#Plug and play ms pacman software#

Panasonic also saw potential in the recent microcomputer revolution. In the late 1970s, the company investigated other business areas outside of home appliances. The decision was a huge success, and Panasonic grew to become one of the largest electronics companies. The Japanese economy was facing a recession after the 1964 Summer Olympics and Panasonic decided to exit the computer business and focus on home appliances. Major Japanese electronics companies entered the computer market in the 1960s, and Panasonic (Matsushita Electric Industrial) was also developing mainframe computers. 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. The hardware design of these computers and the various dialects of their BASICs were incompatible.

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 the Microsoft BASIC interpreter integrated into their on-board ROMs. Many MSX programs were unofficially ported to the SV-328 by home programmers. History The Spectravideo SV-328 is the predecessor of the MSX standard. The Metal Gear series, for example, was first written for MSX hardware. īefore the success of Nintendo's Family Computer, the MSX was the platform that major Japanese game studios such as Konami and Hudson Soft developed for. He felt 'MSX' was fit because it means 'the next of Microsoft', and it also contains the first letters of Matsushita ( Panasonic) and Sony. According to his book in 2020, he considered the name of the new standard should consist of three letters, like VHS.

#Plug and play ms pacman software#

Nishi said that the team's original definition was 'Machines with Software eXchangeability', although in 1985 he said it was named after the MX missile. Others believed that it stood for 'Matsushita-Sony'. In 2001, Kazuhiko Nishi recalled that many assumed that it was derived from 'Microsoft Extended', referring to the built-in Microsoft Extended BASIC ( MSX BASIC). The meaning of the acronym MSX remains a matter of debate. Despite Microsoft's involvement, few MSX-based machines were released in the United States. One source claims 9 million MSX units were sold worldwide, including 7 million in Japan alone, whereas ASCII corporation founder Kazuhiko Nishi claims that 3 million were sold in Japan, and 1 million overseas. There are differing accounts of MSX sales. MSX systems were popular in Japan and several other countries. The first MSX computer sold to the public was a Mitsubishi ML-8000, released on October 21, 1983, thus marking its official release date. Microsoft and Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period, in the same fashion as the VHS standard for home video tape machines. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation. MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983.