oldMSX was a home computer standard popular mainly in Japan and Europe. It's where Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series was born.
- Maker: ASCII/Microsoft
- Since: 1983
This platform is currently a catalog only — in-browser play is on the way. You can still download titles where a file is available.
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MSX was not a machine but a standard, announced in June 1983 by Kazuhiko Nishi of ASCII Corporation together with Microsoft. The idea was to do for home computers what VHS had done for video: agree on a common specification so that software from one manufacturer ran on hardware from another. Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Toshiba, Yamaha and a dozen others built MSX machines, all sharing a Zilog Z80A at 3.58 MHz, a Texas Instruments video chip with 16 colours and 32 sprites, and a General Instrument sound chip with three channels. MSX2 arrived in 1985 with a far better Yamaha video processor and 256 colours, followed by MSX2+ and, in 1990, the turboR.
Where MSX actually mattered
The standard never took hold in Britain or the United States, but it was significant in Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil and the Soviet Union, where Yamaha MSX machines were installed in school computer rooms. Konami became the platform's defining publisher, and its cartridges often contained an extra sound chip, the SCC, which added wavetable channels the base hardware did not have — first used in Nemesis 2 and then in Nemesis 3, Space Manbow, King's Valley II and SD Snatcher. Konami also gave the MSX its most historically important game: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, directed by Hideo Kojima in 1990, laid down the stealth mechanics the PlayStation series later made famous. Other highlights include the open-structure adventure Maze of Galious, Vampire Killer — the MSX2 counterpart to Castlevania — Compile's shooters Aleste and Aleste 2, the action RPG Golvellius and Falcom's Xanadu.
MSX games on oldgame.cz
Our MSX section is the second largest on the site after DOS, with 2,928 titles, but it is a reference archive rather than a playable one: none of these entries currently run in the browser. Each page carries the release year, developer, publisher, genre and a description, which for a platform this poorly documented in English is often the useful part. Where a title is still sold in some form, the page links to the official store.