Category: MSX Development

Everything related to development using the MSX platform or around it

Let’s make an MSX game – Structure and Organization

A couple of weeks ago we started the game concept design and added some basic code that resulted in our sprite being loaded in the graphic mode screen, which was nice and fun. The problem is that our code looks and feels rushed, with lots of hard-coded memory addresses and repeated commands all over the…

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Let’s make an MSX game – Game concept

Any game creation should start with a story, a premise, a reason explaining why things are happening, or anything that justifies the events we will witness develop on our screens. It doesn’t need to be a Shakespearean screenplay or even make any sense at all, as long as it can be translated into a playable…

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Let’s make an MSX game – Starting now!

After studying, reading, and playing a lot with assembly code on the MSX, I finally decided to start to develop a proper game. As Voltaire once said – “Perfect is the enemy of good”, and trying to achieve the best knowledge possible about the subject would end in a quest that could take years and…

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The magic 4×8 font generator

Some time ago Breno Motta, who is one of the members of Facebook’s MSX Brasil Oficial group published a picture of a short BASIC program that creates a “compressed” font style with 4 x 8 pixels on Screen 2 based on the text showing on the screen. It was really interesting to see how the…

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Show your custom font on the MSX screen

In the previous article we learned how to extract the default font pattern from an MSX machine to the TinySprite tool so we could change the design and create our own personal fancy pants font, but all this knowledge is useless if we don’t know how to bring that awesome piece of modern art back…

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Getting the default MSX font pattern

In the last article, we learned how to modify a single character from the original MSX font type, and we also found out the differences between Screen 0 and Screen 1 character, but now what we want to do is to create our own personal font type as artsy as possible. Fancy! Before we start…

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Modifying the MSX character style

Knowing how to print characters on the screen using Assembly is nice, but creating your character style is the kind of thing that makes you feel awesome! At least this is how I felt after doing that, so let’s see if you also have the same satisfaction after this article. The MSX standard provides pre-defined…

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Working with screens and printing texts

In my first article, I did a little introduction about the reasons behind my decision to learn assembly for the MSX, but the most important was the first program I analyzed from MSXPen’s Hello World. It doesn’t seem much but there are a few concepts presented that are very important to notice so I’d like…

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So I decided to create an MSX game

I always found that developing a game should be the apex of a programmer’s capability and the strongest way to prove one person’s skill and since I don’t have a background in development anything related to the subject always fell like some arcane magic and the spiritual invocation was involved in the process. But recently…

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