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In June 1983, Japan’s ASCII Corporation, led by Kazuhiko Nishi, announced with Microsoft a home computer standard that promised something rare at the time: the same program running on machines from different manufacturers. It was MSX. Forty years later, it is remembered as one of the platforms that trained a generation of programmers, including in Brazil, and it is also part of the story of the founder of ATS.
What the MSX standard was
MSX defined a common architecture that any manufacturer could license: a Zilog Z80A CPU at 3.58 MHz, a Texas Instruments TMS9918 video chip with 16 KB of VRAM, a General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chip, MSX BASIC in ROM and, with a floppy drive, the MSX-DOS operating system. Cartridges, tapes and peripherals from one brand worked on the others.
The standard evolved into MSX2 (1985) and, in Japan, into MSX2+ (1988) and MSX turbo R (1990). Sales estimates vary: Nishi himself cites 3 million units in Japan and 1 million abroad, while other sources give higher figures. The platform was strong in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, the Soviet Union and Arab countries, and received games from studios such as Konami and Hudson Soft. The first two Metal Gear games were born on MSX.
MSX in Brazil: Hotbit and Expert
Brazil had two domestic MSX lines, launched one week apart at the end of 1985. The Hotbit HB-8000, from Epcom (Sharp), arrived in November and was produced until 1988. Gradiente’s Expert XP-800 was presented at the Informática ’85 fair in São Paulo and reached stores in December, later followed by versions such as the Expert Plus and DD Plus with a floppy drive. Gradiente ended the line in 1990 without releasing its own MSX2, and many users upgraded their machines with third-party kits.
A correction to the earlier version of this post: Microdigital’s TK 2000 (1984) was not an MSX. It used a MOS 6502 processor and was partially compatible with the Apple II, being a clone of Multitech’s Microprofessor II.
CPU MSX magazine and Guilherme’s first articles
As the user base grew, specialized magazines appeared. CPU MSX, published by Águia Informática, printed program listings, tutorials and projects sent in by readers and contributors, and that is how many people learned to program: typing the magazine’s code line by line.
Guilherme A. Lima da Silva, now CEO of ATS, published his first articles in CPU MSX in 1988 and 1989, while still a student, and later appeared as a contributor in subsequent issues. The programs were written in MSX BASIC and Z80 Assembly and covered a range of topics:
- Função do 1º Grau (Linear Functions): graphing linear functions to visualize the effect of the coefficients.
- Jogo da Memória (Memory Game): a game to exercise logic and memory.
- O Mundo Perdido da III Dimensão (The Lost World of the Third Dimension): an interactive narrative adventure in the style of the text games of the time.
- Fogo! Fogo! (Fire! Fire!): a game in which the player acts as a firefighter.
- Alfabetos do Graphos III (Graphos III Alphabets): a guide to redefining characters and creating custom alphabets on MSX.
- Letras Ampliadas (Enlarged Letters): a program to print text with larger letters.
The original articles (in Portuguese) can be read as PDFs by clicking the title:
| Article | Issue | Pages | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Função do 1º Grau | 3 | 24–25 | 1988 |
| Jogo da Memória | 4 | 30 | 1988 |
| O Mundo Perdido da III Dimensão | 5 | 44–48 | 1988 |
| Fogo! Fogo! | 6 | 42–44 | 1989 |
| Alfabetos do Graphos III: aplicações práticas | 7 | 28–32 | 1989 |
| Letras Ampliadas | 8 | 20–22 | 1989 |
The MSX legacy today
MSX is still alive. Emulators such as openMSX keep the programs of that era running on today’s computers, the community keeps creating new games and hardware, and the MSX Licensing Corporation, linked to Nishi, has presented new projects under the brand, such as MSX0, announced in 2023 for IoT applications.
For ATS, this story has a practical meaning. The logic learned by writing BASIC and Assembly programs with scarce memory and processing power is the same that guides the development of CFD simulation codes today: understand the physics, write the algorithm and validate the result.
