Hello! I'm kind of a new user (signed up for the Dutch part of the forums two weeks ago or so but it doesn't seem very lively there at the moment 
) so I thought I'd introduce myself here aswell since the English boards seem to be where everyone is hanging out 
I got my first MSX computer a few weeks ago, kind of by accident (even though I have been interested in them for a while now). There's a retro computershop in my town but they only go as far back as the NES and the Sega Master System. I was talking to the owner's wife while I was there and she mentioned that they had this "strange computer" in storage that they didn't really know what it was. I instantly thought it might be an MSX computer and indeed, it was a Philips VG8020. Since they had no idea how much it was worth (they just do the popular stuff like Nintendo and Sega, really) I made them an offer the next day (after looking up similar systems online since despite being able to recognize an MSX computer I had never actually owned one) and now I have my first MSX machine
It came with the instruction booklet (in Dutch 
), a datasette, three cartridges and all the stuff needed to use it. First problem after I got home, some of the keys didn't work. So I instantly had to open the thing up to check what could be causing that. After clearing out a small dust village they keys are now all working fine though. I gave the whole thing a quick clean and it's in much better shape now
Two reasons I got interested in MSX computers: Philips made them and me being from the Netherlands (and near the Eindhoven area which is where Philips is from) just made them very interesting to me. Aside from that there's the fact that I remember in my primary school, we had one MSX machine. I'm not entirely sure if it was the same Philips model as the one I have or something very similar, but I clearly remember the MSX keyboard layout and when I started reading about MSX computers a while back I've been wanting to have one (I'm really into retro computing at the moment, also got myself a bunch of Commodore computers a while back, I did notice right away that the build quality of the Philips machine is a lot better than that of the Commodore machines, they were truly made to be cheap 
)
I hope that I'll also be able to find out more about how to program for the MSX, I'm sure there's a lot of information about that available but I haven't been able to find a comrehensive guide yet (I'm just going to start off with Basic but I'd like to move on to something more powerful later to see if I can push the hardware a bit ). I think ideally I would just develop on my Windows machine and then eventually transfer the software to the actual machine using some cartridge that allows me to use an SD-card, this is what I plan to do on my C64 (yes, also looking to write software for that thing but that seems easier because someone actually created an IDE that runs on Windows for C64 software, haven't been able to find anything like that for the MSX).
But anyway, this story is getting long, I hope to be able to geek out about MSX and other retro computer stuff here with fellow enthusiasts, learn a thing or two and just have a good time 
If anyone knows a reliable place in the Netherlands to find an MSX2 computer I would love to hear it btw, Marktplaats (Dutch Ebay) is probably one of the worst websites in the world for buying or selling anything :/
