The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.
Note that, despite the friendly play button circle, this is not an embed. Clicking on the image will take you off-site.
Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.
Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!
Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:
The Atari brand has been in so many hands, and been used for so many things (including, most recently, NFTs and hotels) that making sense of it all is maddening. Christ Trotter on the atomicpoet Pleroma instance made a fairly lengthy series of posts laying it all out that, to my eyes, is accurate. He may actually know more about their history than I do, although pride makes me loathe to admit it!
The whole thread is useful, but here’s the first post on it, presented as screenshot because WordPress doesn’t yet support embedding that kind of thing directly. I don’t know why it’s so blurry, that seems to be WordPress again.
This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?
This is a slightly edited version of a diatribe I emitted on mefi.social. I really want people to see it and think about what it means though.
A dismaying thing is how much of current gaming culture is locked behind Discords, and/or is revealed to the world only through Youtube videos.
These two phenomena are the result of the Myth of the Benevolent Corporation, which was largely started by early Google and their “Do No Evil” policy, which sustained the early web for a good while but itself did huge damage to online culture, and yet promises to do much much more, when they decided that profits mattered more.
When Youtube started, everyone saw it as a kind of miracle. In the early days videos were limited to 10 minutes, but even so they began attracting a huge amount of material. When they switch to just letting people upload anything for free, that exploded.
It’s not just gaming stuff that I’m talking about really, although as a popular fixation for people it’s kind of a hint of things to come. Lots of information is currently exposed to the world through Youtube videos and minidocs.
From U Can Beat Videogames’s video on Shadowrun. It’s great, but some day it’ll be gone. How will people beat an ancient obscure SNES game like this then?
But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].
Of course, it’s not like videos like these have any other hope as it stands. A collection of the incredible size of Youtube’s is so big that only a government could realistically do it, and most of those have their own issues when it comes to continuity of mission and funding.
But combined with Discords as a means of communication, and (bizarrely) information, a lot of online culture is currently a black box to outsiders, unless they sign up to dozens of miscellaneous Discords. And there is a limit to the number of servers you can follow, which is reputed to be 100. (It used to be that Google could get you a quick answer to a question like how many Discord servers can one user follow, but now I’m not sure.)
Social media companies, who all seem to be racing each other to make their services as crappy as possible to non-paying users, are no solution either.
There used to be a Mastodon search engine, at search.noc.social. This is what remains of it. (Yes, it’s just a white page with the text “project has been removed.”)
Fediverse to the rescue! But no, a lot of it is transitory, sometimes intentionally so! In some circles even suggesting that Mastodon be just searchable, let alone preservable, will subject you to a storm of criticism. It’s true that being opaque to general search helps protect vulnerable users, a noble cause, but it also makes Mastodon’s discoverability very low. (One solution, which I think I mentioned here before, is an opt-in search solution called tootfinder, but it currently only goes back three months.)
And I don’t see many other people talking about this, even though the sudden decay of Twitter and Reddit has made this essential problem more visible than its been for a long time.
I feel like going onto every Discord I follow, gaming research ones in particular, and ringing alarm bells, but it’s a task just to find them out, and really what good would it do. People use Discord because it’s free and easy and they even maintain the server for you. These kinds of spaces have always relied on some patron to uphold them; the only real differences are before they were visible to search and the Wayback Machine, and now, it’s a single company that will increasingly hold access to these places obscured behind a storm of pleas to subscribe to Nitro, and someday will delete them entirely.
The Zelda II Randomizer Discord. As a community, it works okay. As a way of storing information, well, it sucks rocks. As a way of preserving everything, it’s DOOOOOMED.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, there are vast swaths of online culture that are already lost permanently: the Compuserve forums of the era immediately preceding the rise of the web. Compuserve was once the biggest online presence. And AOL, which grew to eclipse it in size, likewise holds (still? I don’t know, it’s on AOL!) a vast amount of early internet culture.
Newsgroup archives are a bit better off because of their openness, although nowadays it’s mostly seen as just a way to enable piracy.
Still, essential web services are at least preservable. The Fediverse resembles those, at least in principle, so it’s immediately better off than Discords and Youtube, for making old information findable, even if it’s currently really hard to do it (and some people are outright opposed to it).
It is time to wrap this all up. I say things like this frequently these days. Maybe someday someone will listen. The power and reach of the internet doesn’t have to rely on big companies. I also have qualms about the ability of a even a horde of individual servers to keep things going, mind you. All those dead links on all those surviving old websites, they once represented living projects too.
I think what we ultimately need is an independent organization that can keep up old sites and communities, and provide a place for new ones, maybe supported by donations, without the explicit profit motive of the bigcorps. Something that looks like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia. There’s places where you can host plain websites even today, like the Tildeverse (but its individual pieces, like Fediverse servers, always feel like they could vanish at any time), ancient-yet-still-here Angelfire (of which, like the Lycos it’s a part of, it’s amazing still survives), or the newer, enthusiast-focused Neocities (which too has no guarantee of longevity).
Companies can live longer than people, or their interest cycles. It doesn’t feel right that something like a website require someone to dedicate their life to maintaining it, but due to the dysfunctional way our economic has come to see companies (involving the hateful words fiduciary duty) are also vulnerable to the winds of change. It feels like a non-profit, or at least a durable privately-held company that isn’t pushed by rapacious groups to chase every profit lead no matter how disastrous, may be a solution. I don’t know if it really is, though. I’m just watching this, mostly from the outside. I hope someone can do something though, to overturn the cold tides of entropy. I really do.
Reddit has been severely wounded. I’m sure it’ll keep going for a while, there’s still a lot of people who use it, but it no longer feels like an unalloyed good, it’s obvious that its owners care more about profits than their unpaid mod staff, and a lot of the best users, the ones who produce the really interesting posts and comments, are leaving for other climes.
And… I’m glad. Even though I used Reddit, and Twitter too, I felt bad for doing so. Single websites should not be such a large part of the internet. These are ultimately reimplementations of older ideas of course, community discussion sites go all the way back to Usenet, which predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade. The main reason anyone cares about them is that there’s already lots of people there, and their value grows as more people are involved with them.
Anything that breaks the hold of bigcorps over substantial pieces of the internet is a positive thing, IMO. All those people who are leaving Twitter for Bluesky or Threads, I feel like I need to warn them, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be put back into this situation again, no internet site of service run by venture capital, or put under the gun by shareholders and “fiduciary duty,” can escape being ruined. It is an impossibility, the drive for ever-greater profits will inevitably ruin them. This ends the editorial portion of this post.
The most promising alternative to corporate ownership and control at the moment is the “Fediverse,” a collection of sites that all talk to each other and interoperate. Whether it’ll be the solution to the capitalist internet remains to be seen, there’s lots of challenges ahead for them, but one small current win is a post on lemmy.world’s Games board, asking users for their favorite obscure games. It’s got rather a lot of comments of people, all reminiscing about their favorites. It’s worth a good look, for you’re both certain to find people who love the same neglected titles that you do, and a whole bunch of games to investigate that you’ve never heard of before. It’s a marvel.
