ChinnyVision - Ep 83 - Sony HitBit 75B MSX System Review

The MSX was an attempt to "standardise" home computing in the same way the IBM PC had standardised business computing. We look at once such example of MSX hardware, the Sony HitBit 75b as well as some of its games.
www.chinnyvisio...
Follow us on Twitter - @ChinnyVision

[@fr_schmidlin]

Thank you for the review! Here's some more background info. Hope it helps: The chip with the big heatsink was the Texas TMS99x9 VDP. You guessed the Z80 chip right, and this one is made by Sharp. And the jumpers on the board were used for the HB-55P model, that had less RAM and a different keyboard. Your machine was a high end home model, targeted at executives and people with money. This machine has an expensive multi-PCB construction, and all chips are discrete. No custom chips were used. OTOH, the Sony HB-10B was a very nice low-cost model released in UK for £89.00, thus much cheaper than the model you have. I wonder why its sales never took off. I heard that there was a lot of prejudice against the Japanese machines published by local magazines and this FUD cemented the MSX future there as users believed in all the BS. Is that really true? I also wonder why Sony never even tried to release an MSX2 in UK as they did in Spain. For example, the HB-F1 MSX2, that machine costed 32,800 Yen (GBP 142) in 1986. Can you imagine what an MSX2 at that price could have done in 1986 in UK? :) BTW, the MSX1 color restrictions were way less stringent than those of the ZX-Spectrum: the MSX1 can place any two colors of its 16 in each per 8x1 block, against the 1 color from 8 (bright/dark) for each 8x8 block of the speccy. Also the MSX1 VDP had hardware acceleration for both sprites and tiles. The ZX-Spectrum ports were awful, very poorly programmed (lots of incompatibilities) and they run slow because, believe it or not, the MSX is emulating the ZX-Spectrum video in real time. As you said: If anyone plans to play ZX-Spectrum games, they will be best served playing them on the speccy. Use the MSX to play real Japanese NTSC games. BTW, the Japanese games run slower on PAL machines for a different reason. And it's the same reason that affected many other consoles, like the NES, SMS, Megadrive and so on: PAL runs on 50Hz and this is 16.6% slower than the 60Hz of the NTSC.

[@CrisPearson]

I picked one of these in the late 90's when you could get all this retro stuff for $5-10 in Australia. I was on a spree back then. The Sony MSX I have also came with the external floppy drive and 2 wireless joysticks. They have IR base stations that plug into the joystick ports. Such a great looking system all around, and like you say, so well built.

[@erolbrown]

Absolutely loving this. Never knew anything about the MSX. Top vid. The quality of that Sony unit was insane.

[@chinnyvision]

I've done some more MSX stuff recently including a look at a Panasonic MSX and 50 games reviewed as well.

[@pin00ch]

@@chinnyvision u cant get these HitBits for less that a few hundred quid on ebay now!! I have several machines and love em.

[@chinnyvision]

@@pin00ch Prices are silly. It's got like classic Jags in the late 80's where cars were fetching 30 grand when 10 years before they were worth 5. And like any market, the prices will correct themselves and people who paid top money will be in for a nasty shock.

[@pin00ch]

@@chinnyvision lets hope so! These old systems are wonderful but im not paying these prices! Thanks for the great work! :)

[@joemorris1072]

As far as I know these machines used the TMS 9918A/9929A series of graphics chips which were used in the CBS ColecoVision and Texas TI-99/4A .... which would explain the chunky scrolling - although they can address 32 sprites in hardware they don't * really * have any hardware scrolling. There are ways to make it do smooth scrolling but it's difficult. The 15 colours plus 1 transparent colour came about because TI intended the chip to have video interfacing capability, for doing titles and captions and such like. It's a shame Amstrad were around really because they didn't make a computer that could contend with the later MSX-2 which they froze out of our market with their undercut prices. We were stuck with the GX4000 and amstrad plus. I enjoyed this video.

[@zumareth]

I had over hundred games for this in the 80's. I remember that Salamander was really good cartridge.

[@chinnyvision]

Salamander is very good but extremely hard.

[@ManuelBilderbeek]

Konami actually did make use of the 2 cartridge slot feature of most MSX machines: if you insert the proper other game cartridge in the 2nd slot, the Konami game in the first slot had some extra cheat options :)

[@MatthewMcGravey]

Just got my MSX yesterday! Your videos are great!

[@fr_schmidlin]

Be welcome to join the MSX community at www.msx.org then! :)

[@MatthewMcGravey]

Thank you @frschmidlin...I will

[@kanopus06]

you brought many memories to me, because i owned the sony hb 75p and a nemesis on a cartridge. the msx was very popular in spain, most of my teenage friends had one. as for games i remember knight mare or the goonies

[@pixels_are_best6218]

The Sony is a heavy machine but try the Panasonic CF-2700. It weighs in at about approximately 3.6 Kg. After using other MSX machines it was quite a shock when I first got mine. A good workout.

[@chinnyvision]

I have since acquired a Panasonic. And yes, much heavier.

[@DarioRuellan]

interesting to see the Mitsumi brand there. My first cd-rom reader was a Mitsumi, and always wondered how popular the brand was in Japan.

[@kingstonlj]

I've always thought of the MSX as a cartridge system, as back in the day all the best games for it were promoted on cartridge, such as Gradius and Yie Ar Kung Fu. Seeing those games in motion, really shows what was possible in the right hands. I'd have been over the moon with Gradius. I have vague memories of knowing a kid with an MSX, who wanted to sell it to buy a C64. I also think I only ever saw a machine being sold in one shop - and that was a Sony specialist that sold TVs and Hi-Fis

[@povvercrazy]

Just picked one up cant wait to explore it

[@fr_schmidlin]

You too, be welcome to join the MSX community at www.msx.org then! :)

[@funkyfox2041]

I've an MSX2 (a Sanyo Wavy 23) I imported through a Japanese auction proxy service a few years ago. Hardly worth the cost; once commission fees and double shipping was considered, it was a $200 (about £140) investment for a unit that has no floppy controller or drive. As such I can't get at a huge chunk of the foreign library, though from what I've read the MSX used the same FDD controller standard we do today, it's just a matter of connecting the thing and FDD Cartridges are rather rare. Every MSX had two cartridge slots, and they could interact with one another (for instance the Konami Game Master, which was rather a primitive Game Genie sort of thing). I'm not sure if there were cartridge+floppy games, but I know the cartridge format fell out of popularity fairly fast in Japan as while it was much faster (the MSX FDD is painfully slow) the smaller footprint didn't offer much room. I've looked into the later models, the 2+ and Turbo R, but they're so insanely expensive I can't get near them, more so because I'm American where the MSX never released, so I have to rely on foreign units with heavy fees and mark-ups.

[@Blerkotron]

Lovely overview again, Chinny - I really like seeing these lesser-known machines in the flesh, so to speak. Back in the day there were always a few MSX tapes in Menzies but no-one actually had one (or even really knew what one was!) so they were always a bit of a mystery. It wasn't until much later, once emulation got going, that I ever managed to see what they could do. Seeing a real one is a nice treat, even if it's just a video. :-)

[@chinnyvision]

+Blerkotron I reckon people who like the Z80 machines will enjoy the MSX, but you do have to dig past a lot of dross and bad Speccy ports to get to the gems. But when you try the cartridge stuff, boy its a different world!

[@NotATube]

+Blerkotron I had an Atari 800XL, which was very much "second tier" in support terms in the late 80s UK, and even to *me* the MSX seemed obscure! Odd that you mention Menzies, since while my memory is vague I think that's the only place I ever saw an MSX game. That was it. I'd read about their introduction in my Dad's two-years-old-plus Your Computer back issues, and some guy in Computer and Video Games had an apparent fetish for Konami MSX carts, but I don't recall seeing any other evidence of them. Never knew anyone who owned an MSX. I was surprised that Mastertronic seemed to have done around as many MSX games as Atari 800 ones. Perhaps, as Chinny comments, this was with one eye on more MSX-friendly markets in Europe? Or maybe more people had them than I noticed.

[@Blerkotron]

+NotATube The only MSX games I ever remember seeing were definitely Mastertronic games, they do seem to have been the best supporter of the platform in the UK.

[@chinnyvision]

I think alot of their conversions were done very quickly from Speccy and CPC assets and with one eye on the Spanish and Dutch market rather than the UK.

[@chinnyvision]

***** Yep. One eye on the Spanish and Dutch market. In 86 I suspect there was also a certain amount of hedging their bets as the media hype was these machines would take off. Like with the Atari Mastertronic games alot of the conversions are quick and messy. Although IIRC John Pickford did Feud himself.

[@I_R]

we bought this model christmas 84 in liverpool for around £100 with track and field and ye ar kung fu 2 (featured carts) bought nemesis later, loved this machine, was very hard to source taped games at the time.

[@jaydy71]

We should just forget about the MSX games that came out of the UK and such, mostly. MSX (even in its initial iteration) was a huge step up over the Spectrum. The lazy UK/Spain etc speccy ports just made it look like it was kind of an over-designed spectrum in terms of capabilities. Especially when it comes to MSX2 and beyond, the Japanese MSX games are where it's at, and there are some real gems there. Even when it comes to MSX1, just compare Nemesis on both machines. Even if the Spectrum version were a fantastic one, it could never come close to the MSX version. Don't focus too much on Sony HitBit machines too much if you want to get an MSX. The Philips ones were built amazingly well too, as were most MSX machines actually. I think it's mostly the very early cheap MSX models that had some Spectrum-like quality issues but those early models are very rare.

[@chinnyvision]

This episode was recorded many years ago and I have featured many other MSX machines since.

[@UnbornApple]

I don’t think the Japanese ASCII Corporation had anything to do with American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the ASCII character encoding you’re confusing it with.

[@achaney]

The Coleco ADAM followed most of the MSX standard, so MSX sorta made it to the USA. Porting apps between the two is not a difficult process and companies like Team Pixelboy have been doing the porting.

[@kodoyama]

Absolutely beautiful design and build quality, as you'd expect from Sony. I had no idea this was ever officially released in the UK. I definitely need to add one of these to my collection. The MSX really did play host to some of the very best games of the 8bit era - in Japan at least.

[@chinnyvision]

On cart yes. Most of the tape stuff on the UK was Spectrum ports running at about 30% slower speed. Early 2017 I have another MSX system review coming up so stay tuned.

[@kodoyama]

Yes, a quick eBay search seems to confirm that. Looks like a Japanese machine is the way to go for gaming, as all the heavyweights in Japan supported the system with some great titles. I think it's worth buying one for Metal Gear alone. Look forward to the update.

[@kodoyama]

Can you actually run Japanese carts on a UK machine then without any hardware mod? Do they run full screen? They'll be 50Hz I guess, but at least that makes a UK machine worth buying, as they're a lot cheaper than going the Japanese import route.

[@chinnyvision]

The hardware mod on an original Megadrive is very easy. My Asian Megadrive is now setup so it can do any combination of any regions at both 50Hz and 60Hz. Dead easy. Sega basically left the links on the board so all you need to do is cut the link they selected and then wire in a switch. Of all the mods I've done, it's the easiest by far. Just some wire, a couple of switches and an iron.

[@fr_schmidlin]

+kodoyama The sad part is that at 50Hz the games run 16.6% slower than in NTSC.

[@JesterEric]

Nice video. This was my first computer. I wanted an Amstrad but my parents thought Amstrad stuff was junk. Cartridge games that I played Nemesis, Road Fighter, Penguin Adventure, Yie Ar Kung Fu 2 and Antarctic Andventure were good. Most of the tape games were lazy ports. Jet Set Willy, Blagger, Special Operations and Shark Hunter are the ones I remember with fondness. Vestron stands out for being bad

[@rooneye]

This thing is fucking awesome. I've seen some that look even cooler, with a joystick attached to the arrow keys and it was in grey and also a red one. It just looks way cooler with the stick IMO. Man, I really wish they weren't 'Speccy' like though :( That's the only thing stopping me from getting one. If they were on par with a C64 I would get one in a heartbeat. In fact I may get one just to use as a cool ass keyboard or do something with a Raspberry Pi or something! Also my god that game Feud at 21:30 looks TEDIOUS. Never seen that game before and it looks boring as fuck. Though graphically it's good, I guess for 'speccy' like. I wish the thing was as good as it is with a cartridge like 23:27, but just the hardware so you could program your own games as good as that :(

[@miked4377]

i love japan retro hardware and games . the reason i collect ! nice machine!! sony makes a all around solid as a german tank!!!

[@BeyondTheScanlines]

Certainly a rather nice bit of kit. But yeah, the fact that the best games are usually cart based, certainly makes it a bit of a pricey one to get - which kind of makes it a tough call :(

[@chinnyvision]

+hellfire64 I hope to look at multi cart options at some point in the future.

[@kristina80ification]

+ChinnyVision - The Retro Game Review Channel I don't know about the original MSX, but I'm pretty sure there are a couple of flash carts for the MSX2, which is a system you should also look into, it had a few improvements over the original MSX and it can still play original MSX games.

[@ManuelBilderbeek]

The chip with the heat sink is the Video Chip (VDP). Looks like this model doesn't have custom chips. The Sharp LH0080A is the Z80 CPU indeed. You missed the Yamaha Y2149 (the AY-3-8910 PSG compatible) SSG. Lots of the Konami cartridge games were also for sale in the Netherlands and Spain back in the day. So there are many in Europe which were not imported Japanese releases and are thus not very hard to find. I find 40 pounds a lot for an MSX1. For that money you can buy an MSX2 in the Netherlands easily. And I think you'll find out that that is the most powerful 8-bit ever made, once you buy one! :) Thanks for this nice roundup.

[@chinnyvision]

+Manuel Bilderbeek Sadly prices in the UK for all 8 bit micros have got silly recently. There's a lot of the inferior Toshiba machines on Ebay often going for £50 or more. I've seen Hit Bits go for £75. The market is in a bubble and you have to be quite wary of what you are buying. Even on the same day machines can go for wildly different prices. Its all getting a bit annoying as its not end users pushing the prices up but dealers pricing people out and buying up machines for stock.

[@chinnyvision]

+Manuel Bilderbeek If I get an MSX 2 I will end up getting it from Holland BTW as the last one I looked at in the Uk went for nearly £80 and it wasn't even in good condition.

[@danmac0]

I just bought one of these with a floppy disk drive and adaptor. Both turn on but I don't have the cable to connect it to a TV to test it

[@Theshadowsnose]

I don't think Nemesis is especially hard to find in Europe. I got mine together with the HitBit and I paid less than 50 Euros. (in the Netherlands) The HitBit is really a nice machine, but I would not recommend it as your first/primary MSX machine. I had problems with it when I wanted to load cartridge images from tape... yes, that is possible, but not easy and it doesn't work on the HitBit because of the built in software. It works perfectly well on other machines and I could replicate the problen in BlueMSX, too. I would recommend getting a MSX2. They come with built in disk drives which makes loading much faster and they come with an improved graphics chips and more memory, which again makes loading cartridge images easier. They are harder to get and more expensive, but you get a lot more out of it.

[@chinnyvision]

+Theshadowsnose Compared to most 8 bit games, MSX Nemesis is fairly rare in the UK due to the MSX's minority status. Copies pop up on Ebay but only every month or so (unless you are willing to import and pay high postage costs). Everything MSX is commonplace in the Netherlands as that was an MSX country. In the UK most stuff is harder to come as the MSX was a minority machine. As for the MSX 2, they are both rare and expensive in the UK. Again commonplace in the Netherlands but postage is high.

[@Theshadowsnose]

I have to admit that shipping will not be cheap. It will be about 40 euro to Germany, where I live, iirc and it should be roughly the same to the UK. If you're lucky and a little patient you can get one for less than 100 pounds including shipping. But I can totally feel your pain getting MSX stuff in the UK. I have the same problem here in Germany when I want to get some Spectrum stuff, or even worse Beeb or Elk stuff. They are really rare over here, but abundant in the UK... I haven't played around with my MSX2 machines too much because both have some small issues that I still have to fix, but just the convenience to load the games from floppy instead of tape is totally worth it. And as an additional bonus you get all the MSX2 games.

[@theseob]

The joystick ports are not standard atari style. A few lines are crossed so you have to have a joystick made specific for the msx, or has a switch for msx mode, or you build a adaptercable for it.

[@chinnyvision]

+theseob Every Atari style joystick I've used works fine. The second fire button may not work but that's part of the course really. Nearly every system has a different setup for fire button 2. You can't use a SMS pad on a CPC and expect fire button 2 to work for example.

[@chinnyvision]

+ChinnyVision - The Retro Game Review Channel And reading up on this, turns out the CPC and MSX use the same setup for button B so if a stick works with button B on a CPC, it will work on an MSX. So Gradius with GX4000 joypads ahoy!

[@theseob]

+ChinnyVision - The Retro Game Review Channel problem is that the +5v and gnd are on different pins. +5v on msx is on pin 7 where button 2 is located on the atari. Gnd is on pin 9 instead of pin 8. So it isn't that save to use a 2 button joystick on the msx.

[@chinnyvision]

+theseob Again, it depends on the stick. It's not safe to plug a Megadrive pad into a C64 for example. Single button Atari style sticks are fine. With 2 buttons you need to check. It's pins 5,7 and 9 that can vary. However, as I say, according to users on MSX.org, GX4000 pads (i.e. 2 button CPC joysticks) are fine.

[@RapideWombaticus]

I liked this review

[@1msx2go]

Great vídeo :)

[@BastiaanvandeWerk]

It's a shame those UK software houses focused on converted speccy games. This really didn't do the system (MSX1) any justice at all. The Japanese software houses (such as Konami and T&E) really used the capabilities of this machine. I remember F1 Spirit (an MSX1 title) being hailed as a great MSX2 game for its awesome graphics by the UK press at the time.

[@chinnyvision]

Mind you the Japanese also preferred cartridge games compared to the cheaper tape games in the UK. Lower margins, smaller user base etc. UK software houses could only spend what sales justified. Catch 22.

[@dykodesigns]

Bastiaan van de Werk I fully agree, the UK developers where not that interrested in the system which is a shame. To me it feels like they saw MSX merely as gloriefied spectrum, they didn't do the hardware justice. The japanse really knew how to get the most out of the hardware, Konami knew how use it right. A game like Nemesis shows the machines true colours, the MSX version is very NES like. It's almost as good except for the scrolling. We had MSX computers in schools in the netherlands. Our school had philips new media systems. The teacher had a lot of disks with copied games on it such as antartic adventure and other MSX1 konami games. There was quite a bit of official educational software for it as well.

[@AmbersKnight]

The idea is sound but the actual MSX 1 standard is pretty lame for the price tag, given you could get better specced machines for near or less than the price offered by the MSX machines. Once the MSX 2 and 2+ standards came in they were actually very good 8-bit machines but by then it was all over as far as the UK 8-bit home market was concerned.

[@chinnyvision]

+Ronnie Bradley I suspect they were better value for money in Japan. Also there were cheaper models. Sony were aiming at the higher end (look at the build quality on the HitBit).

[@AmbersKnight]

ChinnyVision - The Retro Game Review Channel Yeah definitely really good buil;d quality on that HitBit, and I like that but here in the Uk it definitely backfired on them.

[@chinnyvision]

Oh yeah, no way you would have wanted one back in the day. But now as a fan of Z80 machines, I'm really glad I own one even if I sometimes have to wade through poorly ported dross to find the gems. The cart games are something else as well. Make most UK games look cheap and nasty!

[@AmbersKnight]

ChinnyVision - The Retro Game Review Channel I must admit when I saw the MSX version of Continental Circus I was shocked at how bad it was. It does surprise me that the 2 main 16 bit computers, the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, didn't go with a cartridge slot, or at least an interface for one like the old Speccy had for the ROM cartridges. makes me wonder what wonders they could have done with the Mig with a cartridge.

[@NotATube]

+Ronnie Bradley As I mentioned elsewhere (in response to someone expressing a similar wish!), the Atari ST *did* have a cartridge slot- unfortunately for you, it doesn't appear to have been used for games, probably because it was restricted to 128KB AFAICT. The few things it *was* used for were utility carts and peripherals.

[@CrazyBossDK]

Konami made the best MSX games. Maybe the best one was NEMESIS III, or Gradius III which also had the extra SCC chip build in :)

[@VectorOmega]

Will you be reviewing these soon? 1. Fujitsu FM-7 series 2. Sharp X1 and X68000 3. Fujitsu FM Towns

[@chinnyvision]

Very unlikely on the budgets I'm operating on. I don't run adverts on here so funds are always limited to whatever is left over from the Patreon and fundraisers such as the calendar. There are two new systems coming though, the VIC 20 and hopefully the Archie (if the one I bought can be fixed).

[@PMCRetroGamer]

what was the tape loaders like? were they close to the spectrum with the similar cpu. how did you load games from tape on the msx?

[@chinnyvision]

+Phillip Croxford A lot of poor ports from the Spectrum on tape. Not all by any means but the European tape software generally seems to be of a lower standard than the Japanese cartridge software (over there they didn't use tape much).

[@NotATube]

I think the Japanese would have been prepared to pay that much for MSX, partly because (i) they tended to be more patriotic, (ii) all their home manufacturers were supporting it, (iii) the Japanese seem generally prepared to pay more for electronics(?) and (iv) the Japanese market is generally quite different. But £300 in the UK for a machine that was in the ZX Spectrum / Commodore 16 ballpark?! Even MSX's attempt at a would-be "standard" in general is that the Spectrum and C64 were already de facto standards that the "network effect" of existing support was going to make hard to supplant. Don't know how much the C64 was in mid-to-late 1984, but the 1985 Argos catalogue (online!) has it at £189. While it's weak on the OS/BASIC side and its keyboard and general construction probably isn't as nice as the Hit Bit's, the internal hardware was clearly better in many respects, e.g. scrolling, sound. Price over 50% higher than a Commodore 64 for a Commodore 16-alike? Can't see why it flopped! (Ahem...)

[@chinnyvision]

+NotATube I suspect in Japan it was cheaper as well. Then it would also need to be shipped over here, localised etc. Not forgetting Sony is a premium brand. I expect the uglier Toshiba (which keeps cropping up on Ebay, often unused) was a fair bit cheaper And trust me, the Hit Bit feels like a quality bit of kit. Had a friend using it the other day. He's not a fan of old computers as such but he loves electronics. He was all over it. Its just so solid, every part is quality. Even the little design details like the two metal bars to keep the keyboard rigid. I have so many computers in this room with me and the Hit Bit sits head and shoulders above every one of them for general build quality. It's lovely. Even the power switch feels like it comes from an expensive Hi-Fi separate. Sony also did a Hit Bit as a MSX2. Now that should be the correct blend of hardware to build quality!

[@fr_schmidlin]

+NotATube The Sony HB-10B was a lower cost model that had a price tag of £89.00, so price wasn't the problem. This machine sold like hot cakes in Spain, that had the same competitors as the UK market.

[@pedropimbax9339]

What switches this keyboard? Rubberdome? Topre?

[@chinnyvision]

Too long ago for me to remember I'm afraid. It's 2 years since I did this video.

[@JnAPhotography]

A game definitely worth checking out is Konami's Knightmare: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eXfKnX6Gq7aghJY

[@carlosfuno8144]

👏

[@helderoliveira2994]

Basically it was the Playstation Zero

[@chinnyvision]

Not really. Anyone could make an MSX, it wasn't a Sony product.

[@ManuelBilderbeek]

Konami actually did make use of the 2 cartridge slot feature of most MSX machines: if you insert the proper other game cartridge in the 2nd slot, the Konami game in the first slot had some extra cheat options :)