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MSX is the name of a standardized home computer architecture, first announced by Microsoft on June 16, 1983. It was conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation. It is said that Microsoft led the project as an attempt to create unified standards among hardware makers.〔(Kazuhiko Nishi - eNotes.com Reference )〕 The system was designed to be plug and play, thus requiring no user intervention either on hardware or software to install extensions. The MSX-based machines were seldom released in the United States,〔(Faceoff: will MSX be a success in the United States )〕 but were popular in Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, South American countries like Brazil and Chile, and in the European market in countries like the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy and Finland. To a lesser extent, the MSX platform was also popular in the former Soviet Union and Kuwait.〔(Giant Bomb website )〕〔(Ultimate MSX FAQ )〕 The MSX was released almost at the same time as the Nintendo's Family Computer in the countries where were both were marketed, becoming Nintendo's main competitor. It is one of the major platforms for which major Japanese game studios, such as Konami, Sega, Compile, Falcom and Hudson Soft, produced video game titles. The ''Metal Gear'' series, for example, was originally written for MSX hardware. ==History== In the early 1980s, most home computers manufactured in Japan such as the NEC PC-6001 and PC-8000 series, Fujitsu's FM-7 and FM-8, and Hitachi's Basic Master featured a variant of Microsoft's Basic interpreter integrated into their on-board ROMs. The hardware design of these computers and the various dialects of their ROM Basics were incompatible. Other Japanese consumer electronics firms such as Panasonic, Canon, Casio, Yamaha, Pioneer, and Sanyo were searching for ways to enter the new home computer market. Nishi proposed MSX as an attempt to create a single industry standard for home computers. Inspired by the success of VHS as a standard for video cassette recorders, many Japanese electronic manufacturers along with GoldStar, Philips and Spectravideo built and promoted MSX computers. Any piece of hardware or software with the MSX logo on it was compatible with MSX products of other manufacturers. In particular, the expansion cartridge form and function were part of the standard; any MSX expansion or game cartridge would work in any MSX computer. Nishi's standard was built around the Spectravideo SV-328 computer.〔(The history of Spectravideo ) samdal.com, retrieved 2012-12-20〕 The standard consisted primarily of several off-the-shelf parts; the main CPU was a 3.58 MHz Zilog Z80, the graphics chip a Texas Instruments TMS9918 with 16 KB of dedicated VRAM, the sound and partial I/O support was provided by the AY-3-8910 chip manufactured by General Instrument (GI), and an Intel 8255 Programmable Peripheral Interface chip was used for the parallel I/O such as the keyboard. This was a choice of components that was shared by many other home computers and games consoles of the period, such as the ColecoVision home computer (an emulator was later available with which MSX systems could run some of its software), and the Sega SG-1000 video game system. To reduce overall system cost, many MSX models used a custom IC known as "MSX-Engine", which integrated glue logic, 8255 PPI, YM2149 compatible soundchip and more, sometimes even the Z80 CPU - however, almost all MSX systems used a professional keyboard instead of a chiclet keyboard, negating the lowered cost of components. Consequently, these components alongside Microsoft's MSX BASIC made the MSX a competitive, though somewhat expensive, home computer package. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「MSX」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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