct characters for them to be redefined. At least one listing uses the ¥ sign, which I think means / for divide on non Japanese MSX computers. Am I right?

By xperroni

Expert (83)

12-01-2015, 07:21

I am looking into MSX Fan's Vol. 5 No. 10 issue (the only "No. 10" I could find on the web) but couldn't find those listings – the one starting on page 54 is called "Urabyoushi" and the one on page 60, "Silver Snail". Could you confirm the issue's volume and/or share a link to the PDF file?

By meits

Scribe (6533)

12-01-2015, 07:24

I can't come up with a japanese character that might be required except for the yen sign which is a backslash...
So you see ¥, you do \

By CX5Mer

Champion (327)

12-01-2015, 08:19

Sorry, it's the Issue 1989/10. I can't remember where I downloaded it from now. I've typed in Kinako, but it doesn't look like much. There's some kind of jumbled picture made up of 16 tiles. It seems the player has to rearrange the tiles. The cursor keys move a box around the puzzle, but I can't find out what else to do. Line 10 was very confusing and I had to change it to get this program to run. The sprite definition was what caused the problem. Part of it goes +CHR$(24)+"(cursor character)"<"+CHR$(24). The listing seems to say that to type this character you first give the command KEY 1,CHR$(255) and use F1 to type it. It kept saying Syntax error in 10 so I changed this to +CHR$(255)+CHR$(24) . The sprite definition is only made up of 6 pieces of data, as well. Adding another 2 pieces as +CHR$(N)+CHR$(N) makes the line too long.

By CX5Mer

Champion (327)

12-01-2015, 08:40

Meits wrote:

I can't come up with a japanese character that might be required except for the yen sign which is a backslash...
So you see ¥, you do \

OK, thanks for the \ tip. I think I read something like IF A$="(two Japanese characters)" THEN... so in that case it would matter. I think these characters were read in from a DATA statement. I'll have to look for that again later. I've just found something in MSX Fan Issue 198909. In a game which has its title all in Kanji on P52, in line 20 the definition for SPRITE$(1) is given in quotes containing 8 characters, 5 of which are Japanese, while the others are I , @, and R, so I couldn't type that definition. SPRITE$(2) is defined in quotes as 6 Japanese characters! I don't understand this way of defining sprites, but I haven't got those characters on my Philips 8235 anyway.

By Grauw

Ascended (10706)

12-01-2015, 09:18

If you’re looking for Basic listings, try these MCM listing compilation books!

http://msxcomputermagazine.nl/listingboeken.html

By xperroni

Expert (83)

12-01-2015, 10:25

Quote:

Sorry, it's the Issue 1989/10.

Found it.

Quote:

It seems the player has to rearrange the tiles. The cursor keys move a box around the puzzle, but I can't find out what else to do.

The game's controls are explained at page 42. The gist is that you solve the puzzle by switching the positions of pairs of pieces. To do that you place the cursor over the first piece, press B to select it, then move the cursor to the second piece and press C to switch them. When you finish the puzzle a message is displayed showing how long you took, in seconds.

By CX5Mer

Champion (327)

12-01-2015, 17:27

Grauw wrote:

If you’re looking for Basic listings, try these MCM listing compilation books!

http://msxcomputermagazine.nl/listingboeken.html

Great! I'd already found the magazines online, but I didn't know these listings books were also online. Thanks for that! I've been looking at the MSX Fan magazines to find out what the MSX scene was like in Japan and as a challenge to try and use listings from that magazine. I noticed a hard drive interface by ASCII, ads mentioning that software was also available for the PC88, PC98, and X68000, as well as some games about kinky sex.

By CX5Mer

Champion (327)

12-01-2015, 17:32

Thanks! I had no idea what it said. I just typed it in because the screenshot looked colourful, although small, and mainly because it's MSX2. I've also found another listing which used the same weird sprite definition technique that produced a syntax error, including the cursor character, followed by <" etc.

By CX5Mer

Champion (327)

14-01-2015, 07:22

I was looking round for copies of the British magazines "MSX Computing" and "MSX User". I didn't find many of these, but I did find the Spanish magazine "INPUT MSX" on www.archive.org . This magazine republished the programming tutorial listings from the British INPUT magazine, but converted into MSX BASIC. There were very similar listings in the British INPUT magazine for Dragon and Tandy computers, but they have no sprites, fewer colours, different text screen modes, and where PEEK and POKE commands were used, these wouldn't work on MSX and were sometimes different locations even for Dragon and Tandy computers. "INPUT MSX" also had computer news and games reviews, instead of just programming. I don't understand every word, but it's much easier than Japanese!