W: Questions for interview with Dutch Philips ex-employee

Nothing happening at the moment due to holidays.

He worked at the Dutch sales office, so he wasn't much involved in development choices....

Thanks, @mohai, that's very interesting.

So PDMS system enabled Opera to develop native MSX and MSX2 games, but not in a way they could reuse the code for other platforms?

I'd like to know too. It's mentioned in the links below but without any real details.

https://www.soloretro.com/entrevistas/entrevista-a-opera-sof...
https://trastero.speccy.org/2012/Exterminator/Exterminator.htm

Update: PMDS appears refer to the PM4421 "Philips Microcomputer Development System" or perhaps some other model from that series. Some traces of information can be found online, for example here:

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/SCSSTreasuresCatalog/hardware/TCD-SC...

This system looks similar to a development system from -if I remember correctly- Motorola, that was used by Konami for development of MSX games.

It is interesting that development of MSX software was done with these systems. It appears like the MSX platform was not advanced enough for the development of software for MSX. Lack of good IDE's, debuggers, mass storage, etc.

Thanks for the link!

So this PMDS system was some seriously impressive hardware back then: Motorola 68000 processor, 20MB of hard drive, 256MB of RAM, etc. with a worth of 42k+ Euros in today's money (the article actually quoted a wrong conversion value).

That starts so shed some light on how people were able to produce software on these machines at the high quality standards that they did.

I always wondered how they did it. Because even today, with an emulator and debuggerm I run into bugs that are so obscure or hard to track down that I always wondered if I would have been able to do the same back in the day with just a standard MSX machine.