[1][2] It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation.

[12] Before 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.

[14] 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 Japanese economy was facing a recession after the 1964 Summer Olympics and Panasonic decided to exit the computer business and focus on home appliances.

Inspired by the success of VHS as a standard for video cassette recorders, many Japanese electronics manufacturers (Including GoldStar, Philips and Spectravideo) built and promoted MSX computers.

To reduce overall system cost, many MSX models used a custom IC known as "MSX-Engine", which integrated glue logic, 8255 PPI, YM2149 compatible sound chip and more, sometimes even the Z80 CPU.

On June 27, 1983,[18] the MSX was formally announced during a press conference, and a slew of big Japanese firms declared their plans to introduce the machines.

The Japanese companies avoided the intensely competitive U.S. home computer market, which was in the throes of a Commodore-led price war.

A new MSX3 was originally scheduled to be released in 1990, but delays in the development of its Yamaha-designed VDP caused it to miss its time to market deadline.

[20] In its place, the MSX TurboR was released, which used the new custom 16-bit R800 microprocessor developed by ASCII Corporation intended for the MSX3, but features such as DMA and 24-bit addressing were disabled.

[citation needed] The VDP was eventually delivered in 1992, two years after its planned deadline, by which time the market had moved on.

In an attempt to reduce its financial loss, Yamaha stripped nearly all V9958 compatibility and marketed the resulting V9990 E-VDP III as a video-chipset for PC VGA graphic cards, with moderate success.

Many Roland S-series audio/music digital sampler/synthesizer keyboards and rack module units are based on the MSX operating system.

By default, MSX machines have a hardcoded character set and keyboard scan code handling algorithm.

While MSX has full application software compatibility at the firmware (BIOS) level, due to minor hardware differences, replacement of the BIOS with another from a different computer may return incorrect scan code translations and result in incorrect behaviour of the keyboard subsystem for the application software.

In 2011, AGE Labs introduced Language Pack firmware, aiming to make each model support several localizations.

It allows changing the character set and keyboard layout of the machine at startup between Japanese, Russian, International and Portuguese locales.

It also gives the ability to change locales during machine operation using the newly introduced LANG command in BASIC.

[27] The one chip-MSX" is similar in concept to the C-One, a Commodore 64 clone also built on the basis of a single FPGA chip.

The new MSX system is housed in a box made out of transparent blue plastic, and can be used with a standard monitor (or TV) and a PC keyboard.

It includes all the necessary components to assemble a working MSX2-compatible computer except for an ATX chassis, power supply, floppy drive, hard disk, PS/2 keyboard, and monitor.

Some of the Korean forum members who made Zemmix Neo created a new MSX-compatible called Mini IQ3000 Cutie, which has similar features to Daewoo Electronics' Korean-made MSX2 model, the IQ-2000.

Connecting an additional peripheral called MSX Player allows it to run original games on ROM cartridges.

Like the latest Zemmix game consoles, it is also based on a Raspberry Pi card with additional circuitry to connect the original MSX peripherals.

Due to the keyboard scan being controlled by the system interrupts, one of the troubleshooting hints when an MSX machine does not display any image (assuming power is present) is to press the CAPS key to see if the respective LED toggles.

In 2011, AGE Labs embedded a PS/2 keyboard controller unit, based on Microchip microcontroller, into its GR8BIT do-it-yourself machine.

Around 1985, Hudson Soft released the credit card-sized Bee Card, which was meant as a cheaper and more convenient alternative to ROM cartridges.

Early MSX models did not have a built-in disk drive, so software were initially published on cartridge and cassette tape.

[14] Mitsumi QuickDisks were originally launched as a proprietary extension for the MSX in early 1984,[35] but they never really caught on, as they were quickly surpassed by the standard floppy disk interface released a few months later.

[37] The MSX 3.5-inch floppy disks are directly compatible with MS-DOS (although some details like file undeletion and boot sector code were different).